The gaping crevasses on Cotopaxi continued all the way to the summit. Extreme exhaustion and the hypoxia that comes with high altitude made me want to doze off while climbing, but the fear of falling into a crevasse kept me awake through force of will. Eventually the switchbacks ended as we faced extremely steep terrain where we had to use our ice axes to maintain our balance. With every few steps we swung them into the icy snow above our heads in order to prevent us from falling backwards. Hugo showed me how to kick the hard packed snow with my boots to make a little ledge with each step in order to transfer weight from one foot to the other without losing my footing and sliding down the mountain. Having to focus so intensely on each step kept me from becoming paralyzed with fear of falling to my certain death.

Why am I putting myself in this situation? Why do I want to climb these mountains so badly? What meaning does this experience hold for me? I would have to wait until I had climbed a few more giant volcanoes in order to discover the answers to those questions.

After leaving the Navajo Reservation, I joined the Peace Corps in 1974 and served as a volunteer in Ecuador, in South America.

The Peace Corps had arranged for the volunteers to have three months of language training in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, before we went to work in our assigned locations. During our training, we stayed with families that spoke no English. Since I had already learned to speak Spanish during a college semester abroad in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, I could focus more of my attention on learning about the land and the people of Ecuador, their customs and culture.

When not in class, I roamed around the magnificent city, admiring the colonial architecture in the center of town, a blend of European and indigenous styles.

Quito sits high in the Andean foothills at over 9,000 ft. An active volcano called Pichincha towers over Quito at 15,696 and envelopes the city on its eastern flanks.

Early one morning, as I walked around the city before dawn, the clouds overhead began to part, giving me a glimpse of a snow-covered, perfectly cone-shaped mountain off in the distance to the south. I stared breathlessly at the majestic apparition in front of me while my heart raced with excitement.

A man on the street, seeing this gringa in a state of unabashed wonder, came up to me and said in Spanish, “Señorita, what you are looking at is Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. Cotopaxi is part of a chain of 27 volcanoes we have in Ecuador.”

At that moment a wave of intense desire to climb those massive volcanoes washed over me—even though the idea was wild and unrealistic.

Before the man could walk away, I asked, “Señor, if someone wanted to climb the volcanoes, what would they need to do?” He said that only experienced mountaineers climbed those mountains because they could be dangerous. If I wanted to get more information about the mountains, he suggested I go to the National Polytechnic Institute and get information from their climbing organization, El Club de Andinismo Politécnico

After the helpful man gave me directions, we parted ways. Full of anticipation, I walked briskly across town to the Polytechnic Institute, the Ecuadorian version of MIT. The woman at the front desk talked to me about the climbing club and said it was mostly for the male students from the Polytechnic Institute. I told her I just wanted to sit in on a meeting and listen to what they talked about. The woman said the next meeting would be in a little over a week. I noted the time and date and wrote it in my calendar when I got back to the home where I stayed.

I told my host family what I intended to do. They urged me not to even think about climbing the volcanoes because of my lack of experience and the risk of getting killed. And, on top of that, I was a woman and shouldn’t be thinking about these sorts of things.

When the day of the Club de Andinismo’s meeting arrived, I showed up right on time. The room was full of men. I didn’t spot a single woman at that particular meeting. One of the men walked over and asked if he could help me. On impulse, I said that I wanted to join their climbing club. The man looked at me with disbelief, but eventually took me seriously when he saw how determined I was to join. He asked me if I had any experience climbing mountains. I assured him that I had climbed quite a few mountains in the United States, including Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson, and Mt. Adams in the Presidential Range, part of the White Mountains in New England.

The young man had never heard of the mountains I listed and did not ask me their height. If he had, he would have discovered that the tallest of the three I listed, Mt. Washington, was only 6,288 ft., a mere ant hill compared to the nearly 20,000 ft. volcanoes of Ecuador.

In describing my ascents, I had unwittingly used the words “hiking” and “climbing” synonymously, which later would have some serious ramifications.

The student said they were planning a trip to climb Cotopaxi the following week and that I could go with them. I told the student that I didn’t have any gear with me, other than my sturdy hiking boots, backpack, warm clothes, and the basic camping gear I had brought from the US. He said that the club had extra gear I could borrow.

Before I left, the student conferred with the other members of the club. They all agreed that, before I joined them on the trip to Cotopaxi, they needed to take me to a nearby climbing area to see how well I climbed and what gear I needed. They said they could get together with me in two days, on a Saturday.

I met up with the climbers at the designated time. I shook hands with each of the men and introduced myself and learned their names. We drove to a snow field to practice walking with crampons on the glaciers.

It wasn’t long before I had to confess to the men that I didn’t know how to use a rope, tie knots, use an ice axe, nor how to put on crampons, much less walk with them on. The men walked a few yards away from me and talked among themselves about the disturbing news I had given them. I waited, holding my breath, knowing that I could be in big trouble for having misled them into believing that I had prior experience climbing big mountains. I had visions of them abandoning me in the wilderness as punishment for my behavior. I would either freeze to death or get eaten by a jaguar, or both. The embassy would have to call my parents and tell them the sad news about their daughter’s death. I felt stricken with remorse thinking that I could cause my parents such terrible anguish and grief.

After what seemed like a very long time, but was maybe only ten minutes, one of the men walked over to me and said that he would teach me everything I needed to know about snow and ice climbing in the Andes. His name was Hugo Torres.

Although Hugo was younger than me by a few years and still in college, he became my mentor in the mountains. He made sure that I put on the crampons correctly and tightened the straps. He taught me how to tie the various knots to secure myself with the rope, asking me to repeat the process until I had the knots memorized. He made sure I knew how to use the ice axe to help me up steep and icy inclines by digging the ice axe into the hardened snow to stop me from falling and sliding down the mountain.

The time arrived to put what I learned from Hugo to the test on the ascent of Cotopaxi. Ten men and I rode in a van to Cotopaxi, a two-hour trip on the Pan American Highway, the same road that begins in Alaska and ends at the tip of Argentina.

We drove to a flat area at the base of Cotopaxi and got out. I looked up at the volcano, staggered by its immense size. We put on our gear. Hugo checked to make sure that I had everything I needed.

I noticed that much of the men’s equipment was homemade, including the gaiters, the crampons, some of the backpacks, the jackets, and even some of the ice axes. Many of the men brought blankets, not having the luxury of a sleeping bag. I felt spoiled that I had a down jacket, a down sleeping bag, and a nice Kelty backpack with a large frame. What I lacked that the men had was experience and training.

In those days, before our accelerating climate change, the glacier extended all the way down to about 12,000 ft. where we began our ascent.

We climbed up to the shelter, Refugio José Ribas, with our packs full of climbing gear, sleeping gear, and food, weighing probably 30-40 lbs. each. I arrive breathless, having gone from around 9,000 ft. in Quito, to the shelter at 15,958 ft., a 7,000 ft. elevation gain in one day. On the way to the shelter, the young men talk animatedly about the trip and their lives in general. I try not to let them see how much I am struggling to catch my breath and how exhausted I feel during the few hours ascending the glacier to reach the shelter.

We have the shelter to ourselves. There are no other climbers on the mountain. After we prepare a simple dinner with soup and hot drinks in the late afternoon, the leader of the group tells me I should get some rest because we will leave the shelter around midnight. He explained that we needed to take advantage of the cold nighttime temperature that would allow our crampons to grip the ice while the surface is hard. After the sun rises in the sky, the snow gets slushy on these equatorial glaciers.

I am too excited to sleep. My breathing and heart rate are faster than normal. I can feel a high altitude headache coming on. I take two aspirin and pray that I don’t get the dreaded altitude sickness that the men warned me about. They described some of the symptoms, like fierce headaches, vomiting, dizziness, weakness, and mental confusion that are characteristic of this condition. The leader encourages me to stay hydrated. We melt the ice on one of the men’s camping stove and fill up our canteens with water. I drink so much water that I have to go outside and pee almost every hour. The frequent peeing is not only from the heavy intake of water, but also from a “nervous” bladder reacting to fear and anticipation. I’m also worried that I won’t be able to make it to the top with these highly acclimatized men.

The shelter has no heat. It’s very cold inside. I wonder how the men will stay warm with just their thin blankets to cover them and without down jackets. At around 7 pm, I crawl into my frigid sleeping bag and shiver, eventually drifting in and out of a restless sleep.

At midnight, the leader rouses me from my half-awake state and tells me to gear up and get ready to leave. I went to bed with all of my clothes on, including my wool hat, so I only had to put on my climbing boots and gaiters. After we drink a cup of coffee, we leave the shelter at 12:30 am. We rope up and head up the steep mountain. It was an icy cold, clear starry night, thankfully without wind. Three people are on our rope. I am in the middle. I have no headlamp, so I follow closely behind Hugo, trying to step exactly in his tracks.

The first part of the climb involved zigzagging up the slope on the switchbacks. We trudged along in silence, alone in our thoughts. I looked back at the chain of bobbing little lights moving steadily up the mountain in the blackness of the night.

The men had warned me about the many crevasses that we would traverse on the glacier and how careful we had to be so as not to fall into one of them. The first crevasse we passed had a wide, gaping mouth, making it easy to spot. With Hugo’s headlamp illuminating the area in front of me, I peered down into what looked like a bottomless expanse. A cold chill of fright ran up my spine. We found a way around the crevasse, being careful to avoid the precarious snow bridges that connected both sides of the crevasse. Hugo explained that they could easily collapse and make us fall into the crevasse.

The excitement induced an excess of adrenaline to flow in my veins, allowing me to keep up the pace that Hugo had set. After two or three hours I began panting while my heart pounded furiously in my chest. Reluctantly, I told Hugo I needed to stop and rest. He said we had to keep moving to get to the summit before the sun rose in the sky.

As I leaned on my ice axe for support, gasping for air, Hugo offered a valuable climbing tip. He said that if I got into a set rhythm, putting one foot in front of the other, at a pace I could sustain, then I wouldn’t need to rest. He said that resting made the climb more difficult. I agreed to follow his advice.

Hugo set a slower pace for me, which meant that the other climbers in our group passed us. I began silently counting my steps, “one and two and,” up to ten, and then repeating the sequence over and over to keep up a rhythm, which kept my mind focused.

The hours rolled by. I was in an altered state, as though hypnotized and detached from my body, perhaps from the low oxygen saturation in my blood. About halfway to the summit, ghostly, phantasmagoric shapes nearby jolted me into the present moment. Hugo had told me about these blocks of glacial ice formations, called seracs. Some of them looked like towers, others had grown to the size of small houses. They appear where two crevasses intersect on the glacier and form an icefall.

Seracs can be dangerous to mountaineers, since they have the potential to fall over without warning. In fact, the route to the summit is called Rompe Corazones, “Heart Breaker.” I wondered what exactly heart breaker meant in this particular case. Did it mean that people die on this route and break their loved-ones hearts? Or did it mean that people had heart attacks on this route because it’s so difficult? My brain was too oxygen starved to think clearly about the reason for the name.

After an hour of walking precariously through the ice formations, Hugo agrees to stop and take a rest. We drink water and eat some chocolate and crackers. Gradually my breathing became less labored and my heart rate slowed down to around 120 beats per minute. I tried to ignore the intense headache that had gotten much worse over the past hour.

Hugo said we had to get moving again so we could beat the sunrise. The last stretch before the summit was treacherously steep. We had to walk sideways up the mountain, kicking the hard snow to make a landing place for the edge of our boots. I felt like I was walking up a two-dimensional staircase sideways. The left foot crossed over in front of the right foot, then the right foot crossed behind the left foot, up the invisible staircase.

I had to overcome my concern about slowing down the group and allow myself to do what I needed to do to keep going, which meant stopping for a few seconds and panting after each step, while bending over and leaning on my ice axe for support.

At 6 am the sun appeared, filling the horizon with a spectacular red and orange glow. The sunlight gave a boost to everyone’s morale. The view took my breath away—any breath that I still had. From here, I had a crystal-clear view of the volcanoes, including Chimborazo, the highest volcano in Ecuador at over 20,000 ft. I wished that I had the energy to fully appreciate the magnificence of the skyline.

I regret that I forgot to put my little Instamatic camera in my backpack. I would have liked to look at photos of our climb and relive the experience once I was back with my host family and fully rested. I consoled myself with the promise that I would be back to climb this mountain more than this one time—after I got acclimatized to the altitude in Ecuador.

Every time I thought we were almost at the top, Hugo let me know it was a false summit. The altitude at the true summit is 19,347 ft. We arrived there at 7 am, after six and a half hours of climbing. I was too exhausted to register anything except a desire to lie down in the snow. After participating in the congratulatory hugs and handshakes with my climbing companions, I unclipped the carabiner that connected me to the climbing rope, and then collapsed onto the snowy ground. My headache had become explosive and I felt light headed. Someone in the group let us know that the temperature was -6 degrees C (21 degrees F.).

After a few minutes of catching my breath while staring off into space with an empty mind, I made myself get up and walk around the enormous crater. I wondered if anyone had fallen into the crater. The strong smell of sulfur kept me from getting too close.

The leader of our group said that we had to rope up and head down before the sun melted the top layer of snow. We tanked up with water from our canteens and ate our snacks, and then headed down the mountain a little after 8 am.

My legs felt like rubber. I could barely hold myself upright. I slipped and fell frequently but was able to arrest myself with my ice axe, as Hugo had taught me. I tried not to think about what would happen if I was not able to stop my fall and slid all the way down the mountain—or fell into a crevasse and was never found. A wave of sadness washed over me as I thought again of the grief my parents would feel if they lost their daughter and had no way to retrieve her body. I silently asked the gods of the mountain to give me the strength to make it down the mountain safely. With all the determination I could find within me, I made it to the shelter.

We rested, ate our lunch, and drank a lot of water. After about a half hour, we continued our journey down the mountain. Hugo taught me how to glissade the last stretch. I sat on the snow with legs outstretched, imagining myself in a toboggan. I flew down the last part of the glacier, with ice axe positioned, ready to jam it into the snow in case I got too out of control.

We finally reached the end of the glacier and stepped onto terra firma. We took off our gear, stashed it in our backpacks, and then walked to the van and headed back to Quito.

The mountaineering experience left me feeling a strong bond with these men, with an especially strong bond with Hugo Torres who had taken me under his wing and offered me his expert guidance. The bond I felt made me wonder if men coming back from war feel something similar. I loved the feeling of having shared such a powerful experience together. Once I got the taste, I wanted more.

Back in Quito, I felt like I had been to Mars and back. It was difficult to fully convey to my mates in the Peace Corps what happened on the mountain. I had experienced a rarefied world high in the sky that not that many people knew about.

I called my parents on the phone and talked to them briefly about the climb. My father expressed vicarious excitement. My mother worried that I could have gotten hurt, even though I had left out some of the more scary details.

Soon I would be leaving Quito and going north to start the first of the two work projects the Peace Corps had assigned to me. Thoughts of the mountains and my new mountaineering companions never left my mind.