From Bolivia, May 27, 2002
(The post below is from a group email I sent to my friends and family while traveling years ago. I include it in this blog as an archive to my travels. It remains in the the raw state that I originally sent it, foolishness of younger years intact, typos and sics untouched.)
Huayna Potosi. 6088 meters. i`m still not quite sure what compelled me to climb to the top of it. it was gilad`s idea. at the time it sounded good. so we found a guide, rented the necessary equipment and set off thursday morning in a taxi cab an hour out of la paz to the base of this snow covered peak.
three hours of hiking up and aroundrocky mounds created by this brown glacier ominiously looking over us. we make base camp. not much of a camp, just the leeward side of a rocky hill where someone had vaguely arranged the flat stones well enough to pitch a tent on. so we did. and cooked dinner. no campfire stories for us though, nope, we would go to sleep at the bitter coldness (at least -5 C) of nightfall. why you say? so we could get up at midnight and started climbing of course!
i don`t know how they convinced me to do this nor, do i believe i was actually convinced to get out of my warm sleeping bag, but we did. gearing up... the long underwear, the snowpants, the fleeces, the windbreakers, multiple socks, hard plastic climbing boots, crampons, hats, mittens, headlamps, harnesses, climbing ropes, and ice axes. at least we felt tough with all this gear. until we started hiking...
let me tell you how thin the air is. you get out of breath just trying to lace your boots with your frozen hands. altitude sickness is a serious concern here. and life threatening too as i had read from arik`s paranoia striking information his sister, a med student, had just emailed him. i tried not to think of it.
so we set off over the permanent snow cover under a nearly full moon. luckily we had the light of the moon and a guide that had done this at least a few times, as the batteries in our headlamps were soon too frozen to function. it was absolutely stunning too!
roped in to each other and the guide we looked like a pack of mules huffing it to the market. each step brought us about 20 centimeters closer to the summit and indescribably out of breath, and our guide rarely let us stop; any time we would it was just more painfull and discouraging to started up again.
we rounded beautiful glacial formations, and mysterious icy holes that led down somewhere you could even imagine. the twinkling lights of el alto, a suburb above la paz, stood out like a twinkling diamond bracelet. i saw four shooting stars. we then headed into a moonshadow, where there was no light on the snow. i started seeing shooting stars on the surface of the snow. not sure if hallucinations are a symptom of altitude sickness, but i knew everything couldn`t be alright doing what i was doing.
finally at quarter to five we reach the final stretch before the summit. unfortunately it is a wall of ice 250 meters high and just a couple degrees off of being dead vertical. our guide goes first and we follow hammering our axes into the ice, kicking our cramponed toes into the wall for grip, pulling and pushing our weight up the wall, minding the ropes and the bits of ice falling from above.
after the longest hour of our lives, we make it to the summit for sunrise. toes and hands absolutely frozen, completely out of breath we made it! the summit has a surface area of about 25 square meters with sheer drops in every direction. i`ll stay seated thank you very much. but the sun comes and with it all its amazing colors. we see the city by light, the course we just traversed, lake titicaca in the distance and banks of clouds blanketing the yungas. 6088 meters, by far the highest i`ve been on land.
yeah, i suppose it was worth it. but it hurt. a lot. got a headache at the summit which i didn`t kick until we were well back into the comforts of la paz. altitude sickness hit us all. and the return was remarkable. to see all we had just endured just a few hours ago in the daylight felt like i had just lived two lives. all up we hiked/climbed 14 of the previous 24 hours.
don`t know why i do this to myself. and i pay good, hard earned money for it too.
siempre loco,
j
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