Mark, Amy and I had met our guide, Richard, the day before on a day's ice climbing excursion to the Pastoruri Glacier. We chose to do this because none of us had worn mountaineering boots and crampons, or used an ice axe before. Similar to your first day on skis, the feel of boots of this type is very awkward to the uninitiated. And as it went, climbing the 20-25m glacier wall was a good craic too.
Richard had brought a lot of gear. Unlike the Santa Cruz trek a week earlier, there were no donkeys planned to help haul this gear to Base Camp. Mark had suffered food poisoning the night before departure, which on the back of the day of ice climbing left him feeling a little fragile. I had eaten very little in the five days prior due to my illness and was definitely below full strength, while Amy generally feels the exertions of hikes in this area due to the altitude. So when we got out of the car at the trailhead, the first things Richard said was, "My proposition is that we hire a donkey to carry the technical equipment". As an investment in our health, we voted unanimously in favour of this proposal.
All the same, the hike to Base Camp was tough. From the start at Cebollapampa (3,900m) to Base Camp (4,550m) was a steep and twisty track with loose stone over a mobile dusty base for the entire length of the trail. This took us four hours of hiking. After a small lunch, we set up our tents and I went to sleep for few hours in an attempt to gain some strength for the days to come. After dinner we were all in bed by about 8:00pm.
We left Base Camp late at 10:00am for the hike up the nearby ridge, down and across the moraine and up again to Moraine Camp. We had to take our personal equipment and some food with us, but this time without the donkey, so our packs were heavier than the walk to Base Camp. The first ridge was extremely steep and we stopped frequently to catch our breath. Fortunately it was also reasonably short and we completed the pitch in about 45 minutes. From the vantage point at the top we looked out at the post-glacial wreckage of the moraine. It resembled a cross between a hapahzardly placed overburden dump and the moon. It, like the previous day's trail, was extremely mobile: rock fall was very common and could occur with a stronger-than-usual gust of the wind. Large granite boulders moved underfoot frequently and parts of the trail, which would have been extremely difficult to follow if not for Richard, fell away underfoot. At one point I said to Mark, "If an earthquake happened now, we'd all be killed".
After crossing the moraine and climbing the ridge we were rewarded with the sight of a large green lake at the base of the Pisco glacier. A good place to stop and have some water. From there it was only a short hike up another mobile spine-like ridge to Moraine Camp (4,880m). This camp was set in a natural drainage area for Pisco's glacier. Again, any earth tremors would have caused a million tonnes of granite boulders to come crashing down on us. A big dump of rain would have washed us all away. There were another nine climbers at Moraine Camp in addition to our party. All were planning to attempt the summit the following morning. We hung out in the sun for the afternoon, checking our equipment and wondering what the climb would bring.
We rose at midnight and left at 12:50am, the first party to leave. Richard guessed that we would take five hours to reach the summit, which would have us arriving on the top at sunrise. We had a breakfast of coca tea only and set out along the smooth granite protrusions below the glacier using headtorches to light to way. The moon had risen and was bright, but it had passed being full and didn't offer enough light to allow us to hike without extra lighting.
We reached the bottom of the glacier in a half hour and waited while Richard prepared the rope. We attached our crampons to our boots and affixed carabiners to our harnesses. Richard then tied us all together at eight meter spacings along the rope. Richard was first, then Amy, then me and Mark was at the end. Everyone had an ice axe which could be used either as a walking stick upside down in the ice (the pick end in your hand) or as an aid if you fell or had to cut a foot hold out of the ice and snow. Because we were climbing in the night, the snow was very crisp and had a heavy ice crust. A skiier or snowboarder would find such snow conditions unpleasant, but for mountain climbers using crampons it provided sure footing.
The first climb was a wall of ice and snow which sat at I would guess a 70 degree angle. Due to the numbers of climbers using the route, there were plenty of footholds to use. And that was a very good thing because no sooner had Amy started to climb the wall than her right crampon fell off. At maybe five metres above the rocks below she panicked. I climbed up and cut a bigger foothold for her and we ultimately had to take both crampons off and change them over as the crampons were on the wrong feet (it is difficult to distinguish with those crampons which was the left and which was the right side, especially under the light of a torch at 1:30am at 5,000m in zero degrees celcius). Then we hiked up and cross rolling snow fields in the dark with huge hollows and formations appearing to the left and right at random. I became very cold and the toes of my left foot began to stick together. I have read enough accounts of mountaineers who have suffered frostbite to begin to worry about losing a digit in the cold myself. In particular, Michael Groom in his book 'Sheer will' told his story of losing all toes on both feet after spending a night on the flank of Kangchenjunga in the mid-80's. Groom's tale was top-of-mind right then and there. I was unlikely to come to that sort of injury, but I did not want to ignore what could be a sign of frostbite. Richard ensured me that this feeling is normal, and not to worry. Still worrying, we continued on.
Mark became tired more quickly than I expected. He told us later that we had not slept at all due to a stabbing feeling in his chest when he tried to breathe. An asthmatic in his youth, we later theorised that the thin and cold mountain air at 4,880m played havoc with his breathing.
The darkness was bearing down on my morale. While the moonlight lit in ghostly contrasts the black rock against the white snow on peaks all around us, we hiked more or less continuously for three hours and there was little to see except the trail in front of you. We were walking up very steep hills of ice, so steep that you had to turn your shoulder to face the trail and walk in a crab-motion using the ice axe to lean into the slope. At 4:06am, I felt defeated: There would be no sunlight for another two hours and I had no idea how far we had come or how far there was to go. I hoped desperately for sun, for the red glow in the sky. And we were getting higher and higher. Richard told us that we had climbed to 5,400m.
Amy began to lean on her ice axe and dry retch into the night. A strong wind was blowing on us from our right. It blew up the near-vertical ridge and over onto where we walked. I yelled to her, suspecting altitude sickness, "Are you sick?" "I'm cold and hungry", she replied. We walked some more and she continued to dry retch. Then, we stopped and I walked behind her to hug warmth into her and form a shield against the wind and I felt her shaking uncontrollably from the cold. Mark selflessly offered his wind breaker and after asking her a couple of times if she wanted to turn back, getting no sensible response, I made the decision to turn back. We had reached 5,500m by 4:33am but had a further one and a half hours to reach the summit. The wind was howling and I later guessed that the ambient air temperature was -2 degrees with maybe a further -10 degrees of wind chill. To illustrate this, I discovered after we had descended that my metal water bottle which was inside my backpack was near to frozen solid.
So we turned around, with Mark now in the lead and he had taken only 10 steps when his crampon broke in half. We could not fix it, and we were still in the wind with Amy squatting on her heels hugging her knees trying to stay warm and shaking, so Mark and I swapped positions in the line and I took the lead and we moved as quickly as we could to escape the punishing wind. By this time I too was very cold. I had lost all feeling up to the ankle in my right foot and the feeling in the front half of my left foot was also totally lost to me. At last we escaped the wind and Amy began to warm up.
Mark was making tough ground back down with only one crampon. Those same steep hills we ascended in a crab walk were descended in a similar fashion, which is made doubly difficult with only one boot to grip the ice and snow, and for a guy who hadn't slept. Finally though, the sun began to glow in the sky. It was difficult to perceive initially, but as we made further progress down the mountain, so too did the sun make progress into the sky. The multitude of peaks around us began to look like a still life, painted onto the canvas of the sky. They were Kerouac's 'patient Buddhas lookin at us saying nothin'. It was awesome.
We passed all the other climbers on the way down. Mostly they had started at a touch after 3:00am and would reach the summit in full sun at 7:00 or 7:30am. We made it back to Moraine Camp at about 7:00am and got straight into our sleeping bags to warm up. Mark had his first sleep of the day and having been so cold, Amy and I got some needed rest and warmth into ourselves. It is hard work for the body to stay warm in conditions like those we had just encountered.
We had a small meal of chicken noodle soup and packed up camp. We agreed to hike all the way back to the trailhead at Cebollapampa and take a car back to Huaraz via Yungay. We walked back down and across the moraine, that dense cluster of unstable granite boulders and all the way along the dusty trails to the road, a total descent from the mountain heights reached in darkness of 1,600 vertical metres. When we reached the road, we had walked for 11 hours.
We took one car to the town of Yungay. This particular town was completely buried by a 7.2 earthquake in 1970, killing all 18,000 inhabitants (remember my comment in the moraine). We were supposed to take a collectivo back to Huaraz, but that kind of transport is punishing, and we didn't need more punishment, so we paid extra for a private car for the hour long journey. Mark, Amy and I met up for a well-earned meal and beer and discussed what had been a great adventure. I certainly had developed a healthy respect for the mountains, far greater than I had before.
The ascent I have described happened yesterday, Wednesday 6 June 2007. Egoists may say that we failed to climb the mountain. We say that we merely did not make it to the summit of a mountain, having climbed a long way. We learned a lot about ourselves and the Andes. I believe that our greatest learning and experience was in our unity and selflessness. The egoist may have made the summit, but to do so would have endangered the life of one of more in our party (who can say if anyone would have made the summit?). In our unity and selflessness, we shared an amazing experience.
Today my legs are sore and we are leaving Huaraz tomorrow night for the beach and some sandboarding in Ica. After a little more than two weeks here, it has been quite a time.
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