The Martlet

Perhaps we were just a little overconfident.

A few weeks into a trip backpacking through Ecuador, we decided we would attempt to climb the world’s highest active volcano.

Her name was Cotopaxi, and she gurgled and spat the earth’s innards at nearly 6,000 meters above sea level.

The three girls—Megan, Chelsea and I—grew up in Kimberley, a mountain town sitting at 1,100 meters.

We fancied ourselves ahead of the game at the prospect of acclimatizing to the Andean altitude. Although none of us had technical mountaineering skills (we put our crampons on upside-down when trying them on for the first time) we had spent our childhood exploring our backyard and felt a familiar warmth in our bellies when surrounded by a mountain landscape.

And then there was Cole — a heavy machinery operator from the Yukon.

He was one of those men who preferred to start his morning with a lumberjack breakfast and a swig of whisky from a hip flask before heading out for some ice fishing, but could probably run a marathon in a decent time if he had to. He was big, blonde and strong.

Even when he reached into his pocket to light a cigarette at base camp, I had no doubt that Cole would summit the volcano.

Another reason for our confidence was just how easy the guiding companies wanted to make us believe getting to the top of this mountain really was.

The day before the trip we walked through the streets of Latucunga, a hustle-bustle, gutter smelling city just a few hours south of Quito, searching for someone who had the equipment and expertise to help us up and down the volcano with as few blisters as possible.

Very easy, yes? We leave base camp at midnight. Then we walk, walk, walk.

Maybe seven or eight hours. And then, we are at the top of the mountain.

Very beautiful.

Very, very beautiful.

We take pictures, walk back down and we are back in town by lunch. Easy, yes?”

We looked at photo albums of tourists in fluorescent rental jackets waving from the summit.

“You look like a very strong Canadian girl. You will have no problem on the volcano,” one guide whispered from behind me, his body pressed into my back in the crowded and humid little office.

We paid the company and went out for a dollar fifty meal of fried chicken and warm, flat coke.

PREP WORK

Base camp, at an elevation of about 4,500 meters, was not even a kilometer walk from where we parked.

I could feel the altitude as soon as we stepped out of the jeep. It was in my bones: a dull yet persistent ache.

It reminded me of when I was 11 or 12, trying to go to sleep as my bones grew so fast I could almost feel them stretching towards the baseboard.

Chelsea complained of a headache.

Megan couldn’t get a full breath of air into her lungs.

Cole seemed just fine; his cheeks were a tad rosier and he kept asking our guides if he could bring a plastic bag to crazy carpet down the volcano.

We had three guides. Chelsea and I would be roped up with Sergio, a short but solid Ecuadorian who insisted we called him “Emilio” above 3,500 meters. It was his “mountain name.”

When we asked if we could have mountain names too, he said no.

Base camp was abuzz with two types of people: there were the experienced climbers looking at maps and murmuring in low voices about which route to take and other important sounding things.

Then there were the people like us, running around the cabin frantically, trying to figure out how the heck to get into the harnesses and wondering if this once-in-a-lifetime challenge was going to be too challenging.

There was a nervous stir in the air as we brushed our teeth under the darkening sky.

“Ever tried climbing this before?” a middle-aged man from San Francisco asked me, his mouth brimming with white toothpaste foam.

“No, have you?”

He spit into the red rocks.

“Yeah, I tried it a few weeks ago, but threw up right after reaching 5,000 meters.”

This, I had not even considered.

I climbed into my sleeping bag, closed my eyes and hoped for a storm to force us back to the city.

A TIME TO CLIMB

Sergio, or Emilio, woke us up at 12 a.m.

We would start the climb in the middle of the night so the snow would be firm enough to carry our weight.

I stumbled outside into the starry sky.

It reminded me of home: the eruption of stars, the silence, the massive, undisturbed landscape.

It was nothing like the South America I had seen so far.

In the distance, the city lights of Quito reminded us of all the people only a hundred kilometers away, sleeping or dancing or selling hot chicken on the street.

Emilio clipped us with a carabineer to his rope.

Using our ice axes as canes and headlamps aglow, we climbed onto the glacier and into the night.

COTOPAXI SUN

I don’t remember that much from the night trek.

I remember the ache of my bones and the feeling that my head would swell into explosion as we climbed into the early morning light.

Breathing was a challenge, but I got used to the rhythm of short, quick gasps of air.

I don’t know how we made it to the summit.

By the time we got to the there, Chelsea was seeing double.

Megan’s guide had to drag her up the last 100 meters to the summit. We had bags under our eyes that looked like we hadn’t slept in weeks.

My face felt so swollen it hurt to smile.

The strangest part of the climb was how foreign my body felt on the mountain.

In the mountains around Kimberley, where elevation isn’t much of an issue, I can scurry up with no more than a few blisters and sore thighs.

Cotopaxi was different.

I had no idea how my body would react as I gained elevation. My lungs, my head and my bones experienced sensations that had not yet encountered in the first few decades of my life.

Cole was waiting for us just beyond the Volcano’s crater. He, too, looked a little weathered and beaten.

We collapsed into the snow beside him and took in the landscape of the Andes.

Morning clouds were rolling towards us.

The skyscape was a spine of volcanoes.

The morning light was growing intense.

We realized then, that we had never been so close to the sun.