People often assume expeditions begin at airports.
Mine began in an office.
At the time I felt I had learned about as much as I could in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For nearly a decade I had been making two or three trips there each year, progressing from pleasant autumn hikes to winter mountaineering trips that involved considerably more suffering. The challenge was part of the attraction. Living in Ohio, the White Mountains became my training ground, and over time I accumulated a fair amount of winter mountaineering experience.
The next logical step seemed to be Colorado. After that, perhaps Alaska someday. Ecuador wasn’t really part of the plan. I had occasionally picked up brochures from the American Alpine Institute at my local outfitter and found myself studying photographs of glaciated volcanoes rising above the clouds. The trips sounded exciting, but they also seemed far beyond my experience. Going from Ohio and a few annual trips to New Hampshire to climbing twenty-thousand-foot volcanoes in South America felt like skipping several important steps.
During those years I was devouring books on mountaineering and polar exploration. If someone had crossed a glacier, climbed a mountain, nearly frozen to death, or spent months dragging a sled across the Arctic, I probably read about it. I spent an unreasonable amount of time imagining adventures in places I had never seen and conditions I had never experienced.
My immediate goal, however, was Colorado. In late March I requested two weeks off from work so I could drive two days west, spend several days acclimating, climb a few mountains, and then drive two days home. Nothing happened. Weeks passed and my request remained unanswered. Frustrated and annoyed, I revised the plan and requested only one week off, intending to fly instead of drive. That request disappeared into the same bureaucratic void. By this point I was becoming more than a little irritated.
I finally reached the end of my patience. I walked into the company president’s office and requested three weeks off to go mountaineering in Ecuador. I fully expected the answer to be no. If the request was denied, I had already decided I would resign on the spot. Instead, the request was approved immediately and with considerably more enthusiasm than I expected.
A few minutes later I walked back to my desk wondering exactly what I had just done.
Shortly afterward I mailed an application, a deposit, and a summary of my outdoor experience to the American Alpine Institute. A few weeks later an information packet arrived in the mail. Holding it produced a strange feeling. For years I had daydreamed about distant mountains and foreign countries. Now I was filling out forms and making preparations for a trip that was actually going to happen.
Excitement quickly gave way to reality. There was a passport to obtain, vaccinations to schedule, prescriptions to acquire, insurance to purchase, equipment to assemble, airline reservations to make, and countless details to manage. Every item crossed off the list seemed to generate two additional items.
Around that same time I traded in my old bicycle for a properly fitted Cannondale mountain bike. The difference was remarkable. Suddenly cycling became enjoyable instead of merely tolerable, and before long I found myself riding every chance I got. What began as recreation quickly became a major part of my preparation for Ecuador.
The bike and I did not begin our relationship gracefully. One evening I rode over to show it to my niece and nephew. On the way, while attempting to avoid a snake I performed an uncontrolled bunny hop and put a wobble in the rear wheel. Later I excitedly demonstrated the effectiveness of the brakes by flying over the handlebars. The kids seemed impressed by that stunt. I was less enthusiastic. Later, while having the wheel trued I ran into my friend Rick, who had just purchased a new bike of his own. Before the evening was over we had squeezed in another twenty-five miles.
As the summer progressed, cycling evolved from recreation into preparation. Forty-mile rides became routine. Then came my first metric century. Not long afterward I completed my first full century ride. One hundred miles had once seemed almost unimaginable. Now it was simply another training goal. More importantly, I was learning something I had never really understood before: how to train for a goal instead of merely exercising. Every ride had a purpose. Every mile was part of a larger plan.
Running became part of the training program as well, although I never learned to enjoy it. I had exercise-induced asthma, disliked running with a passion, and saw no evidence that additional running would ever improve my opinion of it. Given the choice between a fifty-mile bicycle ride and a three-mile run, I would choose the bike every time. Unfortunately, mountains don’t care what I enjoy. So three or four times each week I laced up my running shoes and went anyway. My 5K times gradually improved, the bicycle odometer rolled steadily upward, and my conditioning improved along with it. The goal wasn’t to become an athlete. The goal was simply to become capable.
Capability, I was discovering, is mostly a matter of showing up repeatedly and doing the work.
Not every training day was successful. During one organized ride I selected the sixty-two-mile route specifically because it included a series of climbs known as the “Gear Crunchers.” By early afternoon a blinding headache had struck with a vengeance, the humid summer heat felt as though it was boiling my brain inside my skull, and the fourth climb proved so steep and so long that I completed it in three separate installments. On another ride I encountered a cyclist pushing his bicycle down the road after breaking a chain several miles from his truck. After finishing my own ride I drove home, grabbed a few bottles of sports drink, and returned to find him. We eventually reached his truck at twilight. The ride itself was quickly forgotten. Helping him wasn’t.
Meanwhile, the administrative side of the expedition continued. Obtaining a passport required multiple trips to multiple post offices, largely because I kept finding the wrong one. Vaccinations followed: Typhoid, Tetanus, Yellow Fever, anti-malarial medication, and Diamox. The Diamox generated particular confusion. Several nurses had never heard of it and became understandably curious when they discovered it was commonly prescribed for glaucoma and seizure disorders. Explaining high-altitude acclimatization over the telephone became an adventure in itself.
I also purchased a “Learn to Speak Spanish” software package. My progress was modest. Even after months of practice I remained incapable of discussing politics, philosophy, or advanced mountaineering techniques. On the other hand, I could usually obtain food, ask directions, and avoid accidentally insulting complete strangers. For my purposes, that seemed adequate.
The expenses accumulated with alarming efficiency. Insurance, prescription glacier glasses, medical supplies, travel gear, additional luggage, and a steady stream of small but necessary purchases all demanded their share of my paycheck. Nevertheless, the trip continued moving closer. My passport arrived. My flight itinerary arrived. Maps appeared. Guidebooks appeared. Medical supplies appeared. The spare bedroom slowly transformed into a staging area for a small expedition.
Then one evening, while checking email, I made contact with another participant on the trip. Until that moment Ecuador had remained largely theoretical. Now there was another climber making preparations. Another person who would soon be standing somewhere high in the Andes. Suddenly Ecuador no longer felt quite so distant.
As autumn progressed I found myself paying increasing attention to reports coming out of Ecuador. Guagua Pichincha volcano had become active and Quito was under a Yellow Alert. Reports mentioned unusual crevasse conditions on Cotopaxi and route changes on Chimborazo. Rather than causing concern, the news only increased my anticipation.
Months of preparation had been building toward a single departure date. Soon I would board an airplane in Cleveland, fly through St. Louis and Miami, and eventually arrive in Quito. Looking around the spare bedroom, I realized that what had begun as an argument over vacation time had somehow become an expedition. The passport had arrived. The vaccinations were complete. The gear was assembled. The flight was booked.
Whether I was actually ready for Ecuador remained to be seen.
Then again, most of what I had learned over the previous decade had come from doing things before I felt ready.
So far, that approach seemed to be working.