15,000' Frustration

After I put my foot through the ice and we had to delay our climb, it was time to sit back and enjoy a day of tension.

The night before, I finally felt some effects of the 15,000 foot altitude. For one thing, I had a dull headache that would not let me sleep. I could also hear my breathing, which was far heavier than ordinary. I felt my heartbeat in my ears as it raced along at well over 100 beats per minute. On top of this, the fact that I was still pissed off at myself for my mistake and obsessing over whether the boots could be dry enough did little to promote a restful feeling. When I finally did nod off, it was brief and fitful. Overall, I probably got fewer than four hours of sleep.

The next morning, I set the boots and the liners out in the sunlight so that they could dry. After Honza and I ate breakfast, we walked up one of the rocky ledges near the pond (in leather hiking boots.) At least I felt better than the night before and had plenty of energy for rock-scrambling. That energy could have pushed me to the top of Yanapaccha, but 'nuff said.

When we had climbed a couple hundred feet up the rocks, we had an excellent view of the glacier's snowy flanks, directly across from us. Honza tried to show me the route that we would walk, but my eyes weren't sharp enough to see the footsteps, and any other points of reference were meaningless. As a hawk flew by, I looked away and tried to snap a picture, something that pissed him off.

Later, we went back down to camp so I could practice some more climbing technique. I learned a few things that ten-year olds at climbing gyms might already be familiar with, e.g., the figure eight knot, using a belay device. We practiced by looping the rope around a boulder and belaying up and down a small ledge.

I have to admit, I was a bit of a slow learner. Handling mechanical things has never been a strong suit of mine—also the learning curve might have been depressed somewhat at the higher altitude. Honza's frustrations were pretty much transparent. "This is basic stuff," he would say after I screwed up something that was pretty basic. He also cut me off many of my questions (which were many), got exasperated when I tried to figure things out for myself and screwed up.

At this point, I was getting a little sick of playing the role of good-natured dolt and staring to get pissed at Honza. He was full of helpful comments like "you're going to die on this mountain." He showed me another knot used to secure ropes to caribiners. "Maybe you can go home and use it to hang yourself." Hilarious.

The one thing that he said, more than once, which got me pissed was "You aren't born for it." Really? Fuck you, you smug fucking asshole. I've been climbing mountains my whole damn life. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was inept, that this was not the place for me--so it really did bother me.

The fact that I didn't have the means to prove him wrong right then, only made me more frustrated. I had an irrational urge to put my boots on right then, clomp up the mountain and flip him the bird from the top of the peak. It always sucks when idealism has to play second-fiddle to realism.

It's also good to keep in mind that pride goeth before the fall into the big fucking crevasse. The mountain and adventure literature I had read, such as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air have reinforced into the point that arrogant souls are invariably the ones that draw themselves and others into dangerous situations. The 1993 disaster on Mount Everest for instance, was created in large part by the overconfidence of guides, who let their egos cloud their judgement and underestimated how dangerous the mountain was. I hated the idea that I was an inept climber, hated that I'd been dumb enough to step into an ice-puddle, but I hated most of all to think think that I was capable of deluding myself and that I couldn't trust my judgement.

The idea of fucking up badly on the mountain, getting injured or worse was more frightening than just the consequences themselves. To do so would be to have proven that I had learned nothing, to add my name to the roster of ignorant and deluded souls that have fucked up before. I won't be the first to make this point, but taking an unnecessary risk on a mountain and walking away unscathed is no victory. Cheating fate is still a form of cheating, demonstrating a failure to plan properly and a careless disregard for the conventions of safety that others have honored.

Even our humble New England states have more than a few stories of pride and death in the mountains. Check out Not Without Peril for some great stories about the hundreds who have died hiking in the Presidential Range in New Hampshire. I've always felt some disdain for these less-experienced hikers that kept going through bad weather or fatigue when it was obviously time to turn back. Now that I was stepping up to a new level of difficulty, I didn't want to refuse to acknowledge when I go in over my head, compound ineptitude with willful ignorance.

Fine. I'd have to let Honza handle finding routes, clipping me into belays. My guide deserves the credit for this stuff, and its stuff that, I must reluctantly concede, is still over my head. Someday I would like to be able to bring more to the table and feel that I have claimed a bigger piece of the victory when I come off a mountain. In the meantime, it would still be my lungs and muscles bringing me up the mountain. I wasn't going to be pulled.

Watch Your Step

Yanapaccha, as seen looking up its glacier

The following morning, Honza and I embarked upon a multi-part quest to get to Yanapaccha. After our morning breakfast of oatmeal, we hoisted our backpacks and hiked into the center of town to get a collectivo to Yungay. The ride was packed as usual and our driver was playing a game where he tried to hit every bump and pothole in the road.

Meanwhile, Honza struck up a conversation with a couple of climbers. They were both Hungarian, but had lived most of their lives in Venezuela--not a combination you hear about every day. Since they were going to climb Chopicalqui, which was along the way for us, we decided to split a taxi with them in Yungay.

Yungay is famous because of The Great Earthquake, which struck the Ancash region in the seventies. According to Wikipedia, the disaster killed half of the people living in Huarez and destroyed 90% of the buildings. Yungay fared even worse. Situated beneath the slopes of Huascarán, it was right in the path of a gigantic mudslide that came down the mountain and buried the town entirely. Except for a few hundred survivors, all of the 20,000 living in the town perished under the onslaught of ice and mud. The scale of destruction wrought by the earthquake, both around Huarez and elsewhere in the region made it the most deadly earthquake in Latin American history--until the earthquake in Haiti this year.

Yungay, has since been rebuilt entirely, only a couple of miles from where the old town once stood. Because Peru's government has declared the site to be a memorial, the buildings and inhabitants remain buried where they were at the time of the disaster.

Our taxi ride got interesting fast as our driver began a steep ascent on the bumpy dirt road, climbing past farms and mudbrick buildings. We passed the site where Yungay used to be where there was a large Jesus statue, like the one in Cuzco (or Rio de Janeiro), standing over the site in commemoration of the dead. Huascarán loomed above us like a pillar of white, stabbing into the dark blue sky.

The driver was extremely slow and thus an exception to the Peruvian drivers that I had encountered thus far. When we came to some very tight, narrow curves, he would blow the horn as a preventive measure in case there happened to be another vehicle barreling down in the other direction. Another habit, which got old fast, was his tendency to spit out the window, an act that he repeated every two minutes.

After we had gained perhaps two thousand feet of elevation, we came to the entrance of Huascarán National Park, where all visitors have to pay 85 soles for a 10-day pass. The Venezuelan/Hungarians had paid for theirs eight days ago, so they lied to the officials and said that they were doing a two-day trip to Pisco and got out of paying an additional fee for their three-day excursion. For my part, I couldn't let them know Honza was my guide; he didn't have the proper certification and could have landed in trouble.

Back in the taxi, the road leveled out and we entered a canyon flanked by 500 foot walls of battered rock. We emerged from the canyon after about two miles and came into a vast, open area. Suddenly, I could see all the mountains in the valley. Huascarán is king here, but the other mountains are impressive in their own right and many exceed 5,000 meters. Even Pisco, which never seems to get any respect, looked like an impossible wall of monstrous white. The road went by two lakes that were an enticing shade of turquoise, reminiscent of the Caribbean. These waters were in fact glacial runoff, so they were probably ice-cold.

Honza and the other climbers talked about how the alpine maps from ten years ago were hopelessly inaccurate now because the glaciers had shrunk so drastically. That couldn't be because of global warming though--there were probably just layoffs at the ice factory or something.

Myself at the trailhead, with Huascarán in the background

High-altitude lunch. The lakes I mentioned earlier are visible far below.

The hike in. You can see Yanapaccha's Glacier up above.

The car began climbing again soon after the lake, up an endless series of switchbacks. After an hour of climbing, even the high-altitude lakes were thousands of feet below. When Honza and I got out, and started along the trail, we were already at almost 15,000 feet of elevation. The net climb I was about to do would only be about three-thousand feet. In other words, it would be less than climbing New Hampshire's Mount Washington from Joe Dodge Lodge.

This does seem a bit like cheating and I can't pretend that it wouldn't have been more badass to have started in Yungay--or maybe the Pacific Ocean at zero feet. Then again, starting at a high altitude, maybe already more than halfway up, is pretty much the norm in mountaineering. The summit of the mountain I was about to climb was still 2,000 feet lower than Everest Base Camp. Really, Everest is only a 10,000 foot climb--but what a 10,000 feet!

It is also true that the real mountain features, namely the glacier, don't begin until high-elevation, so if that's the only part of the climb you're interested in, you might as well take a road to that point when it's available. My head-start got me to the mountain's true challenge. Getting to the summit from here was going to be no cakewalk.

Honza and I hiked the trail for a couple minutes until we found a good spot where we could sit for lunch. We had some bread and avocado and then moved on. All around were spectacular views of Pisco, Chopicalqui and of course the mighty Huascaron, which loomed up behind us. About halfway into our hike, I got my first view of Yanapaccha, a little shorter than some of the other beasts on the scene, but impressive. A great glacier spilled down from the top to where it terminated a short distance above where we stood. At its bottom, the ice ended in a confused riot of seracs--thirty foot blocks that leaned drunkenly in different directions.

The trail was rugged going under our heavy packs. Still, I felt pretty high-energy and was doing a lot better under the lower oxygen than I had dared to hope earlier. The time that I had spent in high-elevation towns like Cuzco, Abancay and Ayacucho had evidently paid off in allowing me to acclimatize.

Despite some tricky terrain along our hike to camp, it was not incredibly hard, and we shaved half an hour off the two hours that Honza had anticipated we would need. We pitched tent alongside a high-altitude pond, where we would have a water source, as well as good shelter from the rocky walls that surrounded it.

One of the mountain agencies had done everyone a favor and dug a toilet about a thousand feet from the water source. Far from a mere pit in the ground, this lavatory had an elevated "bowl" built up from local rocks. Utilizing the facility required the initial unpleasantness of putting bare ass on cold stone. Following this however, I enjoyed the most scenic bowel movement of my career.

We got everything prepped in camp, and then put our plastic boots one and left for the glacier so that I could learn some climbing basics before our ascent. To get there, we had to climb over the rubble of the moraine, boulders that the glacier had scraped off the mountain. It was no small feat to negotiate the uneven terrain while wearing clunky boots and keeping crampons and ice axe in hand.

Our tent at base camp

A scenic shitter

We stopped at a large flat boulder at the glacier's edge and put our crampons on. Here, the ice left pools of melt-water we needed to step around, and formed a steep white slope that went up for about fifty feet until it got to the top of the glacier. Beyond this, the surface extended almost to the top of the mountain, a treacherous road, beset with crevasses and steep cliffs. An ordinary hiking boot would have been hopeless on the slippery surface. With the crampons however, I could get a firm grip into the ice, and kick my way up. I also had the axes which I could use on steeper slopes, to get firm, trustworthy holds that would support my weight.

I would have additional security in that Honza and I would be using snow pickets and ice-screws. These devices allow the lead climber to create solid holds to which he can attach ropes as a precaution against falls going up, or else for belaying down. Since Honza planned to lead most of the way, I would have the responsibility of removing his screws and pickets as we went and then attaching them to a caribiner on my harness.

The most basic safety precaution that we had was the rope we would keep attached between us. Two weeks before, an American had been on a guided tour up Yanapaccha and hadn't been roped to his guide. He fell into a crevasse to his death. Whoops. Presumably, if I fell anywhere along the way, Honza would have the time to perform an arrest with an ice axe and stop the fall. Of course, the rope meant that if Honza wen't down, I would have to perform the same duty or else be dragged after him into whatever crack he dropped into.

After showing me some of the basics, which admittedly, I needed to practice and would practice more before I tried any other mountain, Honza said we needed to get back to camp in order to do our cooking and have time to get to sleep early.

Approaching Yanapaccha's Glacier

The moraine at the glacier's edge

The Crampon Grip

At this moment, I suffered a severe attack of idiocy and stepped over onto a thin layer of ice, which, unfortunately, stood over a deep pool of water. The ice gave out immediately, dropping me in up to my knees. I thrashed out as right away, but it was already too late; the boots were soaked.

"So you are finished for tomorrow eh?" Honza said.

This was the absolute last thing I wanted to here, especially because I knew that I had just done this to myself. To compensate for the realization that I had been utterly stupid, my ego flashed into complete denial mode. It didn't matter that the boots were wet, that it was getting cold and dark, that people die ignoring basic shit like this. I was going to get the boots dried, and we were climbing tomorrow.

Back at camp, I took out the wet liners and began stuffing my boots with extra clothing, the T-shirt that I'd worn hiking in, almost all the toilet paper that I'd brought with me. I put the whole mess near the feeble heat of the cook stove and prayed that everything would work out exactly the way it was supposed to.

The thing was that it worked--mostly. After we'd eaten dinner and I'd spent two hours desperately replacing clothes and toilet paper, I ran my finger along the inside of the boots and liners, into their toes. Everything felt pretty dry, maybe a little moisture left over, but no big deal right? Obviously, there was no chance that I'd try to rationalize my way into thinking that I'd fixed something that was still bad.

Honza however, still felt dampness and told me that I was almost guaranteed to get frostbitten If I were stupid enough to try the mountain the next morning. It was far from what I wanted to hear, but I went with it. I decided that we could delay the hike a day and give the boots some more time to dry in the sun. Unfortunately, we couldn't start the hike in the afternoon because, during the heat of the day, the ice softens and starts to build up on crampons in addition to becoming unreliable and unsafe. We would simply have to move the entire plan up 24 hours and begin our night climb at 1:00 the next morning.

Despite being pissed at myself and the circumstances, I began to try to make the best of it in my mind. This was not one of those situations where, we had a narrow window in between storms or other unfavorable conditions. The Andean weather was guaranteed to be sunny and beautiful until the end of the dry winter season. Meanwhile, Honza and I could practice some more technique the next day.

Perhaps I was just as inexperienced as my American predecessor that had fallen into the crevasse. Still, I was glad that my misstep had resulted in only a lost day, and that we weren't going to let it become something far worse.