22,841ft. (6,692m) | Andes Range | 1/7

Two of my paramedic school friends placed bets on how many times I would cry at our graduation. I cried once, one of them made twenty dollars, life kept rolling and the group of humans I spent an entire year crammed in a stuffy little classroom with has never, and will never, be in the same room together ever again.

I’ve always struggled with goodbyes and major life-chapters closing. I hold onto people tightly, especially if I climb mountains with them (and paramedic school undoubtedly counts as a mountain). I think there is something to be said about the way you bond with people while you’re walking side by side, facing the same terrain.

__

I wrote in my miraculously approved paid time off request that I needed to go to Argentina to attempt the tallest mountain in South America — “2021 was the worst year of my life, I’d like to start 2022 off better,” was included as a desperate attempt to elicit pity. I was shameless, but I really did need it.

It turns out in the scramble to buy plane tickets, religiously therapy a torn hip labrum, endure the first holiday season without my mom and navigate a mostly self-inflicted broken heart, I uncharacteristically forgot to remember that this mountain endeavor came with a whole new team of humans to discuss favorite animals with, fall in love with and inadvertently get my heart broken by when it was time to go our separate ways.

As I boarded my plane to Argentina, a text from my friend Dave came through. “Be safe and have an amazing time,” he said, “but I don’t need to say any of that because you interact with mountains in a special way.”

Dave and I have spent four Thanksgivings together — three of those were before my mom passed and the fourth was Thanksgiving 2021: the first year without her here. Dave was also the paramedic who cared for my mom the day she died. On May 7th 2021, my twenty-ninth birthday, while I was across town at my follow-up tonsillectomy appointment with my dad, Dave was on the ambulance closest to my childhood home when my sister called 911. His was the familiar face who walked into my parents’ living room and relieved my younger sister of chest compressions. He took the emergency over, as is the simplified job description of a paramedic. ‘The emergency ends when we walk in,’ they say, but no one prepares you for the reality of declaring the time of death for the woman who prepared your holiday dinner three years in a row.

Dave walked out of the front door and collapsed into my arms that day and we both sobbed. The months that followed taught me that nothing prepares you for the intricacies of returning to work on an ambulance, where you consistently bear witness to tragedy, while you’re actively surviving your own nightmares, either. That was what I spent the better part of 2021 sitting with. It is the gist of what ultimately led me to Aconcagua (and to me begging my employers to grant me a few weeks off to torture my body instead of my mind, or something like that).

I cried when Dave’s text came through, he knows me better than most and he was right — mountains have helped me through a lot and a lot of people who mean a lot to me have watched mountains help me through a lot, but if you fast-forward through my Argentinian expedition, you’d find me sitting at a bar on the outskirts of Mendoza with Melanie telling her the same thing I told my best friend Eric while we shot whiskey at my favorite bar the night I got home, the same thing I’ve told everyone since: “the best part of the endeavor was the people part” and the moments we shared in our collective pursuit of something bigger than ourselves (and no one who knows me is surprised by that string of words).

I stood on top of the tallest mountain outside of Asia on January 10th, 2022. I did it. I loved it. I felt strong. My hip didn’t fall off. It was mostly fun. We spent weeks hiking up and then down just to hike back up. I peed in a water bottle in my tent, and then the pee froze, because the nights were that cold.

I am so proud of every single step I took on that mountain, but beginning a welcomed “new” year at a higher elevation than my legs have ever carried me before wasn’t the best part(s) ..

.. the best part was ending a year that relentlessly tried to knock me down by cheers-ing Belgian beers at base camp with people from countries I’ve never been to. I (we) didn’t make it until Argentinian midnight, but I spent the final evening of my least favorite year huddled in a meal tent with three others as we shared our individual stories and present encounters with success, failure, love and loss. We talked about the fact that all of those words are so damn subjective and in the midst of it all, Gaetan offered the sentiment that “happiness is only real when shared,” putting voice to everything I was feeling and quoting the book he didn’t know I was presently re-reading and lugging up the mountain with me.

.. the best part was watching the sunset at nineteen thousand feet with a nalgene full of boiling water in my jacket pocket, talking of the things that spurred us along, the things that made us who we are, the things that led us to that exact moment in that exact spot. It was the reminder to be grateful for the things that hurt, because life would be really dull and boring and aimless if there was nothing to heal from. I think being knocked down helped me remember not to take a single second for granted — it made me appreciate holding his hand and staring at a rock that looked like a rhinoceros while the sky lit up all around us, even more than I would have been capable of prior to the preceding year.

.. the best part was knowing that despite my femoral head trying its’ best to separate from the cartilage that attaches it to the rest of my body, my heart was healing in the presence of those people and that mountain and that the best medicine is and always will be moments like the ones I’m recounting (especially because I accidentally left my first aid kit and all of my medications at base camp, oops).

.. the best part was scream-singing the Goo Goo Dolls and choosing love and growth as I navigated my way up that mountain and around this world.

I was sitting in my friend Joe and Alana’s living room in Sheridan, Wyoming a few months before this trip began unfolding. Joe and Alana are two humans I aspire to be more like — they’ve approached the things life has hurled their way with more grace and elegance than anyone I know and I admire the hell out of them. I picked up a book sitting on their coffee table that day titled the The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. I read the entire thing in one sitting and a copy of it is sitting on my own coffee table these days.

I teared up thinking about it the day we hiked between the camp with the rhino rock and our final camp, because instead of “the end,” the little crew in that book says: “look how far we’ve come.” I don’t know if anything sums up what I’m trying to say better than that. I asked our team during our final break before we arrived at camp if anyone had read that book and of course Melanie said she had — in a lot of ways I’ve never felt as similar to another human as I do to Melanie. In those same moments, I laughed with Rachel about something unrelated (or maybe it was related, I don’t really remember and high elevation hypoxia is a real thing, which our pulse oximetry saturations confirmed later that night, yikes), I watched Erik refill Nicole’s water bottle and I threw pebbles & jolly ranchers at Richard. I don’t remember thinking much about our summit attempt set to take place the following day, I just sat there in the sunshine and soaked it all in and I would redo the entire expedition to relive those seconds.

I keep thinking about sitting at Plaza de Mulas (the second largest base camp in the world) a few nights before that moment, too. I asked our guide Santi if the local guanacos (wild llamas!) were friends with the mules. Most of the time I asked him a (usually obscure) question he’d respond with “ahh good question, hmmm ..” and then answer it to his best slight-language-barrier-ability. That time he just looked at me, confused. I mumbled something about how much I love unlikely animal friendships, but it all got lost in translation. Melanie and Nicole laughed at me while another guide Rodrigo, also dismissing my sincere mule question, attempted to educate me more about guanacos. He explained that they are the only animal in the world that has never been tamed,“even lions have been tamed,” he said.

“It was a refreshing reminder,” I continued to tell Eric as I attempted to sum up my days in Argentina while we sat at the bar on my first night back in Colorado, “that no matter where and what we’ve come from, most of us are simply out here trying our best and attempting to treat others well as we navigate our way through a world that often doesn’t make much sense.”

Eric and I carpooled to and from paramedic school together and he has had a front row seat to my life ever since. He’s watched me ache over things that I can’t make sense of and he scooped me up and took me snowboarding when the boy who placed bets on whether or not I’d cry at graduation ended up being the person on this planet who’s actions have yielded the most tears. Eric showed up to help me move the day after my mom died and he’s shown up every time I’ve ever needed him. This past summer I talked him into attending the concert of a musician who I spent a few months of 2018 thinking I had a promising future with. His response was yes, but also “why do you do this to yourself?”

The truth is heartache all feels pretty similar to me at this point — success and failure are relative, love seems to be what you make of it and to a certain degree, loss feels the same whether they die, fly back home to a different side of the world or march right out of your life like it was easier than it was for me to change my favorite animal to a guanaco.

And the reality is, goodbyes will never not break my heart — but it’s ok because I’m proud of the extent I’m able to love despite the loss I’ve endured. I’m proud of how I’m constantly looking for ways to be thankful for the happiness and the life experiences that were shared during the season(s) they chose (or I chose, or their body chose) to stick around. I’m learning to accept that I can’t force shared life experiences with people who don’t want to (or cannot) walk further with me and I’m learning to be thankful for the distance and time I had with them. And mainly, I’m just really grateful to be here susceptible to love, loss and everything that comes with living fully.

I walked into my favorite, aforementioned, local bar at 11pm last night in an attempt to finish collecting my thoughts and creating whatever this piece of writing is. I was strangely, but ideally, the only patron there and the employees endearingly greeted me by name as I walked in the door.

I spent two hours sitting at the bar, typing away, sipping whiskey and occasionally participating in their conversation. And then I spent the last hour talking with the two of them, one of which was no longer on the clock. I spoke of how my recent travels seemed to have refreshed my compassion, but made me more restless and they chimed in with their own musings and travel tales — we talked about the places we hoped to visit next and eventually, exchanging recommendations as we verbally combed through the things we love most in this world.

I don’t remember why, perhaps in part because of the whiskey, but at one point Ian was trying to recall a specific ABBA song, to which I excitedly asked if he knew of the Swedish ABBA cover band the A*Teens. I had asked my Swedish friends, Erik and Peter, the very same question while we sunbathed by the pool in Mendoza the week before — neither the Swedes nor the Colorado bartenders had heard of the A*Teens (Melanie had, for the record) and the conversation shifted, but sitting there in my favorite hometown bar at closing time, my whiskey-filled-sentimental-brain rewound to a different conversation I had with Erik and Peter: we were repacking our expedition bags the morning of our fifteen mile hike out of Plaza de Mulas — the day we left the mountain for good. I frantically told the two of them how much I hated goodbyes as I prepared to say goodbye to our guide, Tito. Peter said “but there will be new friends,” in an obviously bewildered attempt to console me and I told him I wasn’t ready to think about that, yet, but he was right. Even in that moment, I knew he was right.

There will always be new friends and new mountains. I have seen so much, I have come so far, I am so excited about where I’ll go next and who I’ll get to go there with.

__

“The two things I know ..

# 1: If you have a choice, pick a big adventure, because life with give you exactly that & exactly the people who are big enough to love the world right along with you.

#2: You always have a choice.” — Brian Andreas