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1 a.m., June 14. Mount Artesonraju, Peru, 18,645 feet elevation.

Stuart Cowles woke up on his birthday in a tent. The altitude was so high, he had to think about breathing. The air was so cold not even a teardrop could survive long as liquid. But the early morning sky was pure black and splashed with shooting stars. It was a good day to turn 40.

A true mountaineer, Cowles, the owner of Climbmax Climbing Center in Asheville, has spent every birthday he can remember on top of a mountain.

At 36, he summitted Mount Rainier in Washington state. On turning 38, he topped out on Mount LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains. For the big 40, Cowles wanted to do it big – summit Artesonraju, a nearly 20,000-foot, glacier covered behemoth in the Andes Mountains of Peru.

“I had been to Peru 10 years ago,” Cowles said. “It was a bad experience, and I felt like I had to go back again to make things right.”

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