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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Dive & Isla Lobos
Dive & isla lobos
Friday, September 23, 2005
Nevado Pisco Day 1 - To the Moraine Base Camp
I rose at 6am and dressed, then walked into the town centre, and to the tour/activity agency. The agency manager, my guide (Miguel) and my porter/cook (Jesús).
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Nevado Pisco Day 2 - Summit Day
We rose at 3:15am and dressed for the climb, then had a quick breakfast of hot chocolate, and breadrolls with jam. We packed our climbing gear, and started up the last part of the moraine toward the toe of the glacier. I forgot my camera, and realised after about 3 minutes, so ran back to get it. We soon reached the toe of the glacier, which was mainly on bare rock scraped smooth by the ice. I was a bit worried when my guides took about 20 minutes of searching around to find the point where the previous people had been getting onto the glacier. The snow during the night had somewhat obscured the trail and it was hard to see by torchlight.
Dawn was breaking as we walked onto the glacier, after having put on harnesses and crampons. The first part was to climb up to the col (saddle) to the west of Pisco. It was a somewhat windy walking route, as it went around several crevasses, but was too steep. The sunrise from the slopes of the col was very beautiful. Once we reached the col, I could see the mountains to the north, and in the distance Alpamayo. They looked magnificent in the morning sun.
The route now went east, directly toward the summit, and went along a fairly flat section, then up a couple of fairly steep parts, and over two crevasses, one of which was about a metre wide, and needed to be jumped. It was tough going - I was huffing and puffing like a steam train and yet going at a snails pace. The guides seemed to be just taking a stroll in the countryside by comparison - they mad me feel very unfit.
We reached the technical section, which was about 70m of very steep ice. The Miguel went up first using two ice axes, and fixed ice screws and a snow stake into the ice, and then belayed us after sending the ice axes back down. The ice climbing was not too difficult, but it was tiring, and took a long time with all the setting up, and waiting for each person to do it. We did it in two pitches, waiting halfway on a small flat section.
After we had made the top of the technical section, we continued onward, along another fairly flat section, which had snow that seemed to be very sticky, and was balling up in my crampons badly. Eventually you end up walking on mini stilts made of snow, so that your crampons are not actually touching the ground, and you are very likely to go for a slide. I had to bang the handle of my axe against my crampons every few strides to clear the snow. I think it was made significantly worse as I had the type of crampons designed for ice climbing, with vertical front points, and more bars underneath to catch the snow. The guides had ordinary mountaineering crampons which didn't seem to clog so badly.
By this stage I was feeling extremely tired while I was walking, and going very very slowly. I would recover very quickly when I stopped, but would be exhausted again almost as soon as I started walking again. Having to clear the snow from my crampons all the time took a lot of extra energy I didn't really have.
By this time, the clouds had moved in, and there were only partial views of the nearby mountains. My guides asked me several times if I was feeling sick, but I was only feeling tiredness. Finally after one more steep section, which I found easier to frontpoint on all fours, the slope got less and less, and we came to the rounded fairly wide summit. I was exhausted, we spent about 30 minutes there eating some lunch, resting, taking some photos of ourselves, and of the few glimpses of a view that we got.
Going down was much faster than going up, but was also far worse with snow cloging my crampons, which usually needed to be unclogged every 6-8 steps, and often took up to 4 bangs of the axe handle to clear each one. The technical section was slow going down again, taking two hours by itself. As we walked from there down to the col, it started snowing, and continued lightly until we finally reached the toe of the glacier again. I had a fairly good rest here as we removed our gear, as we had hardly stopped since the technical section. We fairly quickly went down the rocky morain back to the camp, which was a very very welcome sight. I lay down in my tent, as it was still snowing, and almost fell asleep before dinner (mate de coca, soup, spaggetti bolegnese), which the guides made inside their tent to keep out of the snow. Pretty much immediately after dinner I fell asleep, completely spent.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Nevado Pisco Day 3 - Moraine Camp to Huaraz
We got up about 7am, and had a huge breakfast of pretty much all the food that was left, including leftover dinner. My tent had a thin layer of ice covering it and even a little inside.
I was a bit slow packing, as the peruvians seemed to have done half of it inside their tent before they got up, and we started walking down at about 8:45. The views of Pisco and the surrounding mountains, valleys and glaciers were very spectacular, as the sky was clear. We walked fast (except when clambouring over huge moraine boulders), and it only took 2.5 hours to reach the bottom. By then, the clouds had started to build again on the mountaintops.
We took a taxi/collectivo on the beautiful road back to Yungay, then a combi collectivo back to Huaraz. I said gave a tip and said goodbye to my peruvian guides, then went back to the hostel, to shower, relax, then get dinner and sleep.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Huaraz to Lima
After breakfast, then sorting and packing my gear in the morning, I checked out and sent a package of stuff home, then went to the Cruz del Sur (Southern Cross) bus station and got on the bus to Lima.
The bus followed the Rio Santa upstream to its source, and we came out on a vast alpine grassy plain which stretched away to the beautiful snowcapped Cordillera Huayuash. Then the bus started down toward the coast, winding down fairly steep mountainsides. The mountains became more and more barren, as we went down, and by the time we reached the bottom, were mainly bare rock and sandy dirt, with the occasional cactus. The few tiny villages in this area looked like they were pretty harsh places to live.
Turning onto the Panamericana again, we headed south, through the incredibly dry desert. Sometimes the sea was in view on the right hand side, and on the left was always a sea of sand and rock, with virtually nothing living, and only the occasional man made object or building.
Night was falling as we came into the outskirts of Lima, but it was about another 50 minutes of driving through suburbs and heavy traffic before we arrived at the bus station. I got a taxi to a hostel near the Plaza de Armas (central plaza), and after some dinner went to bed early.
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