Ojos del Salado rises more than twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, on Chile’s northeastern border. It is the world’s tallest volcano, towering over the world’s highest desert: an ash-and-scree-covered behemoth that exceeds Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, and Denali in size, if not renown. Its name means “sources of the salty river,” or, possibly, “eyes of salt,” which is what the brackish lagoons on its lower reaches resemble when your brain is starved of oxygen. The wind and cold are trouble, too. Hypothermia and high-altitude pulmonary edema invisibly patrol the peak, which a pair of Poles were the first to reach, in 1937. Nonetheless, Ojos is what mountaineers call a “walk-up.” There are no crevasses or technical features on its standard route, just a relatively simple rock scramble beneath the summit block.
I gathered this much from reading trip reports, back in 2016, while planning an Ojos expedition of my own. One particularly memorable account of failure there described temperatures of twenty degrees below zero and winds that drove “head-high icy particles which cut our faces like sandpaper.” At the time I encountered that chilling sentence, I was a thirty-five-year-old freelance writer living in Atlanta. When asked why I wanted to climb this volcano—rather than a slighter one, or maybe a ski hill—I sometimes lazily cited George Mallory. “Because it’s there,” the English mountaineering legend said, before one of his pioneering attempts at Mt. Everest, where he would die in 1924.
I did not want to die. I just wanted to kick my tires a bit, to let nature throttle me again. When I was twenty-one and meandering through college, I completed a two-thousand-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. After four and a half months, I emerged emaciated, emboldened, and in need of a root canal from my daily Snickers dipped in Nutella. A few years later, I traced a two-hundred-mile loop through the mountains encircling Lake Tahoe, wearing a silver Speedo urged upon me by my younger brother, Rob, who donned a floral number. I bagged a bunch of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks out West, while working for Outside magazine, and I even topped an eighteener, the Pico de Orizaba volcano, in Mexico, on a newspaper assignment. Climbing that one with Rob had entailed just a few days of discomfort, though. A properly acclimatized expedition up Ojos would require living above fourteen thousand feet for a week, including at least one night past nineteen thousand—two-thirds the cruising altitude of a commercial airplane—where there is approximately half as much oxygen as you enjoy at sea level.
Three friends and my brother agreed that Ojos offered a “Type 2 Adventure.” That is, a perversely painful undertaking that we would fondly remember forever. Hundreds of planning e-mails followed. It wasn’t enough to merely climb the volcano: we had decided to bring along mountain bikes. Only a few other humans had apparently done so. Why not “catch a small plane into the mountain region, unload our equipment, ride into the mountain, summit that beast, ride down and out. . . . Would be so sick!” Chris, a lawyer at the time, who became our fantasist-in-chief, wrote. Justin, a commercial photographer, had never been much higher than fourteen thousand feet, but he was a strong and dependable cyclist. Doug, a fastidious videographer, who planned to bring along his drone, was also inexperienced at elevation; to train for the trip, he slept, often joined by his wife, inside an altitude-simulation tent for two weeks. “She’s cranky this morning and not happy after our first full night at 10,000,” he told us at one point.
Rob was by then a junior-high-school English teacher in San Diego. He had graduated from the National Outdoor Leadership School, and had survived multiple summers climbing and slacklining around Yosemite Valley, where, in keeping with his aversion to constraints, he frequently “raged off-trail.” He was also the only one of us who had ever climbed above twenty thousand feet: on Chimborazo, in Ecuador, and Stok Kangri, in India. He was the closest thing we had to a real mountaineer—and, with his beard grown bushy and his glacier goggles strapped on, he looked it. Rob said that he would climb Ojos without the help of altitude-simulation tents or drugs such as Diamox, a pill that can prevent some symptoms of altitude sickness. This had been his position—which I had adopted, too—when we climbed the Mexican volcano a few years earlier. “I’m not taking any pills to circumvent Mother Nature,” Rob had said. “If I can’t handle the altitude, then I’m not meant to climb the mountain, and I’ll turn around.” He felt the same about Ojos. “You think Messner used painkillers?” Rob asked.
Reinhold Messner, the climbing great from South Tyrol, Italy, was the first human to top Mt. Everest solo, one of the first two to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen, and is widely recognized as the first to eventually climb all fourteen of the world’s eight-thousand-metre peaks this way—an achievement akin to breaking the four-minute mile. In his late twenties, in 1971, Messner published what would become a canonical mountaineering essay, “Murder of the Impossible.” He condemned shortcuts and, in so doing, distilled the “By Fair Means” philosophy he’d adopted from earlier climbers: “Put on your boots and get going. If you’ve got a companion, take a rope with you and a couple of pitons for your belays, but nothing else. I’m already on my way, ready for anything—even for retreat, if I meet the impossible.” In 1985, the director Werner Herzog released “The Dark Glow of the Mountains,” a documentary about Messner’s unprecedented climb of Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, two neighboring eight-thousand-metre peaks near China. Messner and a young climbing partner, Hans Kammerlander, used no supplemental oxygen and no porters after departing base camp during their week-long traverse of the peaks, which they climbed in succession. (Upon encountering Herzog’s camera again, after a week in the clouds, Kammerlander says, “I think if you do something like that often, then the best thing you can do is sit down and write your will.”) Herzog resists making a hero out of Messner, who can seem subject to a darkly fatalistic drive. “I can’t answer the question of why I do it, just as I can’t say why I live,” Messner tells Herzog. “And I never asked myself the question when I was climbing. The question just doesn’t exist then, because my entire being is the answer.” Messner’s name would come up repeatedly on Ojos, as a shorthand for either the pure or the inadvisable approach to our expedition.
I thought more about Diamox this time around. Did not taking it matter to me philosophically, as it did to Rob? Or was feeling meeker than my Messnerian sibling the deeper issue? I decided that the struggle would be real, and valuable, with either approach. The drug might diminish the pain I experienced, but only marginally; it would not give me wings. Diamox was less like human growth hormone than it was like Beano (which I would also bring, for other reasons). That is how I rationalized it, anyway, joining everyone but Rob in filling a prescription.
By then, days before our departure for Chile, I had experienced an even stronger drug: delusions of grandeur. I could see myself signing the summit log with a flourish, gazing down upon the broad sweep of South America, when I closed my eyes at night. The five of us took a name befitting our late-adolescent bravado: Team Brojos. We would lay siege to the volcano over an extended Thanksgiving break.
Chartering a small plane to drop us in the world’s highest desert, the Atacama, was not in the budget. But we did fly commercial to Santiago, Chile’s capital, with our mountain bikes. Pushing them up Ojos, and then riding down, was an absurd bit of alpine theatre that put Diamox and our other fairly common concession to time and terrain—driving to seventeen thousand feet—mostly out of my mind. A pair of Toyota Hilux trucks would get us past the lagoons and through the labyrinth of sandy pits and rock gardens on the mountain’s lower reaches. (For its size, Ojos turns out to be unusually accommodating to specialized motor vehicles: in 2023, two significantly modified Porsche 911 models, nicknamed Doris and Edith, made it to just past twenty-two thousand feet on the volcano, a new world record.) We would take our trucks to where we planned to make camp around ten thousand feet, then twelve, then fourteen—gradually acclimatizing by walking and pedalling for a day or two at each elevation—before finally leaving them at seventeen thousand feet and trudging up the rest of the volcano on foot. We had decided to compress the typical twelve-day acclimatization schedule into eight.
I felt lethargic and constipated during our first week in the Atacama. When I was able to shit, crouched behind some chunk of volcanic debris, I watched toilet paper escape my grasp and take flight in the wind. Near the lagoons, in the mornings, we observed flamingos hunting for high-elevation krill. We shouldered our packs and pushed ourselves up the surrounding hills in the afternoons. At night, we looked at the sky, where there seemed to be more stars than space between them. We observed one another, too. Justin began to slur his words at around seventeen thousand feet. My nose bled. Doug seemed increasingly skeptical of our goal. Rob, meanwhile, eyed the summit like a kid on Christmas morning.
We all made it to our high camp, at 19,150 feet. A mining company had abandoned an L-shaped shipping container there, years before; it is among the highest mountain refuges in the world. Inside were bunk beds, a little table, and a small gear-sorting area, where two Russian men, one large and one small, were chatting and eating cheese. Viktor, a confident fellow in his fifties, was the larger man’s guide. While we prepared our packs for the summit push in the morning, he told us that he had topped Everest several times, among other alpine feats. A solo German climber came inside, at one point, and glumly stared at an apple after an unsuccessful summit bid; he’d apparently gotten lost. Our guide, Mario, sat quietly in a corner. He was a small man with dark, serious eyes who had stood atop Ojos more than fifty times. He had met us at seventeen thousand feet. Like everyone else, Mario looked askance at our bicycles. We assured him that they were necessary.
The Russians set out first, just after one in the morning. We began pushing our bicycles up the volcano three hours later, after a bit of head-throbbing half-sleep. A reading on Doug’s portable pulse oximeter had shown that Chris, Rob, and I were in the “safe” zone; he and Justin, however, were not getting quite enough oxygen in their blood. They turned back shortly after leaving the shelter—cold, exhausted, and, as Justin later put it, “wondering why the fuck it even mattered to stand on top of a really tall volcano.” The rest of us trudged on. We finally dropped our bikes around twenty thousand feet and kept climbing in the dark, up the ashen slopes, in Mario’s footsteps. It was around twenty-five degrees below zero and gusting, and we had about a mile and a half and twenty-five hundred feet of elevation to go. Each step was a distinct ordeal with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It would take another five hours or more to reach the top. Rob yelled into the wind that his toes were growing numb. He tried putting on another pair of socks, but they would not fit over the two that he already had on. We stood there, high on the volcano, getting colder. Rob, cursing his circulation, turned around. Soon, Chris did, too. Mario looked at me. He spoke little English, and I only a little Spanish, but he was clear enough. “Sol,” he said, motioning to the black sky. “Maybe three hours. Wind and cold: more bad.” Onward we went. I settled into looping and loopy self-talk—one more step, one more beer, one more step, nothing to fear—using Mario’s steps as my metronome.
The sun did finally rise, however heatlessly. Sometime later, the pair of cheese-fuelled Russians appeared ahead of us, lurching along the edge of the world’s highest lake, a frozen expanse in the middle of the enormous summit crater, whose lip we had finally reached. Mario said that the summit itself, visible now across the lake, was still another hour away. I picked up my pace to a stagger. We passed the Russians just before reaching the jumble of boulders stacked beneath the peak. I clipped onto a fixed rope, climbed the final stone, and threw myself onto the summit block. I stayed for a few minutes, trying to understand what I saw and felt. The Atacama seemed to appear and disappear through a kaleidoscope positioned in outer space. I felt drunk. Mario elbowed me into a small windbreak. With the logbook in my mittened hand, I scribbled “Team Brojos” and stumbled back down the mountain.
Ojos calibrated me to a new kind of suffering, which would prove useful, at lower elevations, in the years to come. It offered moments of brutal beauty, too, and the fraternity found in far-off places. Back down at the hut, at nineteen thousand feet, I was greeted by my brother, who gave me a long hug with wet eyes. I sat down and tried to answer the questions about the cold, the wind, the Russians, the top. I mostly recall basking in the glory of physical achievement, rarely known to deskbound writers, and in our brief but thrilling ride down on bikes. Still, as the years passed, I sometimes wondered: Did using Diamox etch an asterisk on the whole thing? Had I denied myself some deeper experience or insight? In a world so thoroughly made “efficient” by technology—souped-up trucks, space-age mountaineering boots, G.P.S. systems—what really constitutes a meaningful shortcut?
This past July, before setting out on a trek through the Italian Dolomites, I met Reinhold Messner at the concrete fortress where he now spends much of his time, on a mountain in South Tyrol. The structure sits at around seven thousand feet. It formerly housed the workings of a teleferico, or cable car; Messner helped to persuade local authorities to save the building for him. I expected a mountain of a man to greet me, but I instead found a slight and almost shy octogenarian. The wild mass of hair was intact, but he ambled around slowly in tan pants and a gray-and-brown plaid shirt. We sat down on a stone ledge outside his home, with a sweeping view of the range that he had climbed as a younger man, which was a front during the First World War. “Italians on the other side,” he said. “Austrians here. And they fought for years.”
We talked there for an hour, in English, Messner’s third language, as goats bleated nearby and clouds gathered. He offered opinions about the future of humanity (“Probably we’ll disappear”), the effects of climate change on the ice-covered mountains that he grew up climbing (“pieces are falling much more than when I was a child”), and what he’d like to have happen to his remains when he dies. “I would prefer to be eaten by the vultures,” he said. He added, disappointedly, that this wasn’t allowed in Europe.
But we spent most of our time talking about limitations. One of the mountain faces before us was “not very difficult,” Messner told me. “Maybe every few years, one group—two people with a rope—would go up there.” He continued, “So the wilderness is still there. But people don’t go there. They go on Everest where they have a helicopter and everything prepared for the going up.” Two months earlier, an Everest expedition had made world news: four British men had left London, summited Earth’s highest peak, and returned home, all in less than a week’s time. This unprecedented feat had involved a brand-new form of aid: xenon gas, which accelerates one’s adaptation to extreme altitude. “It’s a shortcut,” Messner told me, shrugging. “But on Everest, on the eight-thousand-metre peaks, there are no rules. So everybody can do what he wants.”
I had expected a more forceful denunciation. I told him an abbreviated version of the Team Brojos story. Messner had never climbed Ojos himself, he said, but he knew plenty about it. Thrillingly, he called it “quite high.” I asked about Diamox: Had I compromised my experience by using it? “For me, it’s very simple,” he replied. “I allow everybody to go in the mountains with his way, but I do it in my way. My own rules. Somebody else can copy them or not.” I pressed him for a clearer judgment of my choice. “I don’t have interesting things to say,” he said. “I know only that the best way is to go by your abilities and the most simple equipment you can get, to be in touch with the dimensions of time and space. And you understand it only if you are doing it without any tricks.” Had we used a vehicle on the mountain? he asked. I said that we had, up to seventeen thousand feet. He nodded gravely, as if to say: shortcut.
We walked into his home, part of which is also a kind of museum—or, as he calls it, “an institute for discussing the mountain situation.” In one room hung his first climbing rope. Elsewhere: a small tent where he and two Sherpas had waited out a life-threatening storm on Everest, for forty-eight hours, in 1978; a huge image of the holy mountain of Kailash, in Tibet; a shoe that Messner had worn while walking across the Gobi Desert, when he was sixty; and a shoe that had belonged to his younger brother, Günther, who died in an avalanche as the two of them took on Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalayas, in 1970. In a display case, I saw a photograph of Messner’s feet with blackened toes: he’d had most of seven amputated following that Nanga Parbat climb. We came finally to what Messner called “the room of the silence.” In the middle stood a pomegranate tree. “This came yesterday,” he said. “A real tree. A tree to say, ‘The world will not disappear.’ ”
On my way out, Messner handed me a copy of a book that he had written, “Between Surviving and Dying,” which he inscribed with a Tibetan phrase. He translated it as “always with small steps.”
A mountaineer named Lukas Furtenbach organized the xenon-fuelled sprint up Everest in May. The forty-eight-year-old Austrian, who runs a tour company and climbing school called Furtenbach Adventures, was already known to be a specialist in “flash expeditions,” relying on hypoxic tents and supplemental oxygen to accelerate the climbing process. He seems to see himself as a pioneer in the annals of mountaineering. After an expedition in 2018 that used hypoxic training, Furtenbach declared on Facebook that “a new climbing style” had been established, and raised the possibility that “the history of commercial, guided Everest expeditions has to be rewritten.” Furtenbach first heard about xenon from a German anesthesiologist, and he and a small group of mountaineers had been testing it for five years, he told a writer for Explorersweb. His first trip offering the gas to Everest climbers came at a high price: roughly a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars per client (a typical Everest trek can cost less than half that amount), along with the condemnation of climbing purists.
Furtenbach argues that his critics overlook the benefits of climb-shortening technologies. He points to the reduced environmental strain that abbreviated climbs have on big mountains, which are increasingly marred by garbage and frozen human waste. He also says that xenon-aided climbs are safer. “Ultimately, it is about increasing safety,” Furtenbach told Explorersweb. “Better acclimatization equals better altitude sickness prevention, and less exposure time on the mountain equals a safer expedition. If people are against it, they are against improving safety on the mountain.” In a statement released earlier this year, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation’s Medical Commission questioned the safety of using xenon as a climbing aid, noting that “off-label use without a scientific basis and with unknown health risks must be rejected.” (Furtenbach has criticized the methodology behind the statement). There’s also a risk of overreliance on chemical aids: maybe the xenon will work, but what if the cannisters holding supplemental oxygen crack, or otherwise fail, as they can? Corner-cutting climbers could be in real danger.
Mountaineering is an effectively unregulated sport—Messner would say that it’s not a sport at all—and so is not subject to the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which bans xenon; this makes the choice to use aids while climbing that much more personal. But the broader debate—the question of when, exactly, the pursuit of athletic achievement compromises the bulk of the achievement itself—has begun to reverberate far beyond the mountains. Next May, the inaugural Enhanced Games, in Las Vegas, will allow participating athletes—competing in track and field, weight lifting, and swimming—to use performance-enhancing drugs under “medical supervision.” The list of permitted P.E.D.s includes anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and some gene therapies; illegal drugs, such as cocaine, will not be allowed, though the organization says that it does not plan to conduct drug testing on athletes, and it’s unclear how athletes caught using illegal drugs will be punished, if at all.
The games are the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, a forty-year-old Australian entrepreneur and lawyer known for leading the litigation, brought by Hulk Hogan and bankrolled by Peter Thiel, against Gawker Media. Recently, D’Souza sat in his company’s twenty-thousand-square-foot offices on Madison Avenue and recounted the birth of his idea. In the early two-thousands, while in high school, he had been impressed by a Wired article titled “Ready, Set, Mutate!,” which argued against “controlling technology’s impact on sports.” A few years later, a series of academic articles by a prominent bioethicist made the pro-doping case more firmly, citing the “need [for] enhanced physiology.” D’Souza was convinced that there was a defensible, and profitable, business here. Thiel ultimately invested, as did 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm affiliated with Donald Trump, Jr. D’Souza now leads a team of venture capitalists and technologists, which includes a former Nike marketing V.P., the C.O.O. of an energy-drink company, the former C.T.O. of a cryptocurrency exchange, and a handful of former professional athletes.
When making his own case for “enhanced performance,” D’Souza leans into libertarian rhetoric. “Individuals with free and informed consent can do to their body what they wish as adults,” he told me. He also invokes equality. “Professional sport is for those who have won the genetic lottery,” he said. “It is intrinsically exclusionary. It doesn’t meet any of our modernist tendencies to believe in a world of equal opportunity.” He isn’t wrong, of course: mountaineers come in various sizes, but it helps to have a good strength-to-weight ratio and an innately high capacity for processing oxygen, known as VO2 max. There’s also the truth of our selective indignance: an injured football player gets a shot at halftime and many cheer as he returns to the field, knowing he could only do so with the help of a drug. Mostly, though, D’Souza argues that enhanced performance is more compelling to observe. “No one wants to watch minor-league ball,” he said. “So if we are now the fastest event in the pool, because we have the fifty-freestyle world record”—which an Enhanced Games athlete now does, if you accept the results of a February time trial—“then we are the fastest human competition.” He went on, “Why can’t we have superpowers? It’s as simple as that. Why should we not be superhuman?”
There is plenty to test, I’ve come to believe, in simply being human. I don’t regret taking Diamox, but I probably won’t use it if I climb above twenty thousand feet again. And I would like to venture that high again, to see myself and the world from another angle. Rob and I have recently discussed Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere—two hundred feet taller than Ojos. We’re both in our forties now: time to kick the tires again, even if they wobble. The advice to “fail more” and “fail better,” which originated with Samuel Beckett, has become something of a cliché these days, worn out by self-help podcasters. But how else can we possibly grow?
In July, I asked Messner about D’Souza’s venture as we sat and stared at the Dolomites. “They’re not testing human limits,” he told me. “If you use all the medicine, the drugs, it’s something else. But I don’t think that you really, in the end, have the possibility to measure the human limits. ‘No limit’ is a sentence I don’t like. We all have limits. And in reality, adventuring means to say, ‘This is my limit.’ ” He went on, “The general limit is not interesting for me. It’s my limit. I go as far as I can. I failed many times in my life and accepted it. And I stepped back.” ♦