Climbing Yanapaccha

Me at the summit

We got into our sleeping bags around seven at night with my cellphone alarm set for one o'clock the following morning. What sleep I had was fitful. My heart pounded away and the headache from the night before made a comeback, though it was a bit less severe than it had been the last time. Maybe the extra day had been for the better because it had allowed me some more time to acclimatize.

As it happened, the alarm failed to go off. Fortunately I randomly woke up about a half hour later and then got Honza into action. The delay was not a really big deal, but it did mean we had to hurry a bit with breakfast. I spilled some oatmeal down my throat and sloshed back a cup of tea.

After the meal, we gathered up our crampons, axes, ropes and harnesses, put on small daypacks with warm jackets and water and began our walk to the glacier. The blue beams of our headlamps danced over the rocks as we wound through the moraine.

We stopped at the glacier's edge so that we could put our crampons on and rope ourselves together. All of preparation took time, and I felt my hands getting cold as I fidgeted with the rope and harness. I was glad when we started moving again.

We were would not be going up alone today. There were two other climbers going up the mountain, a Spanish guy and his Peruvian guide whose headlamps came up behind us as we began our ascent. They were setting up right near where I had stepped in the water, so Honza warned them not to repeat my mistake.

It was weird and unnerving to walk on the glacier in the dark. I was in an unfamiliar environment, knowable only by what I could see by the moonlight and my headlamp beam. The ground itself, one of the few things that we can usually rely on in life, had become an uncertainty. The crampons made stepping feel unnatural. They weighted my feet and required a funky stride to make the spikes would land properly. Being roped to Honza created an additional awkwardness as I had to match his pace exactly, no faster or slower. If I fell behind, I would be yanked, which threw me off balance, if I started to climb faster, there would be more slack between us, which would mean more danger if I ended up falling. Another frustration, was that I had to try not to step on the rope. When I did, it would get caught in my crampon spikes and throw me off balance.

By necessity, our path up the glacier took an erratic and unpredictable route as we swung around the huge crevasses in the ice. There were also smaller cracks that were about a three feet foot or less in width. These we would jump, counting on our spikes to hold the ice on the other side. I let my headlamp shine down into some of these cracks, but it didn't have the power to illuminate to the bottom--not even close.

I imagined what it would have been like if I had gone up unguided and unroped, without being aware of the subtle path I needed to take around the mountain's dangers. It would not necessarily have been suicide, but it wouldn't have been far off.

The ascent by headlamp

The slope became a steady uphill pitch. I didn't need my ice ax yet, but I had to lean forward and kick the tow spikes of the crampons into the ice. We walked a zigzag traverse in order to cut down on some of the steepness. All this time, I kept my head looking down, watching for bumps and cracks. The surface was uneven, broken into ridges. Lifting the awkward spaceman boots was hard work and got my heart and lungs working fast. Soon, I was very warm, and had to unzip my jacket before I got soaked with sweat.

About forty five minutes into our hike, we came to a much steeper section, that required me to use my ice-axes to keep going up. I could see the ice-plain in the moonlight, stretching out far below. It was not a good place to fall.

Honza put an ice screw in as an added security measure. As I went by, I had to unclip it from the rope and put it on my caribener, cold work that required removing my mittens.

Another section required two screws, which we would leave so that we could use them on the descent. This part wound through the bottom of a shallow crevasse and then ascended up the other side.

The ice here was far less sturdy than what we had dealt with before. I swung my axes wildly, to find any kind of solid surface. There was a second, massive crack that started over my head, with large hanging icicles. I whacked a few with my axe and listened as they fell, crashing and tinkling into the dark space below.

During the midst of the ascent, I realized that I had screwed something up with my crampon because it had come loose. Fortunately, I noticed the problem before it slid off my boot, otherwise it would have gone skidding down the glacier and been lost forever in some crevasse. Then I would have been really screwed.

I stopped the climb and did what I could to get it back in the proper alignment. I had to take my mittens off to fool with the scraps, felt myself getting chilled now that I wasn't moving. The fear of the cold meant that I rushed through it, and after another couple of minutes of ascent, it came loose again. I knew what I had done wrong, but Honza wasn't going to give me the chance to screw it up again and fixed it himself. To him of course, this was unforgivable incompetence.

I was relieved when we got through the most technical part of the climb, which gave way to a steep ascent up a dome of ridged and spiky ice. The ridges were about six inches tall, which made stepping in the crampons even more awkward. There were a proliferation of cracks as well, requiring me to break stride several times and take the leap of faith. For this part of the climb, I used my ice axes as short walking sticks, leaning over them in gimpy faction so I could use the points on their bottoms to get more traction. We kept the pace hard and steady all this time, keeping me breathing hard, fighting the fatigue building in my muscles.

At last, I began to see the dim light of morning begin to define the surrounding peaks, gray at first and then a burning orange as the rays of tropical sunlight hit their snows. After hours of looking at the ice in front of me, it gave me a boost to have something to see and appreciate. The extraordinary majesty I was witnessing, made some of the stress of the last couple of days subside.

We came to the top of a sharp, white ridge where we went out of the shelter of the mountain, and into a cold wind. The top stood in front of us, perhaps another half a mile distant and five-hundred feet up. The ridge followed a graceful s-curve and then hit the final pitch to the summit.

I endured another twenty minutes of low-oxygen cardio up the crenulated ice-surface and then we were at the summit. The sun, which had already painted the higher peaks, hit the top of Yanapaccha at the exact moment that we arrived.

Myself and Honza at the Summit

Morning light on the mountain peaks

Why I didn't want to stand on the edge

Huascaran, as seen from Yanapaccha

Yanapaccha's summit stands at 17,910 feet above sea-level. I'd really prefer to round that figure up to 18,000, but what can you do? Should've climbed Pisco. It was a bit vain to bitch about such things at that moment. After the exertions of the last six hours, this mountain felt worthy of being the highest that I'd ever climbed.

The Spanish and Peruvian guy had passed us earlier, but ended up just beating us to the summit. We exchanged pictures, and sat on the lip of snow for a while. Being a steep, crumbly ridge with a massive cliff on the other side, this was not very healthy place to stand, certainly not on a windy day. It was far safer to sit, even if the ice underneath our butts was actually dangling over a great abyss.

We didn't spend more than ten minutes at the top for fear of getting chilled. Other than the view and the sense of accomplishment, summit highlights included sinking my molars into a frozen power bar, which gave me some nourishment for the descent.

Descending from the summit

Ridge near the top. The actual summit is further back.

Negotiating some crevasses

I had worried earlier that the way down would be much harder than the way up during technical sections. In fact, having the illumination of the sun and not having to bust a gut working my way up made things a lot easier. I still had a few hairy moments, including when I failed to put my crampons down properly, fell and slid along the ice. Luckily, I caught myself with the axes before I went very far down the slope.

When we got back to the section where we had left two ice-screws, Honza flipped out because I ended up taking a different route from his on the descent. I had watched him descend, but lost track of his his footsteps when I was actually looking at the ice in front of me. I had wanted to get the descent right, so I asked him which way I should go.

"Down! Down! Down!"

Sounds obvious right? Not while I was hanging onto a crumbly ice wall with axes and crampons. I didn't want to fuck up here, I wanted specifics.

"Yeah, which way am I supposed to fucking go down?"

Fine, don't answer. Down, it's fucking down. I guess it didn't really matter which way, there was no preferred way to go down here except as it pertained to the force of gravity.

"You're not respecting me" he told me afterwards. "I don't like it." When I tried to explain the difference between not understanding and not respecting, he only got more pissed. Now, I just shrugged my shoulders, because I didn't really give a fuck what he thought of me. I had tried to watch, I tried to learn, but apparently my difficulties were the result of willful ignorance. And now I was ready to get off the damn mountain and be through with this shit.

After some more down-climbing with the ice axes, we reached the flatter section of the glacial field and had to negotiate our way back through the treacherous crevasses. Because the daylight made them visible, these chasms no longer held the terror of the unknown, but the known was still pretty damn scary. From, cracks the size of credit cards to fifteen foot wide canyons, most of the drops seemed to go down about fifty feet. I snapped a few photos so that everyone could be duly impressed. At one point we ended up walking on a narrow ice ridge between two of these gulfs and ended with having to heave myself over an ice ledge.

At last we got back to the rocks. Honza shook my hand and congratulated me for the climb. I thanked him and we shared a couple platitudes about how difficult the climb had been. We were probably both kind of pissed at each other, but now that we were off the ice some of the tension had eased between us. No one was going cuss the other one out, partly because we had many hours of travel ahead of us. Maybe when we got to the hostel--but I would probably be out of energy by then. It was nine in the morning; even with the late start, we had made it down three hours ahead of what Honza had predicted for us earlier.

A rather large hole in the glacier. I added my ice axe to lend a sense of depth

Honza by a crevasse

One last crevasse to cross. Note that in the background, there

is a hugeass boulder, sitting on top of a slab of ice.

We had some sandwiches at camp and then packed up our gear. It was a huge relief to take off the clunky plastic boots, which made my leather ones felt as light as slippers by comparison. Then I put on the full pack, and it was back to clomping. The trail back to the road was tricky going because of the loose sand and slippery grass beneath, so there were still plenty of chances to take a nice fall. As it happened, at different points along the hike, we both did. By noontime, we were had reached the road. The hiking had ended, but the day's adventures were far from over.

When you hike in New England, getting to the road means you are free to turn up the AC, crank out the tunes and drive home in relaxation along the comfort of the American interstate system. Here however, reaching the road meant hours in a bumpy collectivo ride down the mountains on terrible roads . The van had no seatbelts and came with a worse suspension than your osteoarthritic grandmother. The driver hit a few bumps so hard that I smacked my head against the ceiling.

After we had left the park, the main road was blocked, compelling the driver to take us on an even-worse detour that was practically a dirt track. Whenever another vehicle appeared from the other direction, there was a game of chicken to decide who would like to back up several hundred feet to a wide enough place for the vehicles to pass.

At Yungay, Honza and I ate a dingy place where we got some cheap eats. We had about another hour of riding to get back into Huarez, packed together with locals inside another collectivo.

I dropped my gear at the hostel and went my separate way to get a pizza dinner at a Chifa. Go figure. The food was pretty good though, and I felt like my ten soles were well spent.

My reflections on the evening were that I had gotten what I had wanted and it was over. Time to go home.

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.

Let's Climb a Mountain!

It was around six in the morning when the bus pulled into Huarez. I got a taxi to Joe's Place, a hostel that the guidebook said was a popular haunt for experienced climbers and guides. I figured that it would be a good spot for me to pick up advice about which mountains in the Cordillera Blanca were good, what kind of challenges I could expect, and information as to where I could pick up a reliable guide. While I did not have much experience climbing on ice, I also didn't want to do a mountain that was too easy. The mountain I was looking for definitely had to require crampons and ice-axes, and had to be something that most people wouldn't be able to do. I didn't want to come home to America and ask myself, "What if."

Joe's Place had multistory dormitories and a courtyard for tenters. The outside staircases and patios it the feeling of a large treehouse. Joe's wife Vicki put me in one of the bunk rooms. Inside, a dreadlocked fellow wearing glasses was already up and moving about. His name was Honza, yet another one of those permanent European wanderers, he was born in the Czech Republic and been everywhere from Japan to Canada and Ireland. He had spent six months in the last country as a guest worker in Oughterard, County Galway. This was only twenty miles from where I had spent my term abroad two years before, and I had even stopped in that town to go off hiking in the mountains of Connemarra.

More relevant to my current mission, he had lived at Joe's Place since April and since then had done nothing but climb mountains in the Cordillera Blanca. In addition to climbing dozens of local mountains that were above 5,000 and 6,000 meters, he had climbed Huascaron, the tallest mountain in Peru which stands at 6,768 meters or 22,205 feet. Honza showed me pictures from his latest exploits on the hostel computer.

Pisco, which he had been up a month ago, was one of the most popular mountains for inexperienced climbers as it required few technical skills. "A hike on crampons," he said dismissively. Despite Honza's disdain, the pictures of the ascent up the glacier and the shots of the surrounding Andes at the summit were striking and looked more wild than any mountain I had climbed. Then he showed me the pictures of Yanapaccha, a shorter mountain, but one that he had more respect for because it required technical climbing: crampons, ropes and ice-axes to get up the face of the glacier. He had guided a couple there a week before and considered it a worthy challenge. I still wanted to consider a few other mountains and look at the guides in town, but I asked if he would be available to guide if I chose to go up it. He told me he would be willing to go back and guide me up the mountain if I paid for his services. It was a steep price, but he said that I could save some money if I found a partner who was interested in climbing with me and would split costs. Meanwhile, I would go into town and check out some of the other tour options.

Huarez is a pleasant enough city; it resembles Cuzco in that it is approximately the same elevation and also fosters a good amount of tourism. Several alabaster peaks rear up around the town in all their jagged splendor.

The breed of tourist that comes to Huarez is slightly different than the Cuzco variety in that he is more likely to be someone interested in serious climbing and trekking. Thus, the area around the main street and the Plaza de Armas is clustered with guiding and equipment rental agencies that supply foreigners with the resources they need to claim an Andean summit. Treks offer an option for those who are interested in putzing around high altitude trails with heavy backpacks or mules.

I walked around to a couple of tour agencies to see if I could join any planned expeditions. Many of these went up to Pisco or to Vallunaraju which is an even easier peak. I was nervous that the climbs I was finding were not supposed to go until a few days in advance, cutting into the amount of time that I'd have to get back to Lima. I had a bordering-on-irrational fear of missing my flight. Because mountain climbs were unpredictable variables, I didn't want to push my luck with getting home.

After wandering a while amongst the various agencies and randomly asking climbers I saw on the street if they wanted to join an expedition, I began to think about taking Honza's offer and whether I was willing to do this as just the two of us. If anything this would cut down on the risk of screwups--if somebody else went who didn't have experience, he might not be up to it, forcing us to bail on the expedition, and losing me an opportunity to climb. On the other hand, most of the climbers in town were more experienced than I was, so it was far more likely that I would be the weak link.

Back at the hostel, I ended up to talking to Eric, a South African who, like Honza, had done a lot of climbing in the area. He was another Pisco hater.

"Its just a walk, not a climb" he told me and was more enthusiastic when I told him I was thinking about Yanapaccha.

"You'll just feel better when you get to the top, knowing that you climbed something real." He agreed that it would be challenging, but thought that I could do it.

At this point, I had figured that I could afford the time it would take to do an expedition up Pisco or Vallunaraju. Moreover, it would have been far cheaper to do it with group rates. But dammit, I did want a real mountain. I wanted to step outside my comfort zone. Sure my experience with ice axes and crampons was slight and experience using ropes and harnesses close to nill. Truthfully, I didn't exactly relish great heights. But then, I was able to function when I went up and down the broken ladder near Machu Picchu. Maybe a little fear was allowed. The serious possibility of failure was necessary for success to mean something.

With these high minded values bouncing around my brain, I went over to the computer room where Honza was working and told him that I could pay him and that we would do it tomorrow.

Motivation seminar cheese aside, there was a lot of basic preparation to do and I had started late. It was about six at night. I would make some pasta and lentils for myself to eat and then Honza and I could get food supplies in town and also rent the stuff that I needed to make a climb.

We set out for a gear rental place in town where I got some of the the badass mountain climbing stuff that I needed. This included crampons to dig into the ice, hard and heavy plastic boots with insulation, twin ice axes, waterproof pants as well as gaiters to keep ice and snow out of the boots. I also got a sleeping bag and mat. Honza already had a tent we could use, so we were fine there. Back at the hostel, Honza loaned me his climbing harness, gloves and thermal underwear. I was already had the rest of the clothes that I needed such as my heavy mittens, parka, fleeces and tech shirts.

We brought food for three to four days, though if things went according to our ideal plan, we would be able to finish in two. With the food included on top of everything else, we had amassed ourselves a heavy payload we would have to haul into camp. I spent a good part of the night wrestling all the necessary crap into my rucksack and tying it together. All together, it probably came to close to forty pounds.

According to plans, we would leave around midmorning, get to the trailhead around noon and then take a two hour hike to the base of the mountain. After practicing some climbing technique on the glacier, we would get to sleep early and set an alarm to wake us up at 1:00am to hike the mountain by headlamp. We would be able to summit by early morning and get back to camp by noon. If all went as planned.