The Road to Aconcagua

It starts in a trucker’s stop. After three months of training, a year’s worth of planning and almost four years since we made it up and down Kilimanjaro, here we are standing next to a run-down diner and surrounded by 22-wheelers.

On the other side of the Ruta 7 highway, which leads west to Chile and east back the way we came to the Argentinian town of Mendoza, lies the Vacas Valley entrance to the Aconcagua Provincial Park. We’re here to climb the highest peak in the world outside of the greater Himalayas, and this is Hour One of a planned 16-day expedition. It’s an inauspicious start, but then what did we expect?
There’s time for a quick photo – five relatively clean and not-yet-appalling-smelling guys piled up with three days’ worth of equipment – before we head off on our ponderous way towards Plaza Argentina, base camp, approximately 40km away. Three of us, Chris, Dave and I – the three with the freshly shaved heads – have known each other since school. With my brother and two other mates, we hiked Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, in 2004 as a grand little adventure for our mid-twenties. Now, with our numbers halved, Aconcagua is different prospect, more serious in physical terms, in what it’s taken us to get here and, ultimately, in what it will mean to us.
We cross the road and pass the sign welcoming us into the park. It looks remarkably like the sign in our guidebook. Indeed, the wonder and excitement of expectation has just met the reality of getting down to business. Even our guides, Hugo and Karl, an experienced expedition leader and his friend, a technical climber from the US, aren’t sure what they’re in for. So it’s one foot in front of the other as we step off into our great unknown.
A few hours later, at our first lunch break on the side of the glacial Vacas River, the novelty of it all hasn’t yet worn off. This rugged gorge will be our route for the next two days before we hang a 90-degree left up the Relinchos Valley, and the sparse and spectacular views are unlike anything I’ve seen before. The hiking is strenuous, as we head uphill with 30 kilograms on our backs over terrain that is already quite devilish at times – stone upon stone, a taste of things to come. But this is what we’re here for, so we’re lapping it up for now. The dust down our throats and the sweat on our brows is part of the deal. Even purifying our drinking water with a UV gun seems a pretty cool thing to do. Then, when we’re passed by the first mule train of the day, a caravan of overloaded animals making brisk pace up the valley with a couple of muleteers spurring them on at the back, we snap away merrily with our cameras. All is good…
Later that afternoon, though, things begin to fall apart. Our pace has dropped to a crawl. We’ve been overtaken by everyone on our section of the mountain – everyone – and Hugo is limping along twenty minutes behind us. Up front, Chris, Dave and I wonder aloud why we’re the only group hauling all our equipment for the first three days when we could have arranged for the mules to resupply us every evening. Why has our kit been sent straight to base camp? More importantly, though, why has our “slow and steady” become so, so slow?
Give yourself enough time on a mountain and you’ll ask yourself a lot of questions. Sometimes you’ll find an answer, sometimes you won’t. In Hugo’s case, we do. Shortly after pulling into our first campsite, Las Leñas – where 30 or 40 other hikers have already settled in for the night – Hugo, a qualified medic, breaks the news that he vomited up his lunch in the afternoon and has given himself a hernia in the process. Hence the slow progress. We take the news on board and busy ourselves with mountain chores that we’ll soon get used to: set up tent, prepare our sleeping areas, make supper, measure oxygen saturation levels. Mine is too low – about 80, when it should be closer to 90. But Hugo’s predicament puts things in perspective. We realise his trip is over already. He can barely talk, he’s in so much pain, and there’s no point in risking your body on a mountain like this; Hugo, as an experienced mountaineer, has been drumming that into us for the past few months.
So, more questions. Lying in our expensive new sleeping bags – rated to -25°C, and just one small outlay for what is a very costly trip – we get to wondering what the hell it is we’re doing here? And with our guide in agony one tent over, his intestines trying their best to slip their way through his abdominal cavity, our thoughts are that much more pertinent. We can’t go back; that isn’t an option. But what exactly can we do from here? Karl isn’t experienced at high altitude trekking and isn’t confident enough to guide us to the top. Should we head to base camp and see if we can tag on to another group? Find a guide on the way down and offer him cash to take us up?
Suddenly our aspirations for the trip are shifting. Perhaps, as Hugo has tried to impress upon us, an Acon trip really is about the adventure of being here – getting to the top is a bonus, as the 60 per cent success rate attests to. We will still be experiencing something new and otherworldly just by getting to base camp; it’s about testing our personal comfort zones, seeing what we’re made of, finding out about ourselves. Will it be enough, though, to justify the time, money and emotion we’ve invested in it?
Tonight we are strangers in a strange land. Nervous, excited, worried that our dreams and preparations have taken a big hit – but perhaps looking at the opportunity with new eyes. Fine, so the summit is a long shot, let’s just see how we go.

After summiting Kilimanjaro in 2004, a couple of us half-jokingly suggested we make Aconcagua our next goal. We’d just made it up one of the Seven Summits; what about the next one? Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak, was also an option, but Aconcagua, the Roof of the Americas, had a certain ring to it. For one, it was higher than Kili. Elbrus wasn’t. It also seemed more remote, more of an adventure.
The seed had been planted. Then in January 2006, my brother and I found ourselves in Sydney for a spell and figured we’d knock off Mount Kosciusko. At 2,230m, it’s a literal stroll to the top along efficiently Australian walkways. That was two of the seven. (Even if the Australasian peak is contested – Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea is 4,884m and even Aoraki/Mount Cook is 1,500m higher – we were counting it.) Suddenly Acon came back into the picture, and by mid-2007, three of us had committed to a January 2008 expedition.
But Aconcagua is not Kilimanjaro. You can get up and down Kili in six days and you can do it without breaking the bank, even if the flights are rather pricy. Kilimanjaro is a hard haul but you’d be unlucky not to make it to the top if you’re in reasonable condition. Two of the guys on that 2004 trip literally ate burgers as preparation. They struggled a bit, sure, and we all learnt the value of having warm sleeping bags, but we all made it. Aconcagua’s extra kilometre in altitude means successful climbers spend at least two nights days above 5,500m – officially “extremely high” – rather than several hours as you do on the way to Uhuru Peak. Coupled with its notorious weather, the difficulty rating elevates exponentially, necessitating an immense amount of respect, a good deal of training and some proper cold-weather mountaineering equipment.
Nearly half the climbers who attempt Acon don’t make it up, a thought that underscored much of my preparation, as I shelled out more and more money for equipment. Chris and I exercised together regularly for three months prior to the trip. Training included frequent mountain runs and exercise classes. A good cardio base was essential and we made a point of doing as much hiking with our backpacks as possible. A weekend trip into the country ensured we were used to our gear.
By the time departure day came around we knew we weren’t just heading off to climb a mountain. Somewhere along the line, long before we got on the plane or even began training in earnest, it occurred to me that we were doing this for a reason. When you do the maths and work out what it entails, Aconcagua doesn’t seem to make sense in your late twenties. It’s the type of thing a guy in his forties or fifties does, a mid-lifer who’s recently exchanged his wife and kids for a Porsche and “bottle blonde with tits like fire extinguishers”, as Grant Warren, author of The Big Four-O, puts it.
Yes, I enjoy having the motivation to get into shape that an experience like this necessitates, and yes, it will be great to talk about it, my little boast if I make it to the top. But there’s got to be more than that. Interestingly, when I told friends of my impending trip there were two obvious reactions: one of them was, roughly put, “Why in the hell would you want to go and do something so daft?” I didn’t really have a decent answer to this so I’d just borrow George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” to fob them off. That comment was about Everest, before it had been climbed, but it generally worked – for them if not for me. So why? Why this need to head off and do something different? I’m not that fidgety kind of guy who has to backpack through south-east Asia or race a triathlon every second weekend to feel alive. I’m not even an office drone about to boil over and trash my computer in a moment’s madness; I’ve got flexible hours and I generally enjoy my job.
Part of the answer was to be found in the second type of response I’d get: an instant envy from guys my age, mostly, who wished they could join us – if not for work, cash, the wife, the kids… So it seems that quite a few of my contemporaries, while perhaps not committing to a mountain climb, are at least thinking about doing something out of the ordinary. But where the widely documented mid-life crisis, or the more recently identified “quarter-life crisis” – a general sense of insecurity that often affects recent school and university graduates – both have collections of books and websites describing what they are and how to cope with them, there seems to be very little literature on what’s up with restless men in their late twenties and early thirties.
According to Men’s Health psychologist Rafiq Lockhat, “an increasing number” of young professionals are becoming aware of a need to get the balance right between work and play. He talks extensively of people who give up their jobs for a year or more to go out and travel and see and do new things – “trying to find the balance between life experience and economic security”. And unlike the mid-life and quarter-life crises, which often manifest themselves without the individual realising what’s going on, this awareness seems to be more of a conscious phenomenon. People are, it seems, growing up earlier and realising at a younger age that there’s more to life than focusing on a career. “We are becoming aware of other lifestyle options because we are constantly hearing of people who are opting out of the mainstream, or reading magazines articles titled ‘Things You Should Have Done By The Time You Turn 30’,” says Lockhat.
With my 30th due a couple of months after my return from Argentina, that’s a valid point for me. I realise I’m off to achieve something specific: climbing a mountain. But it’s more than that. Exactly what, I’ll have to find out when I’m there.
The day before driving up from Mendoza to Puenta del Inca, our overnight destination before heading into the park, I asked the guys for some idea of what they were doing there. No-one had a ready answer. “Because it’s a challenge, and an opportunity to spend time with the boys.” “It will be one of my life’s defining moments. If we make it, it will be epic. And if I don’t, how will I handle it?” “There’s a naked truth on a mountain. It’s a life experience.”
Am I going to survive this test? seemed to be the question we were all asking ourselves.
For Hugo it was a business decision, looking for an alternative route to the over-used Horcones Valley. But even for him the question was there: will he make it? And, ultimately, he didn’t.

On day two, suffering from a hernia and with tears in his eyes, Hugo shakes hands with us and walks off the mountain. We are a man down. We’re 14 kilometres in, with about 40 to go to the top, including more than four kilometres of vertical ascent. We’re feeling foolish because we’re the only climbers hauling all our gear to base camp, plus the weather’s looking iffy and it’s already noon. But with Hugo gone, suddenly the trip feels more real, more of an adventure. We’ve pirated some of his more important survival gear, been given a crash course in first aid and decided to head for Plaza Argentina, base camp – then we’ll take it from there. Off we go.
As much as I love being out in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, I find the actual hiking bits hard. It hurts, particularly with a heavy pack. Maybe it’s because I’ve got a bad back, maybe I’m just human, but for me the beauty usually comes when I can ease off the load and just relish being there, a feeling that’s amplified by all that expended effort. But sometimes I get it. Sometimes I feel the beauty in the movement and the hauling. Today is like that. I feel immensely strong. Head down, I power on through mist and wind feeling as though I could walk forever, and I realise that a small part of me is glad for the extra challenge of going it alone without our guide. I feel desperately sorry for Hugo – he was a shattered man when he left us – but we suddenly find ourselves with a monumental opportunity. Make no mistake, the going is tough, as it will be every day, but I’m on form, as are Chris and Dave. Even when we arrive at sunset at Casa de Piedre, our exposed and tatty camp, we are optimistic, pitching tents in the biting cold. We are already in survival mode, and Dave makes friends with Gustavo, a Bolivian climber, who gives us some much-needed advice and helps to arrange a mule to take a couple of our packs the following day.
Our primary concern at this stage is Karl, who is suffering from the same food poisoning that caused Hugo’s problems. Today will be the start of a steady decline for him that will eventually see him struggle slowly and manfully up to Camp 1 at 5,000m, but no further.

“The higher you climb on the mountain, the harder the wind blows” is a handy maxim from one-time small-arms dealer Samuel Cummings. He was talking about life in general, but on Acon you can take it at face value. While the wind whistled through the valley on that second night at Case de Piedra, disturbing our sleep for hours and hours, our first night at Camp 1 is something I’d never imagined. Icy banshees scream down from 6,000m and higher at what we estimate is 150km/h, buffeting our tent sheltering behind it’s stone-wall defence. It’s like trying to sleep next to a symphonic orchestra practising Beethoven’s 9th. All you can do is change position in your sleeping bag – left side, back, right side – over and over. It’s enough to drive you mental.
Over the past few days, since the joy of reaching base camp was followed by the reality of hauling loads up to the high camps and then heading back down to recover, we’ve become aware of the increasing mental challenges that the mountain is presenting. Getting a good night’s sleep is just one of them. I’ve survived a session of stomach cramps and extended periods in an odious and odorous long drop, but there’s far more to it than that. For one, the barren landscape is desiccating; it sucks you dry. Sunset brings a drama to the jagged rocks and dangerous silhouettes that surround us but, having passed through the vegetation line at 4,000m, all about us now is dust, stone and rock. Then there are the doubts and worries, so many factors that can end our chances: weather, altitude sickness, water- or food-related sickness, injury, broken equipment. The park helicopter arriving in the morning to ferry off climbers suffering from oedemas and frostbite brings it home. It seems silly, outrageous even, that we’ve invested so much time and effort and that everything could be thwarted by an arbitrary slice of luck. A snapped tent pole at Camp 1 was almost that moment for us, but our makeshift repairs somehow held.
Life has become about paring things down to the basics. Have you drunk enough water, eaten enough? Are you warm, are you feeling clean? Bodily functions suddenly take on huge importance. Because of the huge intake of water we’re getting through to aid acclimatisation, we pass litres and litres of water. On rest days it seems that that’s all we do: drink and piss. I can barely think to read, and the emotional swings are extreme: the positivity of being surrounded by a unique environment, doing something special and extraordinary, laughing with mates – versus the negativity of doubt, worrying whether we’ll make it, whether it’s worth it… At times it is almost a sense of depression – of missing home, missing my girlfriend – while at other times I am genuinely gloriously happy.
I look forward to the physical hauling: as strenuous as it is, at least we’re inching closer to the top. And here’s the most powerful realisation: after eight or ten days on the mountain, having dragged ourselves to Camp 1 twice over an absolutely treacherous incline of loose rock and shale, and then on to Camp 2, at 5,850m, again twice, this time crossing a nerve-wracking section of frozen streams with an 80-degree drop of several hundred metres, and contemplating it all for days and days, I know that all that talk about the summit not mattering is bullshit. It’s not a bonus; it’s why we’re here. All we want to do is get up there, especially when we talk to others who’ve done it. The envy pulses in our veins… There is a T-shirt hanging in our the mule operator’s mess tent at base camp that reads, “The ego seeks the summit, the soul seeks the climb”. And even though that may be true after the fact, for now everything has become concentrated into the moment that I visualise myself at the top of this great big hunk of rock.

Through it all, I have one place of respite here. Even when I’m struggling wide-awake with the wind at my ear, my sleeping bag is a good place to be. Even at Camp 2, our last night before attempting the summit, I am fantastically warm inside it. It is my mothering spot, my refuge.
And so here I sit in my sleeping bag at 4am on 20 January 2008 at 5,850m. Ice crystals have formed on the tent above my head in the night. Somehow we’ve come this far with no guide, just following the other climbers and asking for weather reports. We’ve suffered our altitude headaches, eaten freeze-dried food, crapped in mine-fields of frozen human turd, burnt through 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day in hiking alone – and here we are.
As we slowly, slowly get ourselves going this morning, emerging into the night air to spend an hour cracking water out of the frozen pond nearby then boiling it to prevent it freezing again, and noting the clear skies above, something registers in my head that this is the day: there is no way we aren’t getting up today. We’ve come this far and we’ve got one last long push. But we’re getting up.
Usually, I try not to jump to conclusions about anything in life. Perhaps it’s the altitude that does it today. Perhaps this is why I neglect my water bottles and barely fill a couple of litres before we set off at dawn, trudging off after a group that seems to know its way. I am as focused on any one thing as I have been in my life, so it’s only around mid-morning that the water issue hits home. One of my bottles has frozen solid and I’m down to a litre-and-a-half to get me through the day, rather than the four I’d planned. And so my day begins slowly to unhinge in my mind. One step follows another and that’s all I focus on. The little trails of colourful men a couple of hundred metres above me are actually hours away but I visualise myself being there and surely enough that’s where I am as time goes by and the sun passes overhead. I am aware that I am running out of water and suffering from altitude sickness. A wise climber might turn around – as a couple of American climbers we later talk to will. But I’m being stubborn about this. By the time we get to Independencia Hut, at 6,400m, I’m moody, grim and determined. Dave is as right as rain – he has acclimatised brilliantly and flown up this mountain – but I can see that Chris is suffering. Good. If he’s going, I’m going.
I am shattered after eight hours of ascending, and the last few hundred metres, up the infamous Canaleta, the steep boulder-strewn pathway to the summit, is simply a test of willpower. I keep asking myself: do I want to get there, or don’t I? My progress is painfully slow and both Dave and Chris have disappeared above me. For about an hour or more I fall in behind a group of climbers who seem to be in a worse state than me, yet I don’t have the strength to pass them. A man in purple suddenly sits down to vomit; his guide pats him on the head and offers encouraging words. The collective human desperation on this tract of the mountain would be palpable if I had any real sense of what was going on around me. Somehow I carry on. One foot, then another foot. Do I want to get there, or don’t I?
And then – eventually – I do. There are no cymbals, no choirs of angels. There is hardly even a thought in my head. Just an overwhelming flood of relief as I look about me and realise I can’t go any higher. I probably have an IQ of 80 right now. Yet somewhere in that befuddled brain of mine it registers that I am at that moment, with the twenty or so other people up here, including two of my very good friends, the highest person on the planet. It is absolutely awesome.

A couple of months after getting back from Argentina, I look back on our trip with a degree of detachment, almost disbelief. After such a build up, such an extended preparation, it seems to have flashed by in an instant and disappeared into my past. And yet when I think about the extended agony of hauling gear up to Camp 1 from Plaza Argentina or even the mental anguish of waiting out rest days and second-guessing the weather, I know how real and how tough it was. My body took a beating, losing ten per cent of my body weight in two weeks. It was easily the hardest physical challenge of my life, and even harder mentally. Just that mind-bending summit-day effort to climb more than a kilometre at extreme altitude while massively dehydrated has given me an inkling of what I am capable of. Those hours of my life were propelled almost solely by willpower, by ego, and there’s no denying the sense of pride and achievement now. I pulled together with two good friends and I got up in the end.
But was it worth it?
My instinctive answer to this question was, of course, yes – it had to be – and even on considered reflection I’ve come to back up that call. In retrospect it was a gamble; so many factors ultimately boiled down to chance. But with luck on our side, Edmund Hillary’s reworking of the classic explorer’s axiom really does make sense: “It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Aconcagua is no Everest but in my case a slow-burning need for escape and adventure has been fulfilled. I’ve returned home freer of spirit, more aware of what I am capable of, more content.
Humans we may all be, but we all have a different notion, a different feeling in our bones, that tells us when we’re happy with our place in the world around us. I am – for now. And I have no urgent desires to rush back out there into the wild to test the limits of my endurance. Give it a year or two, though, and I reckon Elbrus won’t be a bad option.