Hiking With Humility

Humility. One of the buzzwords we hear over and over in JVC. We must act with humility as we enter into new communities and accept that we are not in control. We must be humble in our workplaces as we learn our way around the Peruvian school system and try to make sense of its nuances. We must be ready to laugh at ourselves after committing a cultural faux pas or making a Spanish error. I thought I was prepared for the challenge of "entering with humility", but I didn´t realize that humility in my personal and professional exchanges was hardly going to be my biggest challenge.

I arrived in Peru on November 1st and headed straight to Urubamba, a small town outside of Cusco, to see my friend from Georgetown, Tom, who is working there for one year with an organization called ProWorld Peru. The plan was to spend 11 days with Tom - a week in Urubamba and four days in Arequipa - and then a week with my parents in Cusco and Lima.

Although I´d traveled from Houston, at 43 feet above sea level, to Urubamba, at 9,420 feet above sea level, in about 18 hours, I didn´t want to admit that I could definitely feel the altitude change and that breathing was a lot tougher up there. (According to Wikipedia, the zone of ´High Altitude´, when high-altitude illness sets in, begins above 4,900 feet.) Thus, with a lack of humility (and disregard for my health - did I mention I have asthma?) I jumped into a two hour soccer game after only seven hours in Urubamba. If Tom and Alex, another Georgetown friend, could play, so could I.  If they didn´t need a breather after chasing down the opposing team, neither did I. Forget that Tom had been at that high altitude for months and Alex had a week under his belt, I didn´t want to look weak. Pride is a dangerous thing.

I recovered, well enough, and spent day number two "speeding up the acclimatization process" by hiking some of the hills around town. I was alone but had a cell phone, so not the smartest decision, but by no means the dumbest decision, I´ve ever made.

Day three brought more soccer. I scored three goals and basked in the glory of having 15 Peruvian men shouting for their teammates to "mark the girl!" so, naturally, I was able to overlook the shortness of breath, dizziness, and general sense of queasiness I felt.

Day four - the day of the hike I had been waiting for! Tom, two other ProWorld volunteers, and I were going to hike up towards the Chicon Glacier, a white peak that glints in the sun and towers over the Urubamba valley. The highest point of our hike would take us to about 15,500 feet, a height well within the range where Wikipedia warns "extreme hypoxemia may occur during exercise." Even though it was supposed to take about five days for me to adjust to the elevation in Urubamba, I was naively (but excitedly) heading up 6,000 more feet after only 72 hours.

The sky was clear as we set off in the early morning and the excitement rose when we saw that a light snow had fallen on some of the surrounding mountains overnight. The joy of traipsing along a mountain ridge with a whole day ahead to do nothing but enjoy the beauty of the world was short lived, however.

We´d barely covered more that 1,000 feet in vertical distance when the effects of the altitude started to set in. I stopped to catch my breath every 20 yards and forced myself to drink water even though I felt nauseous. Eating was out of the question; every bite made me feel sick to my stomach. My head was spinning and, as the day wore on, my legs weakened from the lack of food and the decreasing oxygen. Each of my stops was slowing us down and I was so ashamed to be the weak link in our hiking team. I kept pushing harder and indignantly reminding the boys (who had never questioned or ridiculed me for wanting breaks) that I had only been there for three days.

The sun climbed in the sky and we climbed up the mountain, up rock scrambles and across rock falls. Still, I fell behind. Each time they stopped 200 yards ahead of me to let me catch up I felt my face burning with shame as the same excuses and explanations came to my lips. We reached the lake, a point close to the glacier, and realized with horror that we were making terrible time. Tom had estimated how much time it would take us based on his experience hiking the same route over two days with a much larger and less fit group. Here we were, though, hiking even slower than our predecessors, and it was entirely my fault. I don´t like to lose athletic competitions, especially not to the California hipsters against whom be were being compared.

I hiked as fast as my brain, lungs, and legs would allow and eventually we reached our highest point and took a quick picture with the glacier, which was still another 100 meters of vertical distance above us. We prepared ourselves for the descent but, as nothing on that mountain was simple, the descent started with a two kilometer trudge across a rock field, a 500 foot descent on loose, slippery rocks (I still have scabs on my knees), and a 700 foot climb on a six inch wide path. When it comes to hiking, I rarely complain. This had me wishing death upon whomever had cut the trail.

When we reached the ´true descent´, the part where Tom promised there would be no more going up, we were down to an hour and a half of sunlight. The going went well until we lost the trail in the woods (so dense and overgrown that even guides get lost there) and the sun rapidly slipped below the horizon. We were about 30 minutes from the road below, but the darkness was proving to be a challenge. In an inspired moment of survivalist intuition that morning, we had all packed headlamps . It was better than hiking by the moonlight alone, but a visibility radius of 20 feet is hardly the way to pick your way down a mountain.

Two hours later we hit the road with nothing but an easy six kilometer hike down to Urubamba left. Those two hours, surprisingly, were some of the easiest on the mountain, and not just because we were going downhill. As soon as the headlamps switched on, so did my adrenaline and I stopped focusing on how tired and unhappy I was and instead tried to contribute to the escape plan. I stopped obsessing over whether the boys were judging me for hiking so slowly. I stopped apologizing for putting our hike behind schedule and getting us into this predicament. I stopped complaining and annoying them with my descriptions of the acute pain I was feeling. I stopped feeling sorry for myself for dealing so poorly with altitude sickness.

In short, I was humbled by our hike. I accepted that I can´t always be the one leading the pack up the mountain, sometimes I will be the one dragging my feet and shouting expletives when we reach yet another false summit and see our real destination still looming above us. I realized that sometimes I´ll be the one asking for a hand to pull me up after slipping on the rocks and, when someone offers to put a bandaid on my knee I should smile and say thank you, because gracefully accepting weakness opens you to accepting help.

We stumbled home at 10:15 in the evening, 15.5 hours after we started. I learned a lot - about myself, planning ahead, and taking safety precautions. But, mostly, I felt happy that, once again, this was going to be a story my parents heard well after I was out of harm´s way.