A year before I stood on top of Aconcagua, I was hungover in a hostel in Bangkok feeling like a complete loser.
I had just been laid off for the second time in three years. I was 31, unemployed again, and starting to question whether the life I had been building actually belonged to me or whether I had just gotten good at following the version I thought I was supposed to want.
There was nothing particularly romantic about that moment. I was not staring out at Thailand thinking some grand reinvention was underway. I was mostly tired, embarrassed, and trying to figure out what came next.
What came next ended up being eleven months on the road.
I sold most of what I owned, packed a backpack, and left. Over the next year I moved through 27 countries, starting in West Africa and eventually working my way toward Argentina. There was very little routine in the traditional sense. Different beds, different cities, different countries, different food, different schedules. But one thing stayed surprisingly consistent: I kept moving.
I trained wherever I could. I remember finding gyms in Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, and plenty of other places where I barely knew the neighborhood, let alone the equipment. Some days it was a real workout. Some days it was whatever I could piece together. And even when there was no gym, I was walking constantly, often 20,000 or 30,000 steps a day through whatever city I happened to be in.
Looking back, I think movement became one of the things that kept me grounded when almost everything else in my life was changing.
I had already climbed Kilimanjaro and done some bigger treks, but that year gave me a different kind of confidence. K2 Base Camp showed me that I could endure long, uncomfortable days and stay mentally steady. The Three Passes Trek in Nepal, which I finished not long before heading to Argentina, gave me another block of time at altitude and reinforced that I could keep going when the days stacked up.
By the time I arrived in Mendoza to climb Aconcagua, I was not the same person who had been lying in that hostel bed a year earlier.
I climbed the Normal Route with Inka Expediciones, and one of the things I remember most clearly is the group. We had a great crew, including a couple guys from Chicago, a couple from Canada, and others from around North America. There was another Inka team moving through the mountain around the same time, and one of the guys on that team was from Denver. We kept in touch afterward and eventually climbed Rainier together.
That kind of thing happens in the mountains. You meet someone while both of you are tired, dirty, cold, and trying to get somewhere difficult, and somehow the relationship skips a few steps.
The team energy mattered because Aconcagua is a long climb. There is a lot of waiting, a lot of carrying, and a lot of time where the scenery is beautiful but the actual work is repetitive. You move higher, acclimatize, come down, move again, and slowly watch the mountain get more serious.
I also remember one of the guides being very clear with us early on that Aconcagua was not a mountain to take lightly. He talked about summit rates, weather, altitude, and the fact that being fit was only part of the equation. It was a useful reminder because Aconcagua gets called a “non-technical” mountain so often that it can sound almost casual.
There is nothing casual about nearly 7,000 meters.
The higher we went, the more obvious that became. At base camp you still feel relatively human. Once you start moving into the higher camps, everything begins to narrow. Appetite changes. Sleep gets worse. Getting dressed takes longer. Your pace slows to something that would feel almost ridiculous at sea level.
The altitude strips away your urgency.
You can want to go faster. Your body does not care.
By the time we reached the final high camp, the whole team was waiting for the weather call. You are close enough to start thinking seriously about the summit, but nothing is guaranteed. The mountain can still shut the whole thing down.
Then our guide came into the tent and told us we were going.
Be up at 3 a.m.
And then he added something else.
After the final big traverse, we were going to pass a dead body.
It was one of those sentences that changes the atmosphere immediately.
We all knew, intellectually, that people die on big mountains. You read the statistics, sign the forms, hear the warnings, and convince yourself you understand the seriousness of the environment you are entering. It is different when someone tells you that tomorrow you are going to walk within a few feet of someone who had been chasing the exact same goal.
The next morning we started in the dark.
Summit days have a strange rhythm to them. There is excitement somewhere underneath everything, but mostly there is work. Headlamp. Breath. Step. Pole. Step. Breath. Repeat.
Then the sun began to rise.
I will never forget that light.
At altitude, the landscape already feels unreal. When the first light starts hitting the Andes and you are moving slowly through this enormous, frozen environment, everything seems quieter than it should be.
Eventually we reached the section our guide had told us about.
The body was there.
We passed within feet of him.
What I remember most is the jacket moving in the wind.
That image stayed with me because there was nothing abstract about it anymore. This was someone who had also trained, packed, traveled to Argentina, made it through the same camps, and wanted to stand on the same summit we were trying to reach.
The mountain had not cared about the difference between his plans and ours.
You keep moving because that is what the day requires, but it puts the entire idea of a summit into perspective very quickly.
The final hours were a slog.
There is no elegant way to describe moving at that altitude. You are not bounding toward the top in some heroic montage. You take a step, breathe, take another step, breathe again, and slowly negotiate with yourself not to stop for too long.
The pace becomes almost comical.
One foot in front of the other.
That is it.
And eventually, somehow, the terrain runs out.
We reached the summit on January 1, 2024.
At 22,840 feet, it was the highest I had ever stood.
The team was there. The weather had held. We had gotten lucky with an incredible window and an itinerary that had worked almost perfectly. We took photos, looked out across the Andes, tried to absorb the moment, and then did what every summit eventually requires.
We turned around.
There is something funny about how much meaning gets attached to summits. You train for months, travel across the world, spend days slowly working your way higher, and then the actual moment on top is relatively short. The mountain does not give you a ceremony. There is no music. Nobody hands you anything.
You stand there for a little while.
Then you go back down.
But that summit felt different to me because of what the year around it had contained.
Almost exactly twelve months earlier, I had been in Bangkok feeling like my life had gone backward. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was measuring myself against a career trajectory that had just fallen apart again and assuming that meant I had failed.
One year later, I was standing on top of the highest mountain outside Asia.
The mountain did not fix anything. It was not proof that losing my job had secretly been part of some perfect plan, and I do not think every setback needs to be turned into a blessing to make it meaningful.
What mattered was what happened in between.
I had spent a year moving through the world, meeting people I never would have met, testing myself, rebuilding confidence, learning how little of my identity actually depended on a job title, and slowly becoming more interested in the life in front of me than the one I thought I had lost.
Aconcagua just happened to be the final punctuation mark.
I had started the year wondering whether I had fallen behind.
I ended it moving one painfully slow step at a time toward something I had once been unsure I could do.
That felt like enough.
Planning Aconcagua yourself? Read my complete Normal Route guide, gear list and logistics.
