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Published: November 18th 2010
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Huayna Potosi- 6088m for breakfast
When i arrived in LaPaz, i flicked through the many, many tour brochures in the hostel and one in particular caught my eye. There was a ridiculously cheap three-day guided trek which took you up Huayna Potosi, a 6088m mountain visible off in the distance from the hostel bar. I had a few days to think about it, and the information on the brochure seemed pretty straightforward, so i went ahead and booked the trek for the day after our death road ride.
The first morning i met up with Freddy, a young Englishman who was to be my similarly inexperienced climbing
companion, and our guide Mario (a really great mountaineer, who unfortunately spoke no english despite the assurances of the booking agency... Bolivia is a bit like that). The first day involved driving to base camp (about 4700m), and then hiking up to the lower glacier on the mountain for traiing in the use of icepicks and clampons to scale ice walls... at this point i began to feel somewhat out of my depth, but had a fantastic time scrabbling my way up ice walls. That night i became
On the way to high camp
(i'm under the red pack on the left) rather unfortunately struck down with a cold and got almost no sleep. Despite having spend over a week at this kind of altitude, i think the cold really messed things up and i basically woke up gasping every ten minutes or so for the entire night and felt quite unwell in the GIT department.
The following morning involved carrying our packs (really damn heavy once the ice climbing gear got added on) up over crappy loose rock and gravel to get to high camp (5100m). I achieved this in my fairly seedy state through liberal use of panadol, neurofen, twix bars, strong coffee, even stronger coca tea, and massive quantities of water. The whole climb only took about three hours without breaks, but it was massively difficult at altitude and with the huge packs and an increasingly steep path which eventually necessitated climbing with hands and feet to make the final 200m or so.
High camp was a small wooden building with a few mattresses and walls covered with graffiti from climbers who were either gloating about how successful they were or felling sorry for not making it, but the general
concensus was that it was one of the most difficult things people attempt. This was not mentioned in the brochure. I was not at all well that evening, but will spare my parents the grim details...
The summit attempt involves rising at 1am because the ice near the top becomes less stable once the sun starts to melt it. There were about eight of us in total at high camp, with our respective guides, and we snapped on our helmets (one group weren’t given helmets?.. Bolivia), boots, crampons, ice picks, and headlamps and set off. I’d borrowed a couple of altitude sickness tablets from Freddy and was feeling ok but running on adrenaline. Long story short, about five hours of scrambling, climbing, jumping over a couple of chasms, and much panting later, we all reached the summit. The view was amazing, as was the sense of achievement, but it was kind of sullied by the prospect of having to descend the entire mountain afterward. I only took two photos at the top because the camera batteries froze and i had to warm them by hand for each individual photo and really wasn’t
Roughly 2am
Not feeling well in the mood. The sun started to come up and Freddy and i figured we should descend ASAP so we could rest a bit at high camp before making the rest of the descent. We motored down in about two hours, falling repeatedly as the ice became less grippy for our boot spikes. No harm done other than a bruised tailbone.
The descent sucked. Everyone was sick and exhausted. Even the hardcore Canadian mountaineer guy who’d joined us at high camp looked like death. The ride home also sucked and seemed a million times more bumpy and long given the exhaustion and sore tailbone.
In summary: Most physically demanding thing i’ve done so far. Not at all a pleasent experience, but massively glad i did it in retrospect.
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