Mountaineering in Bolivia - Part 2

After getting back to La Paz we had a cruisy rest day where we said goodbye to poor old Steve, who´d run out of holidays and had to fly back to LA. Unfortunately for him there were quite a few protests around the country that turned into riots, with the occasional fatality, and the USA were being held partially accountable by allegedly helping the people in the lowlands fight the communist government based in La Paz. So because of that, American Airlines weren´t flying into Bolivia anymore, so Steve had to leg it out via Peru.

We then headed to Huayna Potosi, a 6,088m peak that is meant to be one of the easier 6,000m peaks you can do. Our plan was to spend 4 days there, 2 doing some training on the good glacier at the foot of the mountain, a day hiking up to high camp, and then the last day would be the attempt on the summit.

Huayna Potosi. The summit is actually the second highest bump I think.

Training day on the glacier. Here´s me attempting to lead up the glacier.

So on the first training day we headed onto the glacier and did some crampon skills, with some techniques we hadn´t encountered before like front-pointing, and the French, Canadian and American techniques of walking up steep ice. After we´d spent a while mucking around on some steep ice and adding these techniques to our arsenal, we went for a hike around the glacier looking for a big crevasse to throw ourselves down. When we found one we did some crevasse rescue stuff, refreshing in our minds how to set up a z-drag (something I haven´t done for years).

We got Dave up our Z-drag. Phew.

Day 2 of training consisted of learning how to place ice screws and other bits of protection as you cruise up a glacier. We went for some walkies and took turns leading the party and placing pro. It was kinda fun but good to learn. Then we headed down the bottom end of the glacier where there were some nice steep ice walls to climb on. We had our first crack at ice climbing! I managed to shred my brand new goretex overpants but stitched them up that night.

Jen doing some ice climbing.

Day 3 we packed up our stuff and hiked up to high camp, at around 5200m. It took about an hour to get up there, and we spent the rest of the day chilling out. We got to bed pretty early as we were getting up at 2:30am for a 3:30am start to the day.

Summit day! And it was a struggle to get going by 3:30am, but we managed it, and boy was it worth it. It took about 6 hours of hard slog to get to the summit, and the views were spectacular on the way up. For the "one of the easiest 6,000m peaks you can do" we thought it was bloody hard work. There were a few steep sections where we were glad we had our crampon experience, and very glad of Tim and Dave, our guides who did all the leading.

Summit day: one of the steeper sections.

The views were pretty cool on the way up.

Very close to the summit... perhaps 50m from the top? It clouded over just as we neared the summit which was a bit of a bugger.

Well I´d just popped the question to Jen, and she said yes, and then we looked kinda sheepish.