First-Time Mountain Climbing

UKULA Travelogue 15

Words & Picture - Jake Brennan

: Of the many ways to experience the world's second-highest mountain range, climbing it has got to be, without a doubt, the silliest. Knackering as it is, sitting atop a mountain is also a surefire way to evoke childlike wonder at its beauty.

The latter view must have won out when my girlfriend and I optimistically signed up with a La Paz trekking agency to summit 6088m (19,974-foot) Huayna Potosí, one of the more popular peaks of Bolivia’s Cordillera Real.

All we’d have to carry, the slick agency owner assured us, was our “personal gear.” Little did we seasoned hikers but first-time mountaineers realize that climbing up glaciers involves a lot of personal gear – which feels a whole lot heavier at altitude.

Although well acclimatized from hiking in the La Paz area (3600m elevation), we opted for the prudent three-day itinerary (Night 1: base camp – 4700m; Night 2: high camp – 5130m; Morning 3: summit and descent) rather than the macho two-day program, which more often ends in altitude-induced failure. This meant the first two days were relatively lax. I was fine with this.

Fine, that is, until it came time to discuss our Day 3 wake-up time. The guides’ suggestion was an ungodly 12:30 a.m.! This puts you on the summit at or near sunrise, they said - plus it’s much easier climbing in the cold still of night.

Ours was the heretical idea not to wake until a lazy 1:15 a.m. Successfully negotiating this in Spanish with our intransigent guides will some day appear on my resumé for the diplomatic corps. Still, the victory was pyrrhic: it meant hitting the foam before 7 p.m., so early even my sleeping pill thought I was joking, leaving me to face a six-hour fitful nap.

I was surprised how much cereal I could cram in at 2 a.m. After putting on snowpants for the first time in 25 years plus plenty more of that heavy gear, we were off at 3 sharp, roped in together like field-tripping pre-schoolers, one of many strings of three or four headlamps inching up the vast dark glacier.

The rope was a tad restricting for personal activities: my girlfriend couldn’t recall having ever made a deposit in such a wide open space and only 10 feet from three men. It’s at just such moments that a partner’s support can make all the difference. “Remember, we’re paying for this experience,” I reminded my beloved.

But the rope’s safety (against hidden crevasses) also afforded access to great beauty. One face of our dark ascent was illuminated by La Paz, shimmering in the distance; we saw a gorgeous sunrise (from slightly below the summit, I’ll admit) and, from the top, the best view of our lives – as if from an airplane, only cheaper and more effort.

Speaking of effort, altitude’s effects make you acutely aware of it. For the last 500m my queasy stomach was a pot of milk seconds from boiling. Two steps too large and I’d have to stop, or else boil over and lose all that tasty cereal.

We reached the summit at 8, but weren’t there more than ten minutes, that damned unfriendly wind giving us the shivers. Thinking the effort had ended with the up, I was in no mood to fight our 20-year-old guide’s jerky belaying down the steep 200 m icy face from the summit, which only prolonged my nausea.

I finally got fed up and untied myself from the rope only 15 feet up a gentle slope from flat ground. In the end, our youthful guide was the one to boil over, tying me back in and giving me a stern scolding in Spanish while I just lay in the snow, trying not to barf on him. Like I said, the mountains can bring out the child in all of us.