Moutain Climb

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I havn´t really posted much this trip becuase it has been hard to find a computer that will upload pictures in a resonable amount of time. So I am just writing to remember everything I have done really, then put the pictures up when I can. So today we have done pretty much nothing. Not really by choice, but by force. It all started with the great analogy "...It´s like jumping off a high dive, you can´t just sit at the top thinking about jumping, you have to just jump." So we jumped. We woke up to catch a I´ve-seen-worse-bus to the base camp of Huyani Potosí, a 6,088 meter moutain (almost 20,000 feet) we stop and had a little to eat and then made a 2-3 hour hike to High Camp at 5,130 meters or so to sleep for a couple hours until midnight. There were quite a few people trying the hike that morning so the guides tried to stagger everyone out a bit, but for those of us that were later in the night, we all woke up at midnight to the clammering of people that didn´t know how to use there gear. None of us did really. Some of the people had been up here for an extra day practicing with the cramp-ons and ice picks, and learning how and what order to put on their gear. Randy and I did not take that approach. We did the express pain route. After waking up at midnight and trying to frantically get on warm cloths in the mist of others trying to the same while trying to shove anything edible in our mouths, and drinking pots of Coca tea, anything that might make us feel better. So after our guide Silverio helps us with all of our things, we head out into the pitch cold, making our way to the ice so we can put on our cramp-on´s. Torture insused. The fist hill was unbelievably hard for me but everyone else seemed to be doing fine, our guide turned around briefly and told us we should go slower, I thought we were already going really slow, but we kept passing other hikers with relative ease. After about an hour my body didn´t seem to register the pain any more and I found myself pushing us (Randy and our guide) any chance I got, not but actually saying anything, just if anyone would asked if I needed a break I would say no, and try and limit the break as much as possible. But this optomisum was short lived and had a very nasty effect. At one point, I don´t remember when, I hit some kind of invisible wall and could almost put one foot in front of the other. I only remember Randy pulling on the rope, trying to help me, but at the time I thought just telling to hurry up, either way it got the idea across and I just forced every half step to half step. We began making more and more breaks, it seemed like every few hundred feet, and the other climbers began to slowly pass us by. In the dark in was almost scarry, they looked more like the walking dead then climbers. Some guides didnt use head lights and would sneek up on us in the barly moon-lit darkness. The sound of cramp-ons and ice will always be in my head, and the way they swayed back and forth with every minute step was unbearable. As we got higher and higher I had to refrain from looking anywhere put the couple feet in front of me, as to not have my spirits shredded with the site of that aweful peak, and even though it looked closer than ever, I and my body knew it would be hours to make it - if - we made it. Then the first ray´s of sun fell before us. Very red and first, and turning slowly orange. The sun was directly behind us, and very beautiful to look at coming up over the clouds below, but looking back took energy, and we needed to conserve every bit we had. So we pressed on, one foot almost in front of the other. We passed small cracks in the ice, bigger cracks, and full on empty cravasses, waiting for any tourist´s slip over the narrow ice bridges. We finnally came the the steepest part of the moutain, the last push to the top. The snow had been blown into very strange sharp ice shards and with the red glare of the sunrise it looked like spikes of blood and one couldn´t help but think of ending the misery there and then by just slipping of the couple inch ledge. If it wasn´t for the fact of that I was tied to two other people I might have just taken the easy way out. After brushing of those toughts I focused back on making the rest of the way. It was so close, but climbing at that height everything seemed to take forever. We climbed on the ridge for about 20 minutes, with a cliff face on one side of I´m sure over a couple thousand feet strait down, and a very steep incline over maybe a thousand foot fall onto a glacier on the other side. Once we made it to the top, there way no screaming of acomplishment of hugs and kiss´s around. Just silence and pain. Lots and lots of pain. My hands had gone numb about an hour before the top, and now that I had worked so hard my body began to let blood back into my hands. With the rush of blood into my dear extremities the pain soon became alomost unbearable and I wasn´t able to take a picture and had to have the guide get my camera and take one for me while I sat moaning and faking a smile for the picture. The pain retreated and I was able to enjoy about five minutes on the top before we made our way down. I soon learned the down side to climbing a moutain.... the climb back down. Expending all your energy to make it to the end of a race one thing. But extending all your energy and then turn right around and do it all over again just seemed a little sickening. Our guide said it would only take about 2 hours to get down, but he underestimated our physical state and after showing up to high camp with everyone all ready packed - even some had time for a short nap - and ready to head down to the busses we were forced to hurry and pack and continue climbing down with no break what-so-ever. The moutain looked differrent in the light. No longer misteryous and full of danger. Now it seemed quite and sereine. But I dreaded every step. My knees began giving out and I would loose my balance easily over the rocks. I never fully fell to the ground, but I watch as some others did. We were dead by the time we got to the busses, and we just wanted to get back to our beds in the hostels. It seems life sometimes knows what you want most and likes to throw in a curve at just that time. I had a weird feeling the whole bus ride, and I wish I would have said something because everyone would have thought I was clearvouante. I imagined a rode block, or a flat tire, just anything life could do to delay our arrival in our beds. Sure enough, after driving a different way back to La Paz, which I found very interesting, we went through some shaddy areas and finnally dropped into the far end of the valley the oposite side we had left from. We came to a stop. I dropped my head and knew it before I saw it. The rode ahead was covered in wet tar while a yellow rope told us it was undrivable if not just common sence. After minutes of deliberation and driver speaking to locals someone decided we should get out, walk past the wet tar and the bus would pick us up on the other side. Yes, with all our stuff still in the car. And only the driving and one other guide as witnesses to the forecoming "robbery" of the vehicle and all our possesions. I spoke my mind, but everyone seemed nanchalante about it and began walking. 10, 15, 20 minutes past on the other side with no bus, and no word. We sat waiting for what I thought was nothing. Maybe a phone call from the police that our other guide and driver had been found "beaten up" in an alley from self-inflicted wounds, maybe hoping for the insurance to pay or just selling the climbimg gear on the black market. Our guide finnaly got the call. The call from the other guide saying there was no way around and we would have to walk back acrosse the construction and drive the another hour and a half to the other end of the valley to drop in where we left from to begin with one day earlier. We walked back up, heads almost touching the ground from exahtion. We climb in while the driver was talking to a woman selling empañadas on the street. Suddenly a ray of light as she told him there was a way around and if he followed her directions we would make it. We started were our car had just gone, but instead of turning right, we now turned left. Following the ridge of the valley and making our way to a hopfully more secure rode. This one was dirt and next to a few hundred foot roll down into clay and tin houses. Again, fate had our number. We came to more construction and workers telling us there was no way around. Even a school boy told us there was no way through, and we would have to follow the now familier hand motion, that directed us back the way we had come, up to the top, and all the way to the other side of the valley. Even the kid knew it. But our driver kept driving. After a very close call with the edge, an college age Englishmen had had enough and screamed until the car stopped and would let him out. His ´mates´followed. And they made their way climbing down followed by our guide from the moutain becuase he was a good man and wanted to make sure they made it out alive. We stayed in the car, if not just out of spite from the frantic behaviour of this individual. Close calls came and went and we finnally were forced out of the car to push when it couldn´t make it up the steep incline on the dirt rode with all of our weight still inside. We pushed and pushed, uintil my legs started to shake. We made it, and the feeling of absoulute loss turned into joy when we touched solid paved rode on the other side of the hill. We traved our path just a couple hundred feet below to see if we could find the others. But they were gone, and after about 30 minutes into the drive back into town our other guide spotted them in a public bus and pulled over and let them back in laughing all the time and the Englishmen addmitting his defeat. We empithized, if not just out of politness, mere unwilliness to expend energy on argument. We made it back safe. Not healthy. But safe. Randy was already sick from everything. And the next day I would spend the day in bed and in the bathroom. I don´t know why your body gets so sick after such tramatic engery drains, but everyone on the trek seemed to have similiar stories when we would run into them later on. I hope you enjoyed the story and I will try to post pictures after I publish it. We are still alive, and if I wasn´t off to the Jungle tomorrow I would write about all our other adventures, but maybe randy is doing that now.

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