Climbing Huayna Potosi

It was one of many of the tourist jaunts on offer from the travel agency in the Loki Hostel in La Paz, Bolivia. I knew there were treks to the jungles, the Salt Flats of Uyuni, the infamous Death Road, and lastly I knew there were treks out to the glaciers in the high mountains the dominate the view from the windows of planes coming in for their landings in the city.

The travel agent handed me a pamphlet, but they had me at crampons and ice-axe. The three day trip, which included all of our mountaineering equipment, food, lodging, and one guide for every two climbers came in at the astoundingly low price of 150 dollars.

At the office of the Huayna Potosi Agency I met the other 10 wannabe climbers in the group, and with the exception of David, the young Irishman, none of us had ever attempted anything like this before. Hurry up and wait would be a recurring theme for the next three days. We’d all gotten taxis or hustled through streets closed by markets to get to the agency by 9:00 and it was almost ten before we headed from the agency to the equipment depot across the city.

There we all spent another hour and a half trying on jackets, snow pants, boots, hiking shoes, and gloves. It was also here that I held an ice-axe for the first time. I don’t know how the three girls in the group felt, but an ice-axe is one of those tools that once held goes straight to the grunting caveman part of the male brain. The ice-axe has three practical parts, all solid, two at the head and one at the end of the handle.

The obvious and most fun part resembles a pick, this part is driven directly into the ice or snow for semi-vertical climbs up a wall. Opposite this is a flat piece mainly used for clearing snow and ice out of the way in particularly difficult terrain to shore up a path. The last part is the bottom of the handle, which is pointed. It is admittedly the least sexy and most useful part of the ice axe. You put your hand around the head of the ice-axe and drive the handle into the snow next to you to act as a kind of walking stick to balance you as you move uphill in the snow.

The last piece of equipment was the crampons. These are basically large, spiked metal cleats that attach to the bottom of the heavy, plastic boots we wore for the climb. The boots were essentially slightly less rigid ski boots.

After we’d all been outfitted we got back in our vans and headed to the “Refugio,” the lowest camp for ascending the summit. Before we got there we stopped high above the city, getting our last view of La Paz, and loading up on chocolate and coca leaves.

The Refugio was situated at the edge of a man-made reservoir that collected meltwater from the Huayna Potosi glacier and fed the booming population of La Paz. The reason Huayna Potosi is considered the “easiest 6000er” in the world is due to the easy access to the Refugio, situated at 5200 meters, roughly 3,000 feet from the summit.

That first day at the Refugio we ate lunch and headed for the foot of the glacier. Once we got there we had a chance to spend a few hours trying out walking up and downhill with the ice-axe and crampons. It was easy practice for a while, but by the end of two or so hours climbing the steeply pitched slope over and over again it took on the tenor of a tiring high school soccer practice…with an ice-axe.

That night we had dinner and sat around playing a card game called, “Shit head” over and over again, but by 9:00 a clock the workout and the altitude put most of us down for the count.

The next morning we had breakfast, played a little more shit head, had lunch, and then gathered all of our gear into our big bags and headed for the agencies’ base camp, a mere 400 meters up the mountain. What would have been a relatively tough three hour hike unhindered became an immense effort loaded as we were with our extremely heavy boots, axe, crampons, extra clothes, snacks and assorted gear. After about two hours we reached the public base camp at 5200 meters. For the last half hour it had been hailing pebble sized chunks of ice, and at the base camp a heavy snow began to fall.

From here we took off our hiking shoes and put on our heavy boots and crampons. The last two hundred meters of the climb was up a giant wall of snow. Here we used the handle of our axes as a balancing rod, but more often than not when it touched the snow it would sink all the way down to the handle, making it more work than not to use it. Even though the pack was lighter without the boots, crampons, and ice-axe, it was a huge factor in continually losing our balance and pitching one way or another into the snow.

We were also getting less oxygen per breath and I had to undo the chest strap of my backpack because it kept my lungs from expanding to their peak capacity, something that became necessary if I didn’t want to feel out of breath with every step. By the time an hour up the snowy hill had passed and we reached camp, I was covered in sweat, and more humbled by the activity than I can remember being in a long, long time.

Once we all reached the small room, loaded with a quintuple bunk bed, we had about two hours of free time before we had to get to sleep. We’d be climbing the last 688 meters in the dead of night, heading out around 1:30 in the morning, two climbers roped to one guide, moving up the mountain by the glow of headlights.

We had a welcome meal, a hot soup and some instant noodles cooked from a propane tank that I couldn’t even imagine carrying up that snow to the camp. The guides also boiled down massive pots of snow which we used to gulp up hot tea and fill our water bottles for the trek to the summit. We kept busy for a few hours going back and forth between the warmth of the camp and the constantly shifting clouds and fog outside, which concealed and revealed the awe inspiring terrain in a shifting menagerie of snow-capped peaks.

That night I don’t know if I really slept, or if I reached any kind of deep sleep, but I had my head down and my eyes closed for the next six hours. At half past midnight they woke us up and we all put on our gear by the light of our headlamps. There was no electricity at base camp, which added to the kind of mystical quality of that early morning, everyone a bundle of nerves and excitement, nobody having any idea of what to expect from the morning ahead.

We packed extremely light for the ascent, bottled water, high-density snacks (I hated the fact that nobody sold cliff bars in La Paz), sunscreen and sunglasses. We had a breakfast of bread with jam and hot tea, and then we were outside getting roped to our guides. I was hooked up to Paul, a Dutchman in advertising, travelling and looking for a job in Buenos Aires, and our guide was named “Rocky Balboa.”

We were the first ones to head up the slope, but we were soon overtaken by Neal and Adrien, or “Kangaroo and Swisse” as the guides called them. We wouldn’t catch them again until the summit, and I’m still amazed, considering how difficult the climb was, that they got there so fast, and blazed the trail, putting those critical first boots into the snow for the rest of us.

The trail often moved across incredibly thin ridges, barely big enough for two footed boots next to each other. Thankfully with our light packs balance was much easier, and the crampons, primitive devices that they were, held a remarkably firm grip into the snow.

We’d all taken a huge wad of coca leaves in our mouths as we set off, and though the first fifteen minutes of the ascent were relatively flat, if narrow, the first two major climbs were devastating. Each time the path went uphill we slowed to a crawl, taking the equivalent of baby steps while trying, sometimes in vain, to regulate our breathing.

Every half hour or so we stopped, collapsing onto a flat spot on the dark snow, replacing our wad of coca leaves with fresh ones, eating some kind of snack, and generally just breathing hard and thinking in the back of our minds that we should turn around. Rocky Balboa must have had a hard night, because every time we stopped he laid down and took a short nap, which was slightly disconcerting. I asked him at the second or third stop how long it took him to get to the top “sin gringos” and he said two hours. Roughly half the time it took while towing white people. I asked him if it was boring dragging us along at half speed and his answer was “mas or menos.”

It was interesting walking so far, and so high in complete darkness. The headlamps often illuminated only Paul’s footsteps in front of me, and occasionally when I pointed the light into the darkness ahead all I could see was that the trail went sharply up, until the power of the light was consumed by the mountain dark and I knew it simply went up more. The light also reflected off an endless field of virgin snow. It occurred to me as the light sparkled off of the untouched snow like a desert of diamonds, that I might never be within such dense quiet again.

About halfway through the climb I started feeling extremely nauseous, and Paul said his left lung was beginning to hurt. At the next stop I spit out my coca leaves and didn’t replace them with more, there were periods of the climb were I felt incredibly energetic, which I chocked up to the leaves, but it seems I was paying the price for that extra energy now, and it wasn’t worth chewing more.

It’s hard to remember one ascent, one ridge, or one dark area from another, but I know there was a noticeable difference in how difficult the climb became as it went on. I imagine it was a combination of the altitude increasing, and our bodies slowly tiring under the continuous strain. Particularly hard were the few, blessedly short, vertical walls that required us to sink our ice-axes into the wall and pull ourselves up foot by foot.

In the last hour we actually caught up to “Kangaroo and Swisse,” who were beginning to tire a bit, but as soon as we caught up to them they’d be off again, and we were moving slower and slower, taking more breaks, and I continued to yell up to Rocky Balboa, “mas lento por favor” to slow us back to our baby steps where I wasn’t quite gulping for breath.

The path was also notably steeper as we neared the peak. We found Kangaroo, Swisse, and their hardworking, trailblazing guide sitting at the last stop before the summit. They had been waiting for us for almost fifteen minutes because their guide wanted someone else to make the last, critical, and very likely most dangerous path, from this stop to the summit. We all sat a few feet apart on the relatively steep path, our crampons the only thing between us and a long slide. We chatted a bit, had our last chocolates and granola bars, guzzled water, and prepared for the last twenty minutes before the summit.

That last leg began with a twenty foot wall of ice, which we climbed slowly, making sure that we didn’t ascend an inch without knowing the ice-axe had sunk itself in deep enough to hold our entire weight as our feet scrambled to find a crampon toe-hold. When we’d finished the wall I looked up at the shadow of the path ahead. It was the first time I remember thinking that this whole enterprise was perversely insane.

There was about a two meter high wall of ice and snow on our right side, and I could see the outline of where other climbers had gone, now covered by the thick layer of last night’s snow fall. It was far and away the thinnest ridge we’d climb that day. Maybe wide enough for a boot and a half, and after that sinister, sharp looking rocks, and after that…nothing. We had a rope, in climbing circles known as a “confidence rope” because there had little to no hope that if one of us slipped that the guide had a prayer of holding both of our weight. It may have helped arrest a fall where we had space, and a firm toe-hold on the trail, but ironically, in the place where we most needed it, it would not help. No belays were sunk into the ice as we ascended the ridge. Occasionally we’d stop so Rocky Balboa could clear a particularly icy spot, but for the last twenty minutes, every single step up we took was inches away from launching all three of us into an abyss that none would walk away from.

At each step we sunk our axes into the wall on our right, but the hold was always tenuous as most of the snow seemed new. It was hard going as we were the ones now making the path, but we didn’t have any slip-ups, any close calls, just a zen-like focus on putting one foot tenderly in front of the other. We were the first three to make the summit that day, and the first thing I did upon reaching that wonderfully flat piece of the mountain was to fall to the ground and take about a hundred of the deepest breaths I’ve ever taken.

At the top it was still dark, though there were contours of the sky where the black began bleeding a dark blue. A few minutes after us Kangaroo and Swisse joined us at the summit. Ten minutes or so later “Alaska” and Hugo and their guide were at the top. 11 of us went to the Refugio together. A French couple had paid to do a four day trek instead of three so they would be going up tomorrow. One French girl has such intense vertigo on the hike up to the base camp that she stayed behind, and another French girl has hiked an hour in the darkness before some malady had convinced her to go back. Six of us summited at the same time, and about an hour behind us, our last member would get to the summit after we’d come down.

By the time Alaska and Hugo had reached the top the sun had risen. There was a layer of clouds above us and a layer of clouds beneath us, and though we couldn’t see much, nothing could dispel the absolute sense of awe I felt upon reaching that tiny piece of mountain real estate, with the narrow sliver of sky telescoping into the distance. We all felt an amazing surge of energy, and were thankfully given an abundance of time at the top to watch a small piece of the sun burst through the fog and clouds and rest our bodies and minds.

It was funny in a way that as elated as we were Rocky Balboa had used the entire period of our excitement to take an extra long nap. But what goes up must come down, and on the way down the guide would be in the back of each little group. The duty of leading us down the mountain fell to me, who was in the back for the climb. Though daylight revealed exactly how dangerous the last ridge had been, it was somehow much, much easier to move down that precarious path than it was to go up.

It took us around four hours to go up the trail, and a little more than an hour to reach base camp again. We stopped only twice for a minute to catch our breath before bounding down the trail again. We were the first to the summit, and first back to camp, but before long the other two groups joined us. We loaded up our packs with our sleeping bags, hiking shoes and other gear and headed back down the wall of snow to the public base camp. From there we put our heavy boots, crampons, ice-axe and other gear back in our large bags, and slogged back down to the Refugio. It was actually the worst part of the whole endeavor for me, my knees were sore and buckling under the weight of the pack against the rocky trail down.

At the Refugio we all gathered, and played a few more rounds of Shit head while waiting for the rest of the group to gather. Alaska said he’d been chewing huge wads of Coca leaves the entire trek up, and when he got back to base camp he’d thrown up pretty much everything he had in his stomach. David was in even worse shape, he’d arrived about an hour behind us to the summit, and looked incredibly sick as he passed us. He’d actually paid 100 Bolivianos a day for a bottle of oxygen and the porter to carry it up with him. When he got back to the Refugio people took turns taking a huff while considering their hands.

From the Refugio we could look up at the peak, with the fog and clouds criss-crossing the air in front of it, while we nursed our legs and lungs with soup and hot tea. It may have been the easiest 6000 meter ascent, but it was easy to see how conquering mountains like this becomes a lifetime obsession for many climbers. All I'd had was a taste.