MarcIt was pitch dark, the wind was gusting nonstop against me in multiple directions, I was 1,300 feet off the ground, and I had just stepped onto a steel cable no thicker than my thumb. As I flicked on my headlamp, my eyes followed the cable I was standing on across the expanse of nothingness I now had to traverse to reach the 24-foot by 8-foot oblong capsule of aerospace aluminum and clear polycarbonate that would be my bedroom for the night. As the wind wavered my path of braided steel back and forth (and my body along with it), I couldn’t tell if my shaking legs were from the gusts or from the whole “dangling over more than 1,000 feet of absence” thing.
Fear, I’ve learned, comes in two distinct varieties. And only one of them is worth your time.
Manufactured Risk
“The important part for not falling,” Efren was saying with the accenting English of a native Spanish-speaker, “is to never remove your first safety clip until your second one is connected to the wire.” I nodded as if logic could outvote gravity. It was five hours earlier, and I stood at the base of the cliff I was moments away from ascending. Geared up with a helmet, fingerless gloves, a daypack with a change of clothes and toiletries, and a climbing harness, I tried very hard to listen while the distraction of vertical feet of via ferrata climbing immediately behind us washed over me. Ninety minutes earlier, a van had collected me from my very much on‑the‑ground hotel in Cusco, Peru, and driven me out to the Sacred Valley where we arrived at basecamp for Skylodge Adventure Suites.
Comprised of three bedroom pods and a larger, domed kitchen/dining pod mounted directly to the cliff face, the Skylodge is accessible by a straight‑up climb on the via ferrata or by hiking trails. I opted for the via ferrata, a style of climbing that uses steel cables, rungs, and ladders fixed to the rock. I was solo, as I had been for the previous eight days of exploring a good chunk of central and southern Peru, but I wasn’t alone. I found myself preparing to step past the comfort of solid ground toward a perilous drop with two other small groups of travelers—six of us in total—and two guides.
It takes about 90 minutes to climb up to the Skylodge, clicking your safety carabiners into place over and over. First one, then the other, then climbing until I ran out of slack from my harness, then doing it all over again—just like Efren said. After a while I don’t remember much beyond the steady metal‑on‑metal click of carabiners into fall protection, the texture of the rebar rungs, the slow burn in my forearms and legs, and the distance looming both below and above as I made my way ever upward. Call it flow if you like. To me it felt like a narrowing—click, rung, breath—the world shrinking to palm‑width metal and the next foothold.
Objectively, I knew I was safe. I was attached to the embedded steel by redundant tethers. My brain recognized that the worst case was a short fall before the gear caught me and a few awkward moments of flailing until our guides righted me. And yet, adrenaline insisted. Pulse quickened. Breathing grew shallow. Vision tunneled to the next move. Then came the horizontal “bridge” across 100 feet of empty space—two thin cables to stand on, another to hold. You can guess whether my brain considered the logical safety of the setup or the risk of the void I was about to step into.
But this risk is manufactured—built to trip the alarm without real danger. We build safe cliffs everywhere. Conference rooms. Stages. First attempts. The harness is invisible, but our bodies still flood the zone. We’re not dangling off a cliff, yet our bodies go full “fight or flee,” evolved for saber‑toothed tigers, not awkward conversations. And yet, even manufactured risk teaches you something real.
This is where the other kind of fear shows up—the kind that expands you.
Choosing Discomfort
I lowered myself into my guest‑room capsule through the rooftop hatch, climbed down the ladder, and pulled the door shut. Designed for up to four people—with a queen‑size bed across the far end and two twin beds along the long sides—it felt downright luxurious to have it to myself. Solar‑powered lights filled the transparent vessel with a comfortable glow. As I peeled off my climbing gear and found a home for the radio for use in case I needed help, I got familiar with what else the pod offered. At the far end, behind a thick gray curtain, a six‑foot‑diameter dome window opened onto the night sky, punctuated by the warm glow of the dining pod I’d just left. Oh, and a toilet. I had found the bathroom.
Despite being 1,300 feet in the air, there was a toilet and a sink. A dry “ecological” toilet, sure, but still a toilet. The lid lifted to cartoon‑clear instructions: liquids to a funnel to be collected in a central tank, solids to a bag and chute; a jug of filtered water fed the sink. All things considered, it was luxurious. No shower, but it was only a one‑night stay.
After climbing into bed and cutting the lights, I stared up through the panoramic ceiling at the countless stars filling the Peruvian night sky. The high winds continued to buffet the capsule, sending what I’ll describe now safely on the earth as “moderate” vibrations through the structure. Lying in a shaking pod with a whole lot of space between me and the valley floor, I reminded myself that I chose this feeling of disconcertment. I paid for it, traveled internationally for it, climbed for it. Why? Why seek experiences that make us uncomfortable when modern life is designed for comfort?
There’s “bad” discomfort and “good” discomfort. Distress and eustress (pronounced “yoo‑stress”), we call it in the biology realm. One degrades you; the other expands you. Eustress is what occurs when that gap between where you are and where you want to be is slightly pushed. It’s how you learn that your personal limits are actually a lot further than you thought they were.
Discomfort, or fear, serves a purpose. It keeps us from actual danger. But it also keeps us from experiences that could change us. This isn’t an “Xtreme adventure‑bro” sermon about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Sometimes fear is worth listening to. Sometimes it’s noise—an outdated alarm from a world we don’t live in anymore. And the question I sat with that night in my Pod of (maybe) Death, as the wind’s vibrations began to feel like being rocked to sleep by the Peruvian sky, was, “How do you tell the difference between the two?”
Descending
I woke with the sun before 6:00 a.m., a radiant blue sky filling 180 degrees outside my pod. After a stop at The Toilet with the World’s Best View, I dressed and climbed back to the dining pod for breakfast. All of the food here was rather good for being prepared and served on the side of a mountain. Dinner the previous night was four courses: pumpkin soup, a microgreens salad, Chicken Cordon Bleu with greens and quinoa, and a roasted apple dessert. With wine and passionfruit juice. Breakfast was fresh fruit that snapped with sweetness, scrambled eggs, slices of ham and cheese, yogurt with granola, and coffee or tea.
After breakfast it was time to return to the earth. But instead of climbing down the way we came, we were ziplining. Six ziplines, to be exact—including one route alone that was 2,300 feet long. This, as you might expect, was a completely different energy than the climb up. Climbing up was gradual and effortful. I controlled the pace, if not my heart rate. Ziplining down was sudden and surrendered. Clip. Sit. Let gravity do the work. The line sang and the valley unspooled. I pulled my focus back to remembering how I was taught to slow down. At the platform a guide lifted a gloved hand—the universal sign for please don’t turn granite into a chalk outline.
In hindsight, the dichotomy is hard to miss. No one arrives to the Skylodge by zipline. You earn the view in steps and steel, and surrender it in a blur. Ninety minutes up. Twenty minutes down. Some experiences (and the lessons they bring) you earn the hard way, and they can leave quickly.
Departures
As I said earlier, my rational brain knew I was safe, but my body responded to the height, exposure, and unfamiliarity. I was clipped in securely, following a path traveled by many before me, and still my body disagreed. Few gaps are more instructive than the one between knowing and feeling, between fear and eustress.
That gap between intellectual understanding and embodied experience is where real growth happens. Choosing to sleep on a cliff when there’s a perfectly good hotel serves a purpose. The same purpose as international travel or learning a new skill. It’s practice for the involuntary discomforts life throws at us daily. It’s inoculation—a measured dose of discomfort so life’s daily jabs don’t floor you. Practicing discomfort resets my baseline for what’s truly dangerous versus what’s merely uncomfortable.
Looking back on this image–one of my favorites from the experience–I feel like it captures so much of what I got out of my time at the Skylodge. I’m a small figure on a thin line, knees tucked, mouth open. It looks like falling. It felt like learning I can go further than I ever thought possible.
