World Tour of the Ice King

We had both been looking forward to doing some more trekking for a while. We were also dying to try ice climbing ever since we missed the chance while we were in Patagonia. So we made our way to Huaraz, the mountaineering capital of Peru (some would say of South America).

Huaraz is a functional little town in the heart of the Peruvian Andes. It sits at 3091m in the Cordillera Blanca range which contains 50 peaks over 5700m! Huascaran, Peru´s highest mountain at 6768m is just down the road…..

The area around Huaraz has a dramatic and heartbreaking history. It was here on May 31st 1970 that the worst natural disaster in Peruvian history took place. A huge earthquake (7.7 on richter scale) devasted central Peru, killing 70,000 people. Huaraz was flattened, with half the 30,000 population lost. Just up the valley, a huge wall of ice, snow, rocks and water dislodged by the earthquake and travelling at 300kmh buried the town of Yungay and it´s 18,000 inhabitants.

It is sobering to be in a place where the power of nature is so obvious and real.

We decided to try ice climbing first and headed up to the Glacier Pastoruri with new friends Matt and Rebecca from Oxford and our excellent guide Ruben (from Galaxia Expeditions). Poor Ruben spent the day hanging on to our safety ropes as the four of us sped our way up a 30m sheer face of ice.

Ice climbing is brilliant fun and we all took to it like naturals - as you can see from the pics…. ;-). It was very tiring and much more difficult than we had imagined, but a brilliant experience.

Wendy and I realised that Huaraz is a great place for adventuring, so we decided to stay a while and do some more hiking and climbing. See the next blog for more…..

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