between the 31st and 35th parallels, where the highest peaks lay. Chilean Army officer Dagoberto Godoy claimed the prize in 1918. Bolland's flight was especially challenging. The G.3 could not fly much higher than , well below the range's summits, which reach up to at Aconcagua, South America's highest peak. So, she had to fly between and around them and through valleys, a riskier route than Godoy and her predecessors had chosen. The flight suit and pajamas she wore under her leather jacket were stuffed with newspapers, which proved incapable of keeping her warm. The plane had no windshield, and the blood vessels in her lips and nose burst from the cold air at that altitude during the four-hour flight. Seeing the oyster-shaped lake she had been warned about, with a valley leading to the right she did as she had been advised and turned toward the mountain face. "I had to choose; I don't know why I trusted the girl from Buenos Aires," she said many years later. "I turned left, thinking to myself: to think I'll crash for such a stupid reason." But the wind lifted her up just before she struck the mountain, and a break in the mountains soon appeared, beyond which were the plains of Chile. Later she learned the young woman had been sent to her by a medium. "Make whatever you will of it. I still don't believe in the occult sciences. But you have to admit that it takes some effort to not believe!" She landed in Santiago, the capital. Many people had gathered to celebrate the feat. The French consul, who had believed it was an April Fool's Day joke, was not among them. She was called "the goddess of the Andes" by the celebrants, but dismissed the acclaim. "I said to myself: this is glory? It's nothing. Glory isn't worth anything compared to the inner joy of accomplishing something." Bolland's accomplishment went largely unnoticed in her homeland at the time. Two years later, René Caudron's new wife got jealous of her and pressured her husband into firing her. In 1924, she was created a Knight of the Legion of Honor in belated recognition of her Andes flight. She continued to fly, setting a women's record of 212 loops tying with ten other pilots, all men, in an 18-flight, race around France the next year. In 1930, she was taking another