Altitude Sickness

Altitude Sickness shapes Pietro’s childhood in the mountains as a persistent physical struggle rather than a single crisis. On climbs with Giovanni Guasti, exertion and thin air bring nausea, weakness, and vomiting; the symptoms can turn every step into an ordeal, even while Pietro grows accustomed to treating them as part of mountaineering. The contrast between his bodily distress and his father’s determination makes the condition central to their shared climbs: it limits what Pietro can comfortably do, but does not end their repeated attempts at higher summits.

Symptoms and Mountain Setting

Pietro’s discomfort is bound to altitude and exertion. On a high route with his father, as the path rises toward 3,000 meters and gives way to scree, he becomes exhausted; exertion and lack of oxygen tighten his stomach and make him feel sick. Each additional meter is difficult. His father, absorbed in leading the climb, does not notice how badly Pietro is struggling. Instead, he points out ibex on the ridge, while the summit still seems far away to his son.

The strain is sharper on the glacier. At the start of the 1984 excursion, Pietro wakes feeling reasonably well, but the warmth of the refuge soon wears off and nausea grows as Giovanni pulls the roped group forward. When Pietro stops for breath, the rope between him and Bruno tightens, forcing Bruno to stop too; the tension passes along to Giovanni, who turns back in irritation. Pietro’s symptoms therefore affect not just his own pace but the movement of the three-person climbing party.

The 1984 Glacier Crisis

On that August morning in 1984, Giovanni has brought eleven-year-old Pietro and Bruno onto the glacier with hired crampons, tied into a rope team. The climb becomes more dangerous as the sun rises, the snow softens, and clouds begin swelling below them. Giovanni presses on despite the worsening conditions. At a crevasse, he crosses first, anchors the rope with his ice pick, and draws Bruno over. Pietro, already sick and frightened by the terrain, reaches the edge and cannot face the jump. He vomits his breakfast onto the snow, making his altitude sickness impossible to conceal.

Giovanni’s response reveals the seriousness of the episode. Rather than becoming angry, he is frightened and immediately jumps back across the crevasse to help, tangling the rope in the process. Pietro later recognizes the risk in which his father’s persistence had placed them: he was a poorly equipped child, the weather was closing in, and the group had been dragged upward by Giovanni’s resolve. Giovanni knows that the only cure for altitude sickness is descent. He rearranges the rope so Pietro can walk in front and stop when he feels unwell, then leads the party down through the fog.

The descent does not instantly restore Pietro. His stomach is empty, but dry retching continues, and he is too weak to walk steadily. Bruno gives him snow packed into ice to suck; together with the loss of altitude, it helps his stomach begin to settle. Bruno then uses the call he uses to bring cows back to the stable, and Pietro lets its rhythm guide his stumbling steps toward the refuge. The episode ends not with a summit but with the three climbers roped together on the way down, an unusual moment of shared closeness that Pietro remembers as never to recur in quite the same way.

Repetition, Training, and Pride

The glacier crisis is followed by more high-altitude climbs, not by an immediate withdrawal from mountaineering. The Castor is planned as that summer’s four-thousander, part of an annual practice in which Giovanni and Pietro aim to finish the season high on Monte Rosa when they are best trained. Pietro continues going onto glaciers and continues to suffer their effects. Over time, he becomes accustomed to feeling unwell and accepts the sickness as one more routine feature of that world, alongside pre-dawn starts, freeze-dried food in refuges, and crows calling at altitude.

That familiarity does not mean he enjoys the climbs. Pietro describes the experience as a brutal sequence of steps ending in vomiting at the summit; he hates both the effort and the white landscape. Yet he is also proud to go above 4,000 meters again, treating each ascent as proof of courage. The mixture of aversion and pride gives the condition a complicated place in his memory: the body resists the climbs, while the achievement becomes part of how he measures himself.

Giovanni understands the repeated ascents as training. After consulting a doctor, he is convinced that Pietro will grow out of the altitude sickness, and imagines that in three or four years they might attempt more serious objectives, including crossing the Lyskamm or climbing the rock faces of Dufour. His expectation does not remove Pietro’s symptoms in the meantime; it helps explain why the climbs continue despite them. The routes recorded on Giovanni’s mountain map later distinguish his own black lines from the red ones that Pietro understands as accompanying him to their four-thousanders. The map thus preserves the repeated shared outings in which the illness was an obstacle, but not the whole story of their climbing together.

Later Experience and Significance

Years later, during a solitary ascent, Pietro thinks he has passed 3,000 meters without adverse effects on his stomach. This is a meaningful contrast with the nausea that once made the same kind of height punishing. The moment supports a change in his experience, but does not establish a diagnosis, a cure, or the disappearance of all risk at altitude. In the earlier climbs, Giovanni had expected Pietro to outgrow the sickness; the later ascent offers a limited, bodily indication that the old pattern may not hold in the same way.

The recollection of illness also complicates the image of the mountains as a place of uncomplicated freedom. For Giovanni, the higher world of rock, snow, and glaciers can restore happiness and agility; for Pietro, that same ascent may mean a tightened stomach, exhaustion, and the long effort of continuing. The narrative keeps both experiences in view. Altitude Sickness is at once a recurring physical condition, a constraint on the father’s ambitions for his son, and a measure of the distance between Giovanni’s ease in the mountains and Pietro’s hard-won participation in them.