But the band of ice that once protected El Toti's peak is already reduced to a mere 500 feet in height, and we soon climbed beyond, scaling boulders and scrambling up naked rock in rapid ascent until a last haul brought the summit within reach. A warming jolt of adrenaline shot through my veins: It was the highest I had climbed in my life.

A STERNER TEST

It was our second summit, 17,060-foot Pico El Cóncavo, which provided the sterner test.

The hardest part of climbing a glacier, it turns out, is the need to move in step while roped to other mountaineers. Move out of sync and the rope can over-tighten or fall uselessly slack. Coordinating each step while climbing the 1,312-foot glacier that protects Pico El Cóncavo would have me howling in frustration.

We hiked out of camp at 6 a.m. amid slashing sleet, rising among boulders and banks of exposed moraine. At the glacier's snout, winds were canyoning in from the east, gusting snow into flurries that reduced visibility to 20 yards.

Tethered ahead, Alexander peered into the whiteness, nosing out the route by instinct. Somewhere ahead, he knew, snow drifts obscured the lip of a 1,500-foot vertical drop. Suddenly, the crampons, helmets and ice axes no longer seemed like frivolous accessories.

The climb was punishing. Sheets of snow flurried across the mountainside, swishing downward in our wake. Just one carelessly chosen foothold, I knew, could spell disaster. Yet El Cóncavo reserved its meanest trick for the final push. We found the summit itself topped by a 30-foot pinnacle of ice, sheer-faced and curtained with icicles. Alexander edged cautiously onto a brittle ice bridge that led to the top, gazed below at a sheer fall of several hundred feet, and shimmied hastily down.

Utterly exhausted, we sat mute in the snow, staring at the ice stack that had so cruelly withheld the summit from us. Then, one by one, without a word, we rose and turned for the long trudge down, stepping out into a blinding blur of white.

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