Climbing mountains truly is addictive. I know I had promised to leave the mountains behind after Pisco... But look, there were a couple factors that had me change my mind. The weather is perfect and stable now, I am fit and acclimatized, I am here now, the mountains are just out there, I had to watch them all the time (literally from the pillow of my hotel room!), and last but not least I had met Andy, a great guy from Sheffield who turned out to have similar interests... You see, I really had to go and climb one more!
So we decided to combine a short three-day course on mountaineering, glacier travel, and rescue with a summit climb. We ended up going with William, my guide from the Pisco climb, who turned out to be a great teacher, too.
William certainly knows his stuff. He would spot us putting the carbine the wrong way from more than four meters away and would meticulously and patiently correct all of our numerous mistakes making knots and setting up the rescue systems... But let me start at the beginning.
So four days in total, besides Andy and me - William, of course, and his father, Pedro, who would take care of the camp in our absence, cook, and help ferrying the loads. It was actually impressive to see this fit 58-year old fellow carrying a heavy pack swiftly across the steep and ugly trail up to the moraine camp at 4900m. If I would be able to do this at his age, I would feel very fortunate! Speaking of the "trail" - this was actually the ugliest part of the whole trip, partly scrambling up steep rock slabs and slippery mud patches. Not overly bad, but with a 35kg backpack certainly not a walk in the park.
The three nights in the moraine camp turned out to be somewhat rough for me, it got very cold immediately after the sun disappeared and I had trouble sleeping the first two nights. The fact that I also got diarrhea was an unpleasant addition to the discomfort. Honestly, a little bit of loose stool would probably not bother me much at low altitude - at high altitude, though, it is severely debilitating. On the third day around lunch time I had to quit the course and go back to camp to spend the afternoon dozing in my tent in order to gather enough strength for the summit day. This, my self-prescribed diet of only a few biscuits and copious amounts of tea for lunch and dinner, and some Loperamide two friendly American climbers gave me were probably responsible I actually made it to the summit.
Life at the high camp turned out to be much more demanding than usual trekking. The wear and tear on my body and equipment in these four days was significantly more severe than during the twelve days in the Huayhuash. At some stage you do not care anymore about small bruises, dust, and dirt. And the fact that you are wearing the same cloths for four days, day and night, does not even come to your mind anymore as you have more severe things to worry about.
For the course we went from the moraine camp up to the glacier at 5000m to practice the proper set-up of anchors, knots, rescue hoisting systems, ice-climbing, placement of ice-screws, etc. William not only turned out to be a very patient teacher, he really surprised us by his ability to spot the tiniest flaws in our technique even from far away. Well, if you want to survive mountaineering for a longer time, I guess you have to be extremely serious and accurate always. Unfortunately I could not really enjoy the lessons fully since I already felt somewhat weak after the first day.
On the summit day we got up at 2 am, had some breakfast - a cup of hot water for me - and set out at about quarter to three. William set a very good and steady pace and although I was pretty much at my limit, we reached the summit at about 7.15 am, shortly after the sun had risen. I did not really enjoy the walk up due to my weakness and the cold, but on the summit I did warm up and the three of us spent a great three quarters of an hour doing silly things and snapping lots of pictures. Andy turned out to be a very keen photographer and he kindly allowed me to show some of his pictures on this site. Have a look
here. The photograph of this blog entry is by him as well.
On the way down the glacier we could see what a spectacular landscape we had missed on the way up. This included a few gaping crevasse holes right next to the trail we had come up, maybe good we did not see them before... We also met the two Americans who had helped me out with the medicine. They were carrying their skis up to the summit to ski down the mountain! Possible, but given the heavily crevassed glacier not without danger.
After arriving in the camp, I took a quick nap in my tent. Then, we had to pack in everything and hike down the trail towards the access road. We were surprised ourselves how we had managed to climb up this gruesome path with our heavy backpacks the first day... At one spot William even secured us with the rope when we had to go down a rock slab.
Once back to Huaraz at about 3 pm, I really enjoyed the hot shower!!! It did feel highly deserved. And the first night of nine hours solid sleep in a real bed were truly heaven.
You can find my pictures of the trip
here.
