Advertisement
Published: August 23rd 2009
Disclaimer: I have again failed miserably to write anything about the culture of Chile. This is my fault rather than Chile’s. Instead, I have yet again written about going camping in the Andes. I imagine this is stultifyingly boring for those who have enough sense to sleep indoors. cheers -c
In the olden days, some crazy, one-eyed, warty old lady could find the portents of doom in the innards of disemboweled chickens or the lines in the palm of your hand. These days, they usually arrive in a friendly email. The ominous warnings had been arriving from Michigan for a couple of weeks. The latest said, “I'm bringing...2 pair of snowshoes, 4 season tent ,2 pair of dbl plastic boots, 2 pair of crampons, 2 ice axes, 1 folding snow shovel, 2 foam pads, 1 sleeping bag. . .” This obviously wasn’t the first I’d heard of this winter camping in the Andes plan, but it had steadily moved from theoretical to inevitable. Swirl was going to drop a fortune to come to Chile, and I was going to have to go camping to justify it. Camping with Swirl is, in general, one of my favorite things to do, but
the ‘winter’ part was. . . less exciting. Unfortunately, it seemed sitting in a bar for ten days wasn’t going to qualify as an ‘authentic’ Chilean experience. Though one neighbor used the entirely sensible excuse of cold to duck out, another, Nick, was disturbingly enthusiastic. For weeks, emails circulated. I watched in horror as Nick and Swirl seriously discussed whether we could cross the glaciers and summit La Paloma (alt: 4900m = 16,076 ft). I didn’t think they were appreciating the irony that the valley leading to La Paloma was called Yerba Loca. I, for one, had no doubts that trying to summit a mountain in winter was way beyond crazy.
It bears reminding that I am a flat-lander by birth and have no business with things like crampons or ice axes. My reaction to Minnesota's cold and snow was barricading myself inside for 4 years in hopes that neither the Pig’s Eye nor the Wild Turkey ran out before spring. Swirl somehow developed a greater appreciation for winter while living in Michigan. Nevertheless, living in places like Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, and Kansas is not exactly mountaineering 101. Despite the irrefutable evidence of our own incompetence, Swirl was sure
all would be well; he had been reading a book. The fact that ‘Really Cool’ appeared in the title was not particularly comforting. Nick reassured me by informing me that someone had disappeared in an avalanche the week before. Fantastic.
Swirl arrived on a clear blue Wednesday morning dragging two enormous dread provoking bags. While chatting idly about plane rides and whatnot, he unceremoniously upended the bags in the living room. The North Face mountain expedition catalog poured out. “Well, I think we have everything we need,” he said contentedly. Everything except any f%$^ing idea what we’re doing I thought.
Day one, Swirl and I did the customary wander around the 10 square block radius I call home. Among other ‘sights’, this always includes the Cerro San Cristobal, which is crowned with a 22m high statue of the Blessed Virgin. Though the contemplative muzak played in the Virgin’s shadow is horrendous, it is a great vantage to gaze out over the blanket of smog and the city below. Further east past Sanhattan and the rich people, the solid wall of the Andes looms. The peaks of El Plomo, El Altar, and La Paloma sit to the north looking
particularly uninviting. Tomorrow we would shop and Friday we would be headed to Yerba Loca, a valley leading to the foot of el Altar.
Compelled by some strange need to portray life like an adventure novel, I had begun a detailed account of post-hole trudging (step, sink up to knee, repeat), cutting cold wind at dusk, descending clouds, sweeping snowy valleys, foreboding craggy faces, the Southern Cross, moon bows, frozen water falls etc. However, it suddenly occurred to me that the banality of eating, walking, and sleeping even if done in a particularly pretty place, bores the hell out of almost everyone. I imagine the cliff note version will still probably still facilitate a few naps. Nevertheless, . . .
The weather went from cloudy and blustery to ridiculously blue and then stayed gorgeous for three days. Around 7 pm, however, the sun set, the wind picked up, and we quickly turned in. Night was cold but bearable; our comfort being greatly aided by the construction of a qwinzee. Much could be said about the insulating properties of snow, but the gist is that there are really big boulders and really deep snow drifts in the mountains and
if you dig into the side of a drift and hollow out the inside, you eventually have a snow cave that three people can sleep in. Not only did the “Really Cool Backcountry” book assure us that it would not collapse in the middle of the night, but Swirl had apparently already field tested the qwinzee on two five year olds last winter in Michigan. The qwinzee description should conjure up an image of a half-ass igloo; the main difference is that we didn’t bother with cutting ice blocks or architecture. The only real downside of the structure is that if you have a ridiculously small bladder, you have to get out of your sleeping bag, crawl over bodies, and then slither out on your belly through a 2 foot high door into alpine cold. Brushing the door inevitably results in a fine misting of snow down the back of your pants. This is all terribly annoying, but outside in the thin cold air, you suddenly find yourself standing in a bowl of creamy distilled moonlight, flanked by the steep dark valley walls and capped with a lid of piercing stars. Breathtaking; or maybe that was just the cold.
In addition to shelter, water is pretty vital. Mountain streams are pretty, but fairly unhelpful if they are frozen or have really high concentrations of sulfur. Snow, which is obviously everywhere, is tediously averse to melting. Moreover, ridiculous as it sounds, you can ‘burn’ snow. This means that you have to boil water, add a little snow, melt, add a little, melt, add a little. . . or pile snow on big sun warmed boulders and then catch the run off drip by drip. Neither option is very efficient. Civilization clearly has its conveniences.
In general, the Andes are a relatively barren place. There are few trees and the foliage tends to be little scrubby tenacious bits of prickly stuff that somehow has adapted to live with no water and scorching sun in the summer and then life buried under multiple meters of snow in the winter. Nevertheless, life happens. Occasionally, we heard the cries of birds and tracks in the snow suggested that out of sight, critters were abundant. One night at dusk, we saw the silhouette of a large grey fox sitting just beyond our campsite watching us. Later, the dark flitting shadow skirted across the silver
blue grey of the moon lit snow and disappeared into the deeper thickness of night.
The unhelpful -due to-too-much-sulfur creek descends from the glaciers on La Paloma and runs the length of the Yerba Loca valley. Following the creek back towards its source, we eventually came to the base of false Altar (false b/c the real summit is somewhere just behind this massive face), where a series of enormous frozen waterfalls hung like candle wax drippings from the craggy face. Turning west from the feet of false Altar, we followed the stream up a steep incline toward the final saddle. The tedium of trudging in snow shoes up a 50 degree incline was lightened when I suddenly plunged through the snow up to my armpits. Trying to flail out of a hole while wearing snow shoes and thrashing about with ski poles is more than a little like watching a sea lion flopping about on land - perhaps even less graceful. Swirl and Nick found the sight terribly amusing. Once I had wallowed my way out of the hole, we crossed over the saddle and into the final valley. Towering above were the glaciated summits of La Paloma and
El Altar (5222m).
On the way down, we stopped at the frozen waterfalls. For the next hour, we took turns smashing axes and crampons into the ice and climbing the ice. The bite of the axes and the crampons into the ice is comforting and though you’re weight is being supported by only a 2 inch spike, strangely reassuring. Only when Swirl commented that falling from a particular distance would probably result in broken legs and an ice axe sticking out of your head did I rethink the sensibility of continuing up. Nick was not dissuaded by such mundane fears, while I, on the other hand, have a much more cowardly sense of self preservation. As the sun slipped behind the valley wall, we made our way back down to the qwinzee to cook our nightly gut bomb of carbohydrates and protein.
In the end, no one was buried in an avalanche. The view was stunning and the weather perfect. All together, it couldn’t have gone better except that my toes have now been swollen and numb for about two weeks. Ms. Bachman’s internet diagnosis is that I have a mild case of trench foot: a small price
to pay for four days in the mountains. Despite my mother's concerns, I don't think it likely they will gangrene.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 18; qc: 27; dbt: 0.022s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Judy
non-member comment
belated worries
Colin, Had I known what you were up to, I'd have been frantic with worry! Reading your account after the fact, however, was extremely entertaining. Now get thee to a doctor with those feet!