Letting Go of Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba towers at 18,491 feet. A white island on the horizon visible for miles across Mexico, it’s the most prominent volcanic peak after Mount Kilimanjaro and the third highest mountain in North America. On the day we drove from Mexico City through the arid countryside, clouds circled its top and I couldn’t tell where the snow stopped and the clouds begun. Orizaba rose endlessly into the sky.

And that’s how it felt that morning as we trek up its side. An endless mountain. We slip on loose scree that slides under our feet and trickles downhill as miniature waterfalls of pebbles and sand. As we continue up the switchbacks, I feel the sweat run down my spine and evaporate in the dry air. The whole way, the sun blazes amid an empty blue. We don’t stop until we reached the base of the glacier. We’ll tackle the rest tomorrow, we agree.

At 16,000 feet above the ocean, when the wind stops, everything is still. But the gusts don’t often stop up here. As the sun lowers behind lavender clouds, I huddle over a pot of snow on the campstove. Raja slurps tea beside me in the cluster of boulders where we’ve staked our tent. We’ve been melting snow for several hours now. At 16,000 feet, when it’s 20 degrees, water takes a long time to boil. Still, we need to drink and we need water for our dehydrated camp meals, so we don’t have much choice except to wait. I clench my fists in my mittens to warm my fingers and try to forget about the cold.

 Above us, there’s the glacier. It winds up the flanks of the volcano and glows in the dim light. Tomorrow, climbers will inch their way upwards to peer inside the crater and celebrate the summit. But for now, everyone is below. They’re sleeping in the bunks of the red, tin shelter at basecamp. We’re the only ones foolish enough to sleep up here, I think. Maybe because they all knew what a pain it is to melt snow. Maybe because it’s warmer down there. Less windy down there. Because it’s easier to breathe down there.

 As I reach for my headlamp, a wind gust spirals around the volcano’s cone and lifts a blanket of snow crystals into the air. They shimmer before collapsing back into the mountain. I look back down at my pot of melting snow and stir the gray slush. We’re over 200 miles from Mexico City but the smog drifts for a long time. I pour the city’s liquid haze into my water bottle. I swish it around and wonder if it’s potable. I take a small sip and immediately spit it out. Even purified, it’s definitely not palatable. Raja looks over at me and raises his eyebrows, “Hey, we need that.” I take another sip, nod, grimace, and swallow.

 “The summit doesn’t really look that far,” I say, turning to Raja. “Tomorrow shouldn’t be too bad.”

But I know I’m lying. There’s a difference between feeling like you can reach out and grasp the top and actually getting there. We lay with our backs propped against a boulder. I wonder what it sounded like when Orizaba decided to erupt and this rock burst out of the crater and crashed through the air.

 “I’ve never seen inside of a volcano,” Raja says. “Me neither,” I reply.

 Orizaba is dormant, but not extinct. It last erupted in 1846. I don’t know much about geology, but for volcanoes, that’s yesterday. There’s something romantic about the possibility of our mountain exploding and taking us with it. Maybe it’s the same kind of thrill that brought us here.

 Finally, we have enough gray slush to fill two water bottles. One for each of us.

“Do you think that’s enough for tomorrow?” Raja asks skeptically, eyeing the bottles. 

I shrug. I know it’s not, but I don’t want to admit it. “It’ll have to do,” I reply. I should’ve known that the decision was foolish—and that it could be catastrophic—but we’ve been trying to melt snow for hours and I’m tired of it. 

 By now the sun has disappeared and the clouds have settled in for the night. They lie far below us, low on the mountain’s slopes. “We’re above the clouds,” I whisper. Miles of cumulus unfurl around me. I want to stay outside and watch the moonlight illuminate the glacier, but the wind is wide awake and it throws us inside our tent. We have to wake up soon anyway.

 At 3am, we get up. Neither of us slept much. We blame it on the altitude and the wind and the cold, but really, it was probably the dread of what we were about to do. The sunrise is a long way off, but we shuffle to get ready, tucking ourselves deep into layers and shimmying into our harnesses. Wind whips the snow off the peak at 18,491 feet above the sea. We don’t have to go up there, I remind myself. Raja hesitates before threading the rope through his harness. Maybe he is thinking the same thing. But we don’t say anything. Instead, we wedge our boots into our crampons.

 I’d like to say that we were the first ones on the glacier that morning. After all, everyone else had started far below. But to be honest with you, Raja and I had never done this before. The year before, Raja had taken a mountaineering course in the North Cascades and I had experimented with rock climbing, but neither of us had headed up a peak like this without a guide leading the way.

 We’re clumsy and slow as we rope up. By the time we take the first steps in our crampons, there’s already a chain of headlamps illuminating the way up the mountain. I’m relieved to see the glowing blobs. Yesterday I wanted this peak all to myself, but now, hours before dawn, clutching my ice axe and heading into the unknown, I’m glad to follow the others.

 I lead. My headlamp brightens the snow in front of me and nothing else. With each step, I search for cairns and the snow-filled footprints of yesterday’s climbers. The summit is somewhere above us, but for now, under the headlamp’s beam, my world is reduced to the cold white ice beneath my feet.

 The breeze picks up as we claw our spikes into the snow’s crust. When the wind slows, I hear my hard exhales. As we climb, I count steps in my head. One, two, three, four, five steps, rest. Repeat. Don’t let yourself fall. Don’t drop your ice axe. At one point my goggles fog. We both have a headache and are too nauseated to eat. We gulp water every chance we get, hoping that will help with altitude. With each swallow, I regret not boiling more snow. Countless climbers pass us and I wonder if we’re losing too much time.

 We keep this up until the sun's rays strike the sky. I look up and realize that I can see again. I dig my ice axe into Orizaba and turn to look at what’s below and beyond us. For a moment, I forget about my numb feet, wind-stung cheeks, and cracked lips. The mountain’s shadow extends in a wide, stretching triangle across the earth. The tip of the shadow—the mirrored mountain’s top—kisses the horizon. And the moon is still there, above it all.

“Raja,” I say.

 “Yeah?” He asks.

“We’re part of that shadow.”

He laughs, but nods. “Yeah, we’re in there somewhere.”    

After that, it should’ve been easy. We should’ve felt the spark that comes with a new dawn. We should’ve been warmed with the rush of morning light. But the mountain is still steep and the air becomes thinner with each step. Our two liters of icy smog water are nearly gone and we’ll run out long before we make it to basecamp. The crater isn’t far now—and from there a gentle ramp leads to the summit—but without enough water, it begins to feel out of reach. 

A few minutes later, Raja and I pause again, bent over our ice axes. My breaths are like a tempest bursting out from my lungs. We stomp out foot buckets so we can rest and I feel my calves strain to keep balance on the steep pitch of snow. As we wait for our breath to slow, a team of climbers descends towards us. 

“Hey!” I call out to them, “Did you guys make it?” I feel desperate for their words of encouragement, and mostly, for them to tell us that we’re almost there.

They look up and their mouths break into wide grins.  

“Hey!” They shout back. “It’s amazing up there. Just unbelievable. One of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen,” one of them beams.

Raja and I nod, wanting to feel their stoke. Instead I blurt, “How much longer do you think we have left?”

“Probably another 45 minutes ’til the crater. It’s slow going up here, but you’re so close! You’ll be there soon. See ya at the bottom!” And then they take off downhill.

Raja and I look at each other. Ice crystals speckle our goggles. We don’t say anything, but I know we’re both thinking that 90 minutes, coupled with the descent to basecamp, is too many more minutes for our nearly drained water and our dizzy minds.  

“What should we do?” Raja asks. His voice is quiet. After all the planning, the training, the dreaming to get here, to do this, he knew that neither of us wanted to give up. For a second, I feel a rush of anger at ourselves for taking too long to melt snow. We should’ve have planned better. Should’ve made more time for it. Shouldn’t have turned off the stove just because it got dark and we wanted to get out of the cold night. But there’s no point now regretting yesterday.

I look away and watch the wind blow bits of ice over the snow. 

“I think it’s time to go down.” I feel a pang of loss as the words spill from my mouth. The hope that had fueled each kick of my crampons evaporates. We weren’t going to make it. 

I had always thought that we’d reach the top. I hadn’t imagined it any other way. We both always agreed that we didn’t have “summit fever”—we were too amateur of alpinists for that. On the flight over, we told each other that we could turn around at any point. But I knew that turning around meant letting go of the story of us making it. It meant accepting failure. The ego is stubborn.

An hour later, as the sun rises higher and the snow glistens brighter, we take a break from our descent to sit. Mexico’s countryside unfurls below us: layers of valleys and hills covered in clusters of mesquite and huizachal and agave. 

“Have you ever gone sledding at 17,000 feet?” I ask. The glacier has panned out into a gentle slope and the snow is packed hard. Without the possibility of crevasses or dangerous falls, other climbers have unroped. 

“Let’s do it,” Raja grins. 

Then we’re sliding on our butts down the rest of the glacier, self-arresting when we fly too fast. Our exit off of Mexico’s highest peak isn’t one bit graceful. We laugh as we tumble past the other climbers until we collapse at the bottom. Snow is stuck in my mittens and the back of my neck. As I dump it out, I feel like a kid who’s just come inside from a snowball fight at recess.

In the end, we never peered inside the crater. I never saw the jumbled rock and fractured ice that lines the cliffrock. There are no photographs of Raja and me cheering on the summit. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes wish we could’ve stood on top of Orizaba. But we still saw the mountain’s sunrise shadow. We crawled up a snow-capped volcano in the dark and the cold and the thin air. We slept above the clouds. We were there. We went up and we came back down. And I’m thankful for that. Just next time, we won’t take water for granted.