I followed the trail for several long miles, passing little fishing huts etched into the lakeshore. I had just crested a height of land at the head of the lake, when quite unexpectedly, I noticed a figure on horseback approaching rapidly in the distance. My neck muscles instantly tensed. After all, these were strange gringo behaviors I was performing in a stranger’s land. And I wasn’t sure if slogging a purple rucksack around and following my nose in the sake of self-indulgence was something the natives would celebrate.

As the horseman approached, bad scenarios began to swirl through my mind like a wildfire. What if he unsheathed a saber and left me headless in his wake? What if the horse was steered in my direction and I got twirled beneath its legs as if tossed in a blender?

By the time the man and his horse had galloped up alongside me, I had dropped my pack and was planted firmly in the Kung Fu fighting position. The man gazed down at me from his high saddle. A look of bewilderment was spanned across his face. He wore a wool poncho, leather gloves and western blue jeans. He had sinewy skin, and bad teeth. He was undoubtedly a highlander.

Highlanders are people who scrape fortresses together from this barren landscape, and then dig-in for a century or two. Their livelihood thrives on the fragile embers of subsistence sheep farming. They spin alpaca-wool for clothes. Entertainment comes from coca leaves. Spirituality comes from the mystery, and the power of the mountaintops.

" Gringo?" the highlander called down, as if trying to confirm that I was one.

I nodded in agreement. He scanned my bulging pack and the ice axes dangling from it. He noticed the plastic mountaineering boots wrapped around my feet. A sense of deep confusion visited his face. So I pointed up at the icy summit-crown in the distance, trying to clarify why I had come. His leather saddle squeaked as he turned to see what I was pointing at.

" Ya ha!" he said as he rotated back to face me. "El puno de Pachamama!" He lifted a hand, balled it down into a tight first and then brought it toward my face for me to inspect. Back home, this type of body language would have caused me to backpedal away from the situation. Since this was a foreign country, and perhaps normal behavior, I maneuvered in for a closer look.

" Say what?" I inquired.

" El puno de Pachamama," the highlander repeated.

I was a bit hazy on the word puno, but as for Pachamama, I knew exactly who she was. Pachamama is the mother-goddess of Peru; the spiritual essence of the Cordillera Blanca. Highlanders have included her in their songs for millennia. Peruvians show their devotion to her by dumping the day’s first sip of fermented maize-liquor onto the ground in her honor. Sheep have been known to be sacrificed on her behalf.

The highlander noticed I was straining to translate his sentence. So he brought the fist in closer for me to inspect, simultaneously motioning over at the mountain in the distance. I looked at the fist, then up at the mountain. My eyes widened as it hit me. The Fist of Pachamama.

It must have been the eye-widening that caused the highlander to explode into a fit of spastic laughter. But before I could brace myself, he let out a tremendous roar of hysterics. His mouth dropped open and I could see a row of teeth bouncing around like little wind chimes. I think the pampas began to vibrate. I swear I saw a twinkle of excitement pass through his watery eyes as he entertained the thought of some gringo trying to climb one of his sacred mother-goddess’ fists.

After the highlander had collected himself, a conversation ensued between him and me. We discussed the mountain, the weather, and the fact that I was the only gringo he had seen this far up his valley in years. He was the self-acclaimed owner, manager, and custodial force behind this valley. He drove the cows. He bred the sheep. He produced the little kids who had left footprints behind in the mud.

As the conversation evolved, the highlander suddenly asked if I cared to join him in his hut, as a guest, just up the valley. We’d chew coca leaves, he offered, and if I wanted to, I could marry his youngest daughter.

As I turned to chuckle, I noticed something gleaming high above me. It was the Fist of Pachamama. And it wasn’t simply calling me anymore. It was beckoning. This was no longer some side-adventure, some frivolous undertaking. This was something more. This was the essence of exploration. Climbing the Fist, I mused, just might prove to be the most important thing I had ever done.

I thanked the highlander profusely, but declined his offer. He wished me good luck, and watched as I snaked my way up through the pampas.

That evening I fashioned metal and nylon into a home near a high tarn. Its water was reflecting the wavy images of a fallen sun smoldering in the western horizon. Far down in the valley below, I could see the horseman’s plot of land. Several wooden structures were checkering the fields. Thin gray wisps of fire-smoke were rising up from the rooftops. A tiny flock of sheep was moving around gracefully, as if directed by the wind. A brown dot was galloping between them.

I sat back with a cup of coca de maté and wondered what this valley would be like if the Fist was a mere 2000 feet taller. The tarn next to me would surely be labeled as "base camp" in all the guidebooks. The highlander would be renting out burros. Grand expeditions would be besieging these flanks.

By 4 a.m. the next morning, camp was well behind me. I was scrambling quickly toward the lower rock deposits of the mountain’s southeast ridge: the obvious skyline I had first seen from the laguna a few days before. Foreign-looking vermin were dashing in between the rocks. I gulped-in lean breaths of mountain air, and as I gained altitude, my head unglued itself from the rest of my body and floated above like a balloon on a long piece of string. A strip of pink daylight was rekindling in the east.

Just below the toe of the southeast ridge, I paused to let my lungs catch up with me. Rising above was a complex mass of gullies and broken rock arêtes which led directly to the southeast ridge crest. The ridge itself was an abrupt partition between the dramatic south face on one side (my objective) and some tamer eastern snow slopes on the other (a viable descent in case of success). I wiggled my head into my helmet, drew the chinstrap tight, and headed for the ridge crest.

I battled up through a steep gash in the mountainside, clawing over blocks that were perched precariously above the valley floor. A delicate traverse out left brought me to within touching distance of the crest. I edged closer on a beautiful, sheer slice of marbled andesite, and then flung a leg over top of the very crest. I sat there, straddling the entire southeastern layout of the Fist as if it were a thoroughbred, and took a good hard look at things.

The continuation of the southeast ridge rose above me like Jenga blocks. It was balanced there as if waiting for someone like me to come along and knock the whole thing down. The laguna had been reduced to a blue thumbprint in the pampas. And the highlander’s hut was a pebble in the endless landscape. From this spot, the upper fringes of the mountain looked far more frightening than they did from far below.

I began to make a few conservative moves further along the ridge crest. At times I was forced to grab its dorsal-fin edge and dangle my boots off to one side, sashaying over drops that would have surely taken me back to base camp in a hurry. A slight wind had picked up from the west, and the increase in altitude was beginning to chip away at my sensibility. I was being sucked into the mountain at this point. Everything below me was long forgotten. Everything above was the great unknown. It was that beautiful moment in mountain climbing when you are no longer climbing a mountain; you are holistically a part of it.

The ridge steepened, and I followed. It turned dramatically to the north, so I snuck around to the south, finding places where I could avoid the increasing grip of gravity. An hour of this exchange came and went. I was moving cautiously, and deliberately, like a good soloist should be. Rising above was an assortment of chossy bits and overhanging mountain debris, all awash in a gleam of snowmelt.

I noticed a nearby ledge that was about the size of a car hood, and sat there to regroup. Squinting through my sunglasses, I searched the mountain for an answer. Nothing above was jumping out as being a relatively safe undertaking in terms of solo mountaineering. Everything bled into a disturbingly grave mountain feature: a series of frozen drapery folds split by crumbly rock arêtes. The south face proper. A place I would hesitate to go with a partner and a sound belay. The mere thought of moving out onto it caused the pasta from the night before to bubble up in protest. Glancing around, I realized that the car-hood ledge beneath me was my last stand with flatness.

I suddenly had this feeling that Pachamama herself was watching me, waiting for my next move. The game had grown more serious now. The romanticism, the adventure, the freedom I had exercised when I decided to tackle this thing alone had all been peeled back to reveal the true reality of the moment. If I was hoping to unearth some truth about this mountain, some new route, or some significance from the term Pachamama, the time was now.

As if piloted by something that was not actually inside of me, I rose to my feet and began shuffling out across the ledge toward the impenetrable south face. When flatness ran out, I peered down below my boots. The mountain dropped away into a field of rocky debris 3000-feet below. I swallowed hard and glanced skyward. Being up close to the face, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Tucked back into a crease in the mountainside, I noticed a corner system made of seemingly good rock, red in color, and as smooth as dolphin hide. It was a long corridor which marked the very spot where the south face came in to fuse with the southeast ridge. Rising above this corner, perhaps 300 feet higher, I saw a white snow-tongue which was lapping at the summit ridge. This, I mused, was my ticket to the top.

I located a foothold in the corner. It appeared solid enough, so I stretched my boot out over the abyss and tapped it with a plastic toe. Far below my ankles, I could just make out red rubble that was once part of the corner system. I sighed heavily for dramatic effect, stemmed out over the nothingness, and transferred my weight onto the foothold. A second later, I pulled my entire body into position above Peru. The great bottomless maw began to exhale its breath across my back.

I moved along as if controlled by mechanics. Tiny handholds could be found here and there, followed by long sections of blankness. I crawled upward, unlocking a space inside my head where there was no longer a need to feel anxious about the possibilities of danger, because danger was upon me. There was no fear, no little man clinging to a sheer mountain face. It was all quite silent, and unreal.

Caught up in that little container of self-control, I could barely believe what my fingers had discovered above me. They were fiddling with something oddly familiar. So I lifted my eyes to it. There, dangling from the cliff side, was a strand of bright yellow webbing attached to an aging piton. A climber’s anchor. A permanent fixture where someone had once belayed from, or rappelled from, or otherwise used while discovering the red corner below me. This was no secret passageway. No spiritual journey to the top. This was an established climbing route on a mountain like all the others. I had been risking my skin to solve a riddle of the Cordillera Blanca that had already been figured out.

I closed my eyes and imagined what I’d be doing if I had taken up the highlander’s offer. We’d be sitting fireside, listening to the glorious crackle of molten wood, discussing the weather between spats of coca leaf.

I glanced above, past the piton, and tried to research my next move. Another 50 feet would have me at an apparent ledge. And beyond that, a further 50 would get me to the snow-tongue. The butterflies were slam-dancing in my gut.

I departed the anchor in trembles. Grasping above, I found smooth edges on the inside of the corner which I used for balance as I groveled, gingerly, up the remaining feet. After several minutes of this, I found a place where I could finally let go of the mountain and stand to my feet. I looked back behind my boots and reviewed what I had just left behind. The corner lay below like a strand of discarded red ribbon. A piece of yellow rope was fluttering part-way up it in the breeze.

There was little time to stall and contemplate things. I still had no idea what lay above the snow-tongue. I was entirely committed now. A forced retreat through the corner could mean certain death. So I fit my crampons into place and hacked the picks of my ice axes into the snow tongue. A firm wind was sweeping down from the summit, patting the heat from my face. And as I climbed, I began to regain a sense of security I had lost in the earlier chapter of steep red rock.

With each slash of my axe, snow burst from the mountain like uncorked champagne. An hour later, the dramatic grasp of the south face slowly eased and I moved out onto some more manageable reaches of the upper mountain above. In the near distance, I could finally see a triangular shape jutting up into the mid-morning sunlight.

The summit ridge was a classic affair, complete with a massive cornice clinging to its lee rim. I stuck the shafts of my axes into the snow and crutched along toward the top. Distant views of the northern range unfolded beneath me.

At the summit, I turned 360 degrees and took a good long look at Peru. I adjusted my sunglasses and squinted hard through the sunshine. An endless cardiogram of undistinguishable peaks were shattering up through the horizons. And it was then that I finally felt the truth behind this experience revealing itself to me.

The essence of adventure can’t be concealed entirely in the shape of a mountaintop, I thought to myself. Even if it did resemble a portion of the mother goddess of Peru. New route or old, summit or not, the real magic had already taken place. It had occurred the moment I decided to look past the known, the charted, the guaranteed. In fact, the essence of Peru had already revealed itself to me. It was found in the laughter of the people, the remoteness of the valleys, the feeling one gets while watching the mountains come alive at sunrise. The highlanders describe these things with the term Pachamama. But in reality, Pachamama is everything that is beautiful and mysterious in Peru, all at once.