The top. The summit. The cone. All my preparation focused on the top. The rest of the mountain did not seem to exist. It was all the steep, soft almost 4000 final feet. I envisioned my wheels sinking to a halt in the volcanic ash, my lungs screaming for oxygen. In reality, my wheels didn’t sink. Surprisingly enough, the part of the top that I completed—from 15,500 to 16,500 challenged me less than the more technical lower part of the mountain that I had dismissed so easily. At 16,500 feet my heart rate reached 141. It felt comfortable, yet altitude will still presented one of the biggest challenges. Oxygen at the top is only 48% of that at sea level.

 

The effects started at 12,500 feet when I stopped breathing—just for a moment, but long enough to wake me up. I fell back asleep and it happened again. Thoughts of pulmonary edema or cerebral edema snapped my eyes wide open. I reached out and shook my tent mate, John Lawrence, our doctor.

 

“I stopped breathing twice. Is that a problem?”

 

John struggled to wake. “Do you want drugs?” Diamox—the diuretic that balanced O2 and CO2 in the body—was on all our minds. Coming out of the haze of sleep, John offered the suggestion on the top of his mind.

 

“No. I just want to know that I’m okay.”

 

John gained lucidity, “You’re fine.”

 

That was enough for me. I fell back asleep, but I had planted a seed of altitude doubt for him. While I slept, he wondered about the altitude effects, and like a good doctor tested himself. Over and over he counted to ten in French. Each time he reached the end and only had nine numbers. And each time he knew that he had missed “sept” or seven. When he relayed his counting exploits to me the next morning I told him that if he knew he missed seven that meant that he was fine, but in the dark, in the thin air John worried, and I slept, but I’d have my own problems in the night.

 

John might well have been trying to remember seven as I slid into the side of the tent again. Not only did the slope of the mountain push me into the nylon wall, it also twisted the sleeping bag around me. Cold nipped at any exposed flesh. The locals say that on the mountain it’s summer every day and winter every night. I felt the winter. The zipper had rotated from my right side all the way to the left.

 

I say my sleeping bag, but it wasn’t my sleeping bag. It was the sleeping bag of my former girlfriend. I moved my left arm out of the straight jacket-like, but warm cocoon of down and grabbed the nylon on my hip and pulled and slid myself back to straight, but then the bag popped. Feathers flew in the air. I immediately wished I hadn’t tried to straighten out—wondered how I’d explain popping her sleeping bag, then I fell back asleep.

 

In the morning John woke to the sound of me blowing quickly through pursed lips. He worried about altitude, especially since it was a world where seven didn’t exist or at least sept didn’t. Darkness—light and dark are almost exactly twelve hours apiece that close to the equator— kept John from seeing me burble goose feathers. As light rose, I rolled to my side and said, “John, I had an incident in the night.”

 

A scared look crossed his face. In the proceeding days he’d complained that he hadn’t been able to do any doctoring short of cutting the sleeves off one of my shirts. Now, he might do some doctoring and he looked worried. I let him flutter in the breeze like a floating goose feather, waiting a few seconds before I said, “I popped my sleeping bag.”

 

He raised up on one elbow. Looking at the space between me and the wall that I’d visited so many times during the night, it looked like snow. He started to laugh—part must have been relief in that he didn’t have to do some disgusting doctoring—and part must have been the pure spectacle.

 

Going higher on the mountain—going to that higher more difficult part—I’d just limited my ability to stay warm. My below zero sleeping bag suddenly went to an above zero, and when the porters packed the tent the feathers flew out the back. It was another lesson that the biggest challenges on the mountain are not always the ones for which you prepare. 

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