It's the night before our summit push on Pico de Orizaba - 18,491 feet, the highest mountain in Mexico, third highest in North America - and I'm lying in my bivy outside the Piedra Grande hut at 14,000 feet, staring at two left boots.
Let me back up.
Paul and I are a LOWA family. I'm on the LOWA Pro Athlete team, and Paul's been in the outdoor industry long enough that between the two of us we have close to a dozen pairs of LOWA mountain boots - basically the whole lineup, which is an incredible privilege but also means our gear room looks like a LOWA warehouse exploded in it. I say this because it becomes relevant soon.
First, context: I run AWExpeditions, a women's mountaineering company, and this trip was a guide development climb - five of us girls heading up the Jamapa Glacier route to scout the mountain and grow as a leadership team. Paul and I had just gotten back from ice climbing in Bozeman, we were in the process of moving, and our gear room was an absolute disaster. Gear and boots were strewn everywhere. I packed at the last minute because, hey, that's how life goes.
Here's the irony - Paul has done this before. He grabbed my LOWA Alpine Ice boots once thinking they were his, only to discover at the remote trailhead that we had planned the weekend around that his size 12 feet don't squeeze into my 9s. So when I packed for Orizaba, I was careful. Checked the size on the first boot that I pulled from the pile: mine, good. Then I reached for the boot sitting right next to it - because of course it would be the matching right. Except that it was not the matching right. It was Paul's left boot, three sizes too big for me.
When you have LOWA's whole lineup of mountain boots scattered across your gear room floor, apparently this is just a thing that happens.
So, back to my bivy outside Piedra Grande on Orizaba: here's my predicament. Do I attempt 18,491 feet in two left boots - one of them three sizes too big - or do I just not push for the summit? There's the question of comfort, the question of safety, and the question of professionalism. We're here as a leadership team, and all three of those matter. I poll my two senior expedition leaders, Shea and Dani, independently. "What would you do? What should I do?" They both say the same thing: if you can walk, you should try. And I agree - because I know that, as long as my crampons stay on, I have the ability to stay within a good margin of safety on this glacier, even with two left feet.
So try I do. I pull Paul's boot onto my right foot and it goes on. With three sizes of extra room the wrong-footedness barely registers - my foot just kind of floats in there. I think about the women and men that I've seen portering on Kilimanjaro and in Nepal, hauling heavy loads up steep terrain in boots that are threadbare and sometimes five sizes too big. If they can carry 30 kilos up Kili in that type of footwear, I can surely figure out two left boots on a glacier. The real question is whether my crampons will fit - I use Petzl Leopard FLs, ultralight and strap-on, adjustable to fit basically anything. They cinch onto the odd boot fine; end of debate.
We leave camp at 3 a.m. - me, Shea, Dani, Carly, and Rachel. I'd thought departure was 2:30 and was mildly panicked when nobody had stirred at 2, but turns out I'd just missed the updated start time. Up we go through the scree, into the Labyrinth, on toward the glacier.
I should mention that I was really sick the day before - bad enough that I wasn't sure I could summit at all. But now it's morning and my gut is cooperating and I decide not to think about it too hard.
Our acclimatization timeline is aggressive. Dani and Shea are climbing without Diamox and grind through it; I've chosen to use Diamox, knowing how thin our schedule is, and have an easier time up high. Carly turns around just above camp - with a new personal altitude high point for her, right at 15,000 feet. Rachel makes it to the toe of the glacier and turns because they feel they are too slow (they aren't, really).
The rest of us keep going. One boot fitting, one boot ridiculous, crampons biting perfect neve in the dark.
Did my feet hurt? No. Did I compensate with my hip or my knee? Also no. I just walked - one left foot, one very large left foot - up 4,600 vertical feet of rock and glacier to the top of Mexico, and then back down. And I didn't even get a blister.
I've been climbing in LOWAs since 2018; I've worn them on Aconcagua, across the Annapurna Circuit, through a thousand miles on skis from Anchorage to Nome. Rarely have I had to deal with hot spots, never have I had a product failure (if you exclude operator errors such as the one on Orizaba; there's another story where I melted down one of my Iditarod boots, but that's for a different time). And apparently that statement extends to situations where the boot is on the wrong foot, in the wrong size, belonging to the wrong person. I'd argue that's not a product test LOWA designed for, but it's possibly the most honest inadvertent test I've ever run.
Did I MacGyver a summit of the highest peak in Mexico with two left boots? Yes. Would I recommend it? Let me put it this way: am I going to reorganize the gear room as soon as I have a spare minute? I'll get back to you on that.
