Brendan Doms

At about two o'clock in the afternoon - three solid hours into our hike - we crossed the river on a wooden footbridge (supposedly constructed after a pair of brothers had drowned trying to ford the river) and the transition from a verdant, azure-sky land of running water into a macabre, cloudy one of freezing ice was complete.

The glacier rises in the distance.

The glacier itself and the position of the ice leave no room for a debate about climate change. Even if you somehow disregard all the evidence that NASA has compiled there is simply no denying this: every year the glacier here retreats. Its footprint gets smaller and smaller, racing towards evaporation as the globe heats up. To be there and see it and still choose ignorance is not politics, but madness.

It is here that I begin to feel alone, and discover there is no turning back. We haven't seen another group on the trail for so long that I begin to imagine we are the only beings in the universe. A dozen souls crunching and sliding across the ashen ice. And when we stop moving, cease our conversation, the air is so still, so silent, that it becomes an easy fiction to believe.

Fog sweeps onto the glacier.

A thick fog descends, obscuring our view to only twenty or thirty feet at times. We have mere glimpses of our interim destination: a red, gable-roofed shack that sits on top an intermediary peak. We have already ascended over 1000 m (3280 ft) and I consciously notice for the first time the thinness in the air, how each breath seems to do less to supply my limbs with the strength to keep going.

A few of the group take a breather on the trek up the glacier.

By staying on the trail of other footprints and keeping sight-lines between us, we eventually reach our rendezvous. Lunch is the sandwiches we prepared earlier that morning, which already feels like it happened some other day, to some other person. I change out my soaking socks for a fresh pair. At around four o'clock our professor/guide Orri finally arrives.

A lone figure stands on the glacier, almost lost in the cloud.

We begin to move again, my muscles stiff from the brief respite, and my energy seems to have fled entirely, probably in search of the sun, of which there is no sign. We continue to ascend, and because of the fog it seems a never-ending process. There is hill after hill of soggy ash-mud, rise after rise of the never-ending gray ice. Every step becomes tortuous. The ice compresses beneath my weight and I slide back half the distance I gain each time I set a foot down, a rhythmic sapping of my will. I am at my lowest point mentally, my weakest physically. My body ached and my brain could only focus on how much I hurt, how tired I was, how I only wanted it to end. But stopping or even slowing significantly would put the fog between me and the rest of the group, which would leave me without direction on the hazy, frostbite mountain, a thought more terrible than any my sore muscles could conjure.

When we finally start to descend again the peak is passed with little fanfare. It is probably somewhere near 1500-1600 m high: we have gained a vertical mile since our start. It is the highest I have ever climbed.

The breathing gets easier with every step. I find a second wind lurking just beneath my skin. Layers shed from all of us like snake skin.

Then the fog clears.