While camping in the area of Berlin shelter, I encountered two brothers, ex-soldiers I had met during their reunion at Plaza de Mulas, Santiago and Mateo—not their real names for the sake of anonymity, given the high positions they currently hold in Argentina. I saw the brothers hastily preparing their gear for an ascent to the summit the following morning. I asked if I could go with them. Without hesitation they denied my request. They felt certain that a woman would slow them down and prevent them from reaching the summit.

I convinced them that if this should be the case, I would turn around and head back to Berlin by myself while they continued on. I also pointed out that I had equipment that they might need, like an ice axe, slings, and a pair of crampons. They reluctantly agreed to let me follow behind them.

Before seven the next morning Santiago, Mateo, and I left Berlin and headed up the mountain with only hot tea in our stomachs. We walked in the dark, with a cold wind in our face.

Santiago and Mateo began walking at a rapid pace. I suspected they were trying to show that I couldn’t keep up with them. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they would wear themselves out.

Sure enough. We had only been climbing for an hour when Mateo asked if I could carry the one pack we had for the three of us. I willingly agreed. We arrived at Independencia (21,000 feet) in one hour and forty-five minutes. Independencia is another tiny, A-frame shelter, used only in emergencies.

My feet began to freeze. I had on two pairs of wool socks to make up for not wearing double boots, which would have been more appropriate. I tried to move my toes. My feet began to feel like stumps beneath me. Fears of frostbite and amputation filled my mind. I calmed myself with the realization that the sun would appear in a matter of minutes.

After two hours of walking, we encountered extensive snow and ice on the route, much more than we expected. The brothers lacked adequate equipment, having only ski poles.

This particular route, referred to as the “normal route,” usually offered little in the way of snow and ice climbing, the challenge being more about physical and mental endurance rather than one requiring technical skill.

Not far above Independencia we came to the Shiller Glacier, named after a geologist who had frozen to death in his tent not far from our route. The small glacier looked steep and icy. We roped ourselves the best we could with my slings tied together. Santiago walked in the lead with one of my crampons on his right boot and his ski poles for balance. I walked in the middle with the other crampon on my left boot. Mateo held my ice axe in the rear. I was skeptical about the safety of our arrangement. The nonchalance of the soldiers offered little consolation, yet turning back now seemed worse than taking our chances crossing the glacier.

Using supreme powers of concentration to avoid a single misstep, we managed to make it safely to the other side without sliding down the glacier. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. Our relief didn’t last long. A few yards further up the trail, we encountered a large, icy patch, not yet melted by the morning sun.

As we were carefully crossing the stretch of ice, I noticed that Mateo was only halfheartedly belaying us with the point of my ice axe barely penetrating the ice. When I protested, he silenced me, saying that he knew what he was doing and had more experience in the mountains than I had.

Less than two minutes after that exchange of words, Santiago lost his footing and shot like a bolt of lightning down the steep slope, pulling Mateo and me behind him. Mateo managed to arrest our near fatal fall by slamming the ice axe into the icy slope, but not until we had fallen several feet. The fall left us shaken but unhurt—with Mateo a little less arrogant. We lost a precious hour and precious energy in recovering our route. What a relief when we finally stepped onto dirt, rock, and gravel again, and could remove the slings that tied us together.

The brothers’ pace slowed even more. They took big breaths of air between steps. Every 20 minutes or so, I stopped and waited for them to catch up.

While waiting for them, I had time to reflect on the austere, inhospitable grandeur surrounding me. My heart nearly burst with emotion, grateful that places like this still existed on our ravaged planet. I felt an irresistible urge to pray to the mountains, sun, sky, and rocks, and give thanks for the opportunity to experience the celestial world around me. I suppressed an urge to weep. I knew that I had to contain myself to keep from depleting my carefully rationed store of energy.

To the west, I could see the Pacific Ocean, a thin, blue line on the horizon. A few miles in the same direction I could see a big stretch of Chile down below me.

Rows of jagged, saw-toothed mountains surrounded us. Not far to the south an airplane crashed in 1972. Sixteen members of the Uruguayan rugby team survived seventy days in subzero weather in the Andes, having to resort to cannibalism of their frozen dead friends to keep from starving to death. Being in the general vicinity gave me an even fuller appreciation of the survivors’ courage. The riveting story is recounted in the book, Alive.

With the morning sun came perfect weather, with neither wind nor clouds. At 11:30 am we arrived at the “canaleta” or corridor, the most dreaded part of the climb. The steep, wide channel of rocks and boulders leave climbers with no firm ground to place their feet. Often dozens of rocks slip downward en masse with each step. Progress can be painfully slow, resulting in high levels of frustration and further exhaustion.

Because of the rarefied atmosphere, the summit looks deceptively close. What should take minutes takes hours of hard labor. The majority of accidents on Aconcagua occur in the canaleta. Some people lose their minds and become hysterical, some fight each other, and some freeze to death. Marcelo, the Ecuadorian climber, hallucinated in the canaleta, imagining he saw shiny crosses. The Mexican climber from the beer company screamed hysterically. Santiago told me earlier in the climb about a rescue operation he had led to recover the body of a Japanese climber. They found the dead Japanese man seated outside his tent in his underwear, frozen, surely a victim of delirium.

The two brothers showed clear signs of reaching the end of their strength. Their breathing turned into desperate panting for air. They took each step in slow motion and with the utmost care to conserve their strength. After every three steps they rested, Mateo bending over my ice axe and Santiago leaning on his ski poles, muttering torrents of curse words between gasps of air.

Fortunately, my breathing remained under control. My body and mind still functioned well in spite of the strain, probably due to the multiple opportunities I had to acclimatize myself over the past weeks.

Through my experiences climbing in Ecuador, I discovered that my body was capable of far more than I could have imagined. The mind, I concluded, plays the biggest role when it comes to endurance and survival. Now I had a chance to test that assumption. I had so thoroughly prepared myself psychologically to expect the worst on our climb, that what I encountered on the mountain did not throw me off balance or terrify me.

As we neared the summit, I heard Santiago screaming something at me. I sat down on the only firm rock I could find and waited for the brothers to catch up. Although they were only a stone’s throw away, it took them twenty minutes to get close enough so I could understand what they were yelling about. Their faces were swollen and ashen colored. Santiago yelled at me breathlessly, “Stop Gringa. You listen to me. I’m boss of this expedition. Ernesto isn’t your boss anymore.” When I asked him why he was so furious, he continued, “I’m going to get to the summit first, understand? You second.”

Exhaustion had brought his competitive nature to a head. My mind flashed to the blood-chilling stories I had heard about climbers becoming irritable and fighting each other, sometimes until death. Hoping not to aggravate his fury, I said, “I don’t care who gets to the summit first.”

This only made him angrier. “Don’t fool me, Gringa. You want to get to the summit first to get the silver plaque that the Mexicans left.”

Rather than risk violence, I said nothing and stayed behind. I found their rhythm of resting every two feet much more exhausting than my slow but steady pace. But at this point, they had little alternative since they had so thoroughly burned themselves out from their fast pace when they started out in the morning.

Just one hundred feet below the summit the brothers said they could go no further and for me to go on by myself. I felt sorry that they should stop this close to their goal. I convinced them to get on their feet and give it one last try.

With pushing, pulling and constant encouragement, we arrived on the rocky summit at 3:30 pm. We staggered around, too stunned to fully appreciate what we had done. Everything had a dream-like, ethereal quality, as though I was on some strange, mind-altering drug. Nothing seemed real anymore. I could feel my mind eluding me. I knew that we must hasten to get us off the summit before we deteriorated beyond hope.

Santiago found the silver plaque left by the Mexicans, which had obsessed him on the climb, and put it in the backpack. Mateo took the banner of the beer company that had sponsored the expedition. I was left with a little silk flag of Mexico. We, in turn, left a banner, a bracelet and two flags which we put in a plastic bag and left in the little steel box containing the summit book. We signed the summit book on two pages, one of which we tore out to take to the army base as proof of our ascent, as was the custom. We placed the box under two large rocks.

My mind became increasingly foggy. It dimly occurred to me that I must take some pictures. The normally simple act of opening a pack, removing a camera, then adjusting the settings became a major undertaking. After regulating the aperture and shutter speed, I handed the camera to Santiago who lay sprawled on the ground, and told him to just point the camera in my direction and press the button.

My next big project involved photographing all the cardinal points. Behind us loomed the dramatic South Wall, a massive sheet of rock that extended thousands of feet. My tired mind could barely comprehend the spectacular view.

We began our descent after spending a total of fifteen minutes on the summit. My heart began pounding fast and furiously in my chest. I developed a headache, probably from descending too rapidly.

The brothers had no strength left. They staggered and repeatedly lost their balance on the loose rocks. Progress was hopelessly slow. The afternoon wore on. Each time they fell, I prodded them to get up again. They insisted that I let them “take a nap.” They had lost their will.

I encouraged, begged, pleaded that they keep going. We finally got to about 1,000 feet above Berlin when Santiago announced categorically that we had to bivouac. If we bivouacked, we would surely die since we had neither tent, sleeping bag, nor down pants in our pack.

When I begged them to keep going they told me to leave them alone. Night was not far away. I had to make a decision fast.

I left them lying on the ground and ran for help as fast as my trembling legs would permit. Just above the Berlin shelter I ran into two of the former soldiers, Willy Noll and Luis. They had taken a short climb above Berlin to get acclimatized.

After several minutes trying to catch my breath, I managed to say breathlessly, “I need your help.” My teeth chattered and my legs trembled uncontrollably. I had to lie down on the ground. While trying to recover my speech, the two men took photographs of me. When I saw the prints many weeks later in Buenos Aires, I understood why the men were so interested in my appearance. My entire body had become swollen like a beached whale. My skin looked grey and my eyes appeared wild behind slit, puffy eyelids.

After relating an abbreviated version of what happened, I urgently requested that they help Santiago and Mateo before they froze to death. The two men hastily climbed up to where they found the brothers lying on the ground in a stupor. With difficulty, they assisted Santiago and Mateo as they staggered down to the Berlin shelter. They arrived at the shelter at ten pm, in the dark without their headlamps.

Santiago and Mateo looked like wild men, utterly exhausted, incoherent, and dehydrated. That evening Willy Noll gave each of us a total of three liters of liquid to alleviate our severe dehydration. Santiago and Mateo, unable to speak, just drank their liquid while staring off into space. Willy and Luis had to put them into their sleeping bags as though they were helpless children. Several times in the night, both of them had to be nudged awake from nightmares. We could hear them kicking in their sleeping bags and gasping for breath, as though reliving some of the trauma of the day before.

As I unpacked my backpack, I noticed we had not eaten a single morsel of food all day, except for a handful of honey drops. The next morning we ate our first meal in thirty-six hours. Liquids were the only substance our bodies craved. Digesting food just added to our bodies’ demand for oxygen that we could not spare.

The next day, Santiago and Mateo left Berlin and headed for base camp at Plaza de Mulas to more fully recuperate. Willy Noll and Luis headed up the mountain to the summit. I stayed alone in Berlin in case someone needed help in an emergency. At 2:30 pm I heard shouts. After a few minutes I could see Raúl staggering toward Berlin accompanied by Alberto. They had gotten as far as Independencia when Raúl became sick from puna and could go no further. I agreed to accompany them down the mountain. At 5:30 pm we left the shelter for Plaza Vieja. They needed constant encouragement to keep up their pace. Darkness fell. We had no headlamps with us. Fortunately the route was very familiar to me.

We arrived at Plaza Vieja a little after 10 pm and found Ernesto asleep, along with climbers from another Argentine expedition out of Cordoba. Our arrival woke up the climbers. We all conversed about the day’s events until we could no longer stay awake.

Ernesto, Alberto and I decided to sleep outside under the stars. When they thought I was asleep, they began to talk softly with each other. Ernesto cried because his son hadn’t made it to the top. He said he felt embarrassed because his expedition had received so much publicity and no one had made the summit from his group. He threatened to go back up the mountain to try again. His son, understandably concerned, tried to reason with him, saying that he was too old to keep climbing this mountain. Ernesto replied that he wouldn’t mind leaving his body on the mountain.

Poor Alberto, in his frustration, ‘woke’ me up to help in persuading his father to go home. I had no more success than Alberto. Finally I offered to accompany Ernesto back up the mountain but he would hear nothing of it, preferring to go alone.

With sad hearts, Raúl, Alberto and I said goodbye to Ernesto the next morning. We arrived at Plaza de Mulas and found the base camp filled with climbers, including two expeditions from Mendoza, one American expedition (all sick with puna), and one from Spain.

Some of the climbers stood up when I walked through the door, cheered, and gave me congratulatory hugs. They had heard of the mujer Americana from the other expeditions, which had come and gone. News had also spread to soldiers at the army base at Puente de Inca.

The climbers once again christened me Cabra Montés (mountain goat) and treated me to a delicious meal prepared by the Spaniards’ own private cook. Ravenous and emaciated, I ate with gusto, and enthusiastically accepted seconds and thirds, which pleased the cook. Later, at base camp, I got on the doctor’s scale and discovered that I had lost around 15 lbs. since the physical exam I had with my Ecuadorian compañeros.

Raúl, Alberto, and I followed the river out of the valley two days later. The two walked very slowly, still exhausted from being on the mountain so long. When I reached Lake Horcones, three families came out to meet me with big hugs and smiles. They were Argentine tourists who had heard that an American woman had made it to the top. They brought me a bottle of wine and a basket of food and then photographed me.

I felt awkward at having such a fuss made over me. At the army base the officers treated me like a celebrity, probably because it was so unusual in South America at that time for women to enter into the mountains, the once-exclusive domain of men. Everyone I ran into wanted to shake my hand. Some people gave me presents. I got a ring, a bracelet and an ashtray. The major gave me free room and board. One of the soldiers washed my clothes and polished my boots.

The major invited me to have dinner with him and his wife. He drank a toast to me and announced that I was the first American woman with proof of having climbed to the summit. He said an American woman, Vera Watson, had climbed Aconcagua solo in 1974. She claimed to have reached the summit. The major said she had no evidence to prove her claim, no photos, no souvenir taken from the summit, no notation in the summit book.

The next afternoon a local family walked with me to the cemetery where the bodies of the climbers who didn’t make it are buried. I got the chills standing in the cemetery and gave thanks to god that I had come out alive and in one piece.

I read the newspaper article about our climb. I noted Santiago and Mateo had not reported any of the details, simply that they had reached the summit. Perhaps they were too embarrassed to say what really happened. In another paper there was no mention that I was with them at all.

In Santiago, Chile, I shipped my equipment back to the States and began my travels around the South American continent. Thoughts of Ernesto weighed heavily on my mind, especially when I read in the newspaper in Patagonia that he was reported dead. The thought was unbearable to me. After several days I telephoned his family and discovered that it had been a false alarm. He had been stranded in a snowstorm near Berlin for six days. He lost forty pounds but came out alive. His reputation as a diehard was well earned. I went to visit him and the rest of our group, along with the priests and other people who befriended me on the mountain, including Rosa Maria in Mexico.

The day I passed through Ecuador, three months later on my way north, coincided with the day news of our climb appeared in the front page of the Sunday supplement of El Comercio in Quito. It was a nice souvenir to take back with me to the States. The laminated article remains in my pile of memorabilia.