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At 11pm, our guide shines his headlamp in my face, waking me to start my summit attempt. My head pounds and stomach churns with the telltale signs of altitude sickness. I look at the large meal of potato soup prepared at the benches of base camp and leave for the cold, dark night, dry-heaving in the outdoor bathrooms. My husband, Kelly, comes outside to check on me, but I don’t tell him that I am sick. I’d spent months training in the Ecuadorian Andes through injury and altitude for a chance to summit Cotopaxi; at 5897m, it is a perfect conical volcano and one of the tallest peaks in Ecuador. Outside, the cold temperatures cut through the nausea and pain, and make me believe I can still climb the mountain. Already, the altitude is affecting my judgement. We leave our basecamp to tie up with our guides and begin our climb. Tonight, there are 86 climbers trying for the summit. The freezing rain coats us with rime ice and slashes at our faces. The storm is building. We climb, and the landscape changes; ground drops, rocks rise, and the mountain becomes steeper. I retch and walk and begin hallucinating. The crumbling snow that rolls beside me looks like snow mice, and I muse that their fur must have whitened for the winter. I look over my shoulder and saw a city blazing with yellow and golden light, impossibly bright. A headlamp—or the moon—glows up ahead. I crawl on the tips of my crampons and chop ice with my ice-axe. My body keeps moving despite the confusion of my brain. About halfway up the line of bobbing headlamps turned around and started coming down the mountain I am strung between Kelly and our guide climbing over a saddle of ice when the wind catches me off-balance. I slide on my belly down the slope and dig my ice axe into the ice by my right shoulder. Our guide felt the tug on the rope, but couldn’t see me through the snow and darkness. Kelly gathered the slack in the line and caught up to me, gripping my shoulder and yelling into the wind that we need to turn back. We are the last team left on the mountain, and 300m from the summit. Everyone else has failed in their attempt. Our guide reasons with us, pointing out that a summit would be impossible with high winds. There are crevasses to climb and a bridge of ice to cross, neither of which would be safe if the wind took our balance and the snow obscured our vision. My judgement has been so affected by the altitude that even at our most dangerous point on the mountain, a part of me still wants to summit. My body had pushed through every demand that I have given it, despite pain or inability, and I couldn’t believe that it would fail now. Our guide prevails, though. We descend over the saddle with our stomachs scraping the ice. I think I see the snow mice falling beside me, tumbling back over tail. The sun begins to rise and glow around the sides of the mountain. Soon, Cotopaxi becomes a gentle grade back to the base camp. I’m startled to see the golden city over my shoulder was no mirage, but rather the sprawl of Quito. We hike to the side of the Pan-American highway—the longest road in the world—wearing too many clothes for the warm ecuatorial gusts that now sweep over us. I had found my physical limits, and in that knowledge was a feeling of power and self-understanding, and even happiness. George Mallory, who died in an attempt on Everest in 1924, said, “If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.” Cotopaxi was my struggle, my challenge, my joy.