Dead Woman's Pass

Dead Woman's Pass is at 4200 meters (13,860 feet) and it lies in the middle of Day 2 of hiking the Inca Trail.

It is imposing as hell as one stands at the rest stop below, the last place to buy anything until the end of Day 3. Each day, two local Peruvian/Quechuan women hike up from the village way below to sell Gatorade, M&Ms, snickers, bottles of rum, cans of Cusquena beer and more to those of us hiking up beyond this point.

As I look up, I can see the line of porters dressed in blue (ours) and the line dressed in red (another group's) hiking up towards the pass. They are impossibly small. I wonder how I will ever make it up that high, up that far on a day when I am already exhausted from lack of good sleep at altitude and winded from my lungs' constant request for more oxygen. We head off, following our Peruvian, tri-lingual guide through the valley, even though everyone else was headed up the trail.

We hike along the valley, through the scrubby brush-like grass amongst the llamas for a while. Dead Woman looms above us in one direction; over to the right, a huge craggy mountain top brushed with snow; and behind us, a huge, glacier-topped mountain that's been following us for two days already.

Suddenly, we stop short as an Andean deer, endangered/vunerable, and not seen all that often appears. She's a bit away from us, and decides not to make a run for it. Our guide, knowing I have a camera with an amazing zoom requests I get some shots. When your local guide reacts to an animal as special, chances are it is. I take it out and begin snapping. And then the buck appears. Runs to her and whispers sweet nothings coupled with a warning against humans, perhaps, because they take off together as quickly as he had arrived.

We make a sharp left and scale the side of the valley wall to reunite with the trail everyone else was on. And the worst huffing and puffing of my entire 4-day trip begins. Our group had naturally split into three during the first day and we remain this way on Day 2. There are the youngsters, those with super clean, super capacity lungs and strong legs and ligaments yet to be destroyed with the continued dawning of another year. They stay with our lead guide in the front of the pack, hiking in a neat line along the trail. Then there are the middlers, those of us in our late 30s and early 40s. Fit and able, to be sure (I mean, we WERE doing this after all), but a little worse for the wear. Lungs perhaps compromised by some early-90s college smoking and knees that'd had seen a fair bit of action over the years. And then those behind. A couple of older folks needing to be sure of footing, a couple of less-fit folks determined to enjoy their vacation instead of killing themselves, and the poor youngster with three-year-old knee surgery. It was a clear and natural split.

I find myself gasping for breath in a way that scares me. I don't have any lung issues, but as a scuba diving professional in my late 20s, I had a number of incidents where I got out of breath underwater which is the scariest thing in the entire world, because if you can't catch your breath and calm down underwater, there's a good chance you'll die. So when I get really out of breath, even on land, my brain sometimes automatically tells the rest of me that if I can't get it under control, we'll die. Some super-id part of me must know this isn't true, because my brain and I have an understanding where it listens to reason. But it takes a moment.

As I gain on the top of the pass, named because they found a mummified woman at the very top when they cleared the trail after Machu Picchu was found by the outside world in 1911, I realize I can't just keep walking. The trail isn't a trail, but a massive stone staircase. I am not just putting one foot in front of the other up a hill, I am stepping up each time onto a new stair. It's hard. Very hard. It's worse psychologically than physically.

I set a goal. Take 25 steps up and then stop and get my breath back. It takes only a few seconds to regain my breath and wonderfully (and due to some serious exercise regiments), my quads are not complaining in the least. So again, 25 more steps up. Breathe again. Good. Keep going. I catch up to another "middler" and share my methodology with him. He decides to join the 25-at-a-time club because his own 100-and-stop method was beating him down. Together, we make the summit.

It is cold. Colder than I had anticipated, especially now that I've stopped moving after so much effort for so much time. I have come to 4200m completely ill-prepared. I have no fleece, no hat or gloves (the porter carrying my sleeping bag, mat and other clothes has those things and he's long gone). I have only my rain poncho, which I don since it's sort of spitting and it offers me a bit of warmth. (I am still better off than my new Kiwi friend who is shivering in his t-shirt and board shorts.)

We wait for those behind to join us to make our group whole again, and together, we each take a capful of rum, let one drop fall to the ground to honor the Earth and drink the rest in a toast to our accomplishment, to this mountain and to the nature around us. It warms our tummies from the inside, a welcome phenomenon.

The descent begins now, our biggest yet (our first real one). Down, down, down into another valley. Steps again. Big, stone steps and with each one I wonder if my knees will survive this, as I wondered about my lungs. And I also wonder about the Incas and how they did this. And I wonder about the porters, who make quick work of what is so difficult for me so when I arrive hungry for lunch, they already have it cooked. And I look around in wonder really, of it all. For a Pantheist, there is no place more hallowed than the top of a mountain in the crook of a pass with my lungs burning or my knees aching as yet another hummingbird flutters by and yet another, different colored orchid peeks out at me.