The skin on my face begins to tingle as tiny crystals of ice coat my exposed cheeks. I look up, the warm, yellow light of my headlamp beam illuminating the glittering ice before me but not revealing anything beyond the two-foot-wide circle of light it casts. There is darkness above, darkness below, and, for me, a darkness within.
I am not here against my will. I willingly climbed into Mount Everest’s “death zone”—the section of the mountain beginning at 26,000 feet where human life cannot be sustained for long—not once or twice but six times (including once without supplemental oxygen, in 2016, becoming the first American woman to do so). As I detail in my memoir, Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest, these climbs were all in pursuit of something more than the summit.
