the ridge hike | remote andes mountains, ecaudor

I trembled as I straightened my legs. I inhaled deeply, and I caught myself thinking that I could really die up here. As though my fear were a pesky fly buzzing nearby, I shook my head to shoo it away. I placed my hands on my thighs, took in another deep breath, and willed my legs to stand tall and to please god stop shaking. I balanced one foot in front of the other; the trail was too narrow to stand with them side-by-side. The not quite foot-wide trail dropped precariously off on either side. It was sheer cliffs down either. For a moment, when I finally rose to my full height, for one minute the danger gave way to the sight of verdant mountainsides and downright breathtaking scenery. At somewhere between 11,000 - 13,000 feet in the air, with mountain peaks that shrank beneath me, and a heavy sky weighing down on top of me, I felt like I'd reached the top of the world. Like I was standing on the very point where earth and sky meet, and were that the case, I can promise you that it's a sight to behold and worth the death-defying climb to reach it.

Zan bellowed from 40 feet below me, his voice stricken with fear that camouflaged itself as anger. HOW MUCH FURTHER?

My legs started to shake again. I'd taken in the view, and for that one instant of total clarity, my fear had receded, but his voice brought me back into the moment, the physicality of our situation, the responsibility that weighed on me. In search of where the trail led, I made the mistake of looking down.

I'm not afraid of heights. I love the feeling of flying while barreling down a 100 foot drop on a roller coaster, and I learned to rock scramble just for the thrill of jumping off cliffs 30 feet above swimming holes below, but this. This was a different sort of height. To my right, the drop was vertical. To the left the drop was vertical. And all that was between me and those vertical drops was this narrow dirt path and the wind, that was unfortunately picking up.

I pulled the hand drawn trail guide out of my jacket pocket. I unfolded it carefully; it seemed like every move I made in those few moments was calculated, was exact, was more cautious than I have ever been. My heart raced trying to read the map standing on this ridge. I reminded myself that Edmundo, the owner of our guesthouse, had discovered this hike when he was 8 years old. Eight. If he could do it then, I could certainly do it now. And then I thought that 8-year-old feet were much better suited to this sort of thing and got flustered all over again.

But I read and re-read the guide.

You will squeeze through a gap in the rocks and come out on the other side of the mountain. I flashed back to the narrow crevice we'd crawled through 20 minutes earlier. Check.

The path splits, with the left heading downhill. Take the less developed path on the right... We'd seen that and gone right. Zan had been leading at that point. We pointed it out and checked it off the map. But early in the hike we'd thought we'd finished one instruction, and we hadn't. We had to retrace our steps. What if we turned the wrong way?

Continue on top of the ridge. Well, there was no doubt we were on the ridge.

Once you get to the plateau, keep along the left edge. What plateau? I couldn't see any end in sight. The ridge was just a balance beam of dirt.

I thought about turning back. Could we scale down the ridge? That seemed as dangerous as moving forward. I read back through the guide and went with my instincts: we had followed it correctly, and this path would - it had to - eventually come out to a plateau.

I moved onward.

Zan, terrified of heights, followed behind me, yelling ahead every few minutes to ask about my progress, what I could see, and for the love of god to stop taking pictures!

I couldn't. The thrill of the ridge hike paralleled my fear, and every time I found large shrubbery to grasp onto or a skinny rock to squat nearby, I took the opportunity and  kept snapping photos.


I repeatedly told Zan I was stopping to catch my breath and that all was fine, and the trail was great to keep encouraging him to move forward and to stay calm. The truth is that every 10-20 feet I re-read the guide, prayed a little that the plateau was ahead, and tried to swallow the pit in my stomach.

At one point, I laughed at the handwritten note at the top of the guide, Warning: If you are afraid of heights, you may not enjoy this hike. So much for that!

Five minutes later, out of nowhere, the ridge emptied into the plateau. It was a large, open area covered in beige reeds and spindly shrubs. Zan fell to the earth and lay there recovering, practically hugging the security beneath him. When we had reached the ledge, he could have asked us to go back, he could have said absolutely not, we don't even know that this is the right path, and I'm terrified of heights, but he stayed on the ridge. And I think that when you find a person that will walk across a foot-wide trail to stand on top of the world with you, that you have everything you'll ever need.

My legs finally stopped shaking, and the adrenaline-laced euphoria eventually subsided until my heart beat normally again. The rest of the hike was less harrowing but only the tiniest bit less beautiful.

When I look back on Ecuador, it's the ridge - that moment of nothing but the sky and the earth and me, and the adrenaline of hiking a tightrope trail - that fill me with every feeling I could ever feel. That hike... every traveler searches for that hike. Every traveler has those few and far between experiences that, like an addictive drug, keep you exploring to the ends of the earth for another.