Up on the via ferrata, she walks along casually and clips into and out of the cable with spidery fingers above a 600-foot drop, with the Bridal Veil Falls gushing like a fire hose from last night’s rain in the background. I laugh out loud about something she asked me earlier. “When Hilaree O’Neill asks if you’re comfortable with exposure,” I yell up to her, “she’s not just talking about a spot without any trees.”

I catch up to her on the cable, and ask if it’s ever difficult to get people in far-flung places to take her seriously because she’s a woman. She laughs and tells me a story about when she was in Lebanon, a guy tried to buy her for three—and then five—goats. Then I ask her about getting older—she’s 44—and how much longer she plans on doing this. She stops for a second, drops one hand off the rock and turns to me. “Fuck it. The men can do it, I can do it too. Conrad’s doing it, Jimmy Chin’s my age, and no one’s telling them they can’t do it.”

We stop for a minute as the path narrows and skirts a rock spire that looks like something out of Dr. Seuss. I ask Hilaree about her own mother, and what she was like growing up. She thinks for a minute, and then says, “She was an adventurous spirit who never got to explore the world on her own terms. That deeply affected my perspective,” she says. “When I had my first kid, I freaked out that I wouldn’t be able to do it all. You only get one shot at this world, and I didn’t want to lose mine.” So when her son Quinn was only 10 months old, she planned an expedition to Pakistan to prove to herself that she could. “I quit breastfeeding the day I left,” she says. She cried. A lot. “I know now that was a bit over the top,” she says, but her children remain a large part of why she pushes herself so hard: If she can teach them to stay true to their passions, whatever they may be, that will be her greatest legacy.

We get through the cliff and descend into the valley on the steep trail, and as we get down into the forest it smells like mint and green and rock and dirt and life. She carries the artfully coiled rope on her back, her quickdraws jangling off her harness as she walks. I bring up Burma because, well, how could I not?

Hilaree is best known for her greatest failure—an ironic stab that clearly pains her still. She conceived Burma to be the anti-Everest expedition, completely wild and uncharted, to summit and officially document the altitude of the highest peak in Southeast Asia. Though the crew defied odds and starvation and came home alive, the trip was seen as a disaster in the climbing community. Hilaree’s male teammates asked her and another female climber to step down from being on the summit team because they did not feel they were strong enough alpine climbers, and the men went on to attempt—but not reach—the summit alone, leaving the two women stranded with no ropes in a tent above a cliff for two days.

On the trail, Hilaree falls quiet for a few seconds, and then tells me extremely convincingly that she’s comfortable with failure. That it’s just part of her job. Sure, she strives for success, but it’s the discovery part that drives her. “My dad was so anti-failure—I can’t tell you how many times I still hear about missing a basketball shot. I just took it the other way. I fail all the time. It’s my way of being defiant. I think that’s why I take on these huge projects.”

And what does her father think of her career and her accomplishments now? She laughs. “He thinks it’s really cool.”