Aconcagua

The highest mountain in the Americas, 6,961 metres in the Argentine Andes, near the Chilean border. Aconcagua is the tallest peak outside Asia. From the Pacific coast 100 kilometres west, on clear evenings, the summit catches the last light long after the surrounding ranges have fallen into shadow.

The first ascent was made in 1897 by the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen, leading an expedition organised by the British alpinist Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald himself, exhausted by altitude, did not reach the summit — Zurbriggen completed the climb alone. The route they pioneered, the Northwest Ridge, remains the standard line today and is technically straightforward. No ropes, no ice climbing, no fixed lines on the normal route. What Aconcagua offers instead is altitude, distance, and weather.

The climb is a long walk that gets harder with each passing day. Base camp at Plaza de Mulas sits at 4,300 metres. The summit is over 2,600 metres higher. The expedition takes two to three weeks, most of it spent acclimatizing at progressively higher camps. Above 6,000 metres, the air carries less than half the oxygen at sea level. The mountain receives weather systems direct from the Pacific that can drop temperatures to minus 40 and produce winds over 200 kilometres per hour. The fatality rate is approximately three per thousand summit attempts — low for a peak of its altitude, high in absolute terms.

What makes Aconcagua significant is not difficulty but scale. The mountain is the largest object in the Western Hemisphere by sheer presence. The summit views extend across the Andean spine into Chile and Argentina simultaneously, mountains receding in every direction to the horizon. There is no peak in the Western Hemisphere from which more is visible.