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.