Huascaran Sur - 22,200ft

Our burros & arriero en route to Huascaran base camp

Day 1:
Our plan was to do Huascaran in five days. We were going to skip base camp and go straight to the refugio, just below the moraine camp. To start, we got off on the wrong collectivo stop, which really only delayed us maybe 20 minutes. Once we arrived at the town of Musho from which we would start walking we caved and hired overly priced donkeys to help get us to base camp. The plan was to carry our stuff after this to just below the Moraine Camp in order to climb Huascaran in only five days. Our donkey driver was a character, and half the time we weren’t sure if he even knew the trail. At one point he had us stop and wait while he ran off frantically back down the path. We thought at first maybe he had dropped his sweater but then we realized that one of our donkey friends was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, the naughty donkey came trudging back up the trail wearing Andre’s backpack and being closely followed by our ariero. We arrived at Base Camp around 2, and decided to attempt to get to Moraine camp that same day. A guided group told us to use their rope to ascend and start the rocky traverse. There were cairns to follow, so we headed right, but the problem was there were cairns all over the place, most covered in moss, so we soon began to think that we may be off trail.  After spending about 30 minutes trying to get up one extremely steep and exposed step with heavy packs on, (in which Andre eventually had to climb down and carry my pack  up for me),  we checked the gps and found that sure enough we were well off the trail. By this time, the sun started to set, and we had not made it nearly as far as we had hoped, so we decided to bivy. Soon after we decided this, we came across a slab of flat stone  exactly the size of our tent and we set up camp and made successful pesto pasta as the sun set over the horizon.

Day 2:
Waking up at our perfectly sized bivy spot, Andre felt a bit ill, so we took a long morning to get ready and discussed whether or not we needed to slow down our itinerary a bit. Since we had brought 2 days of food we had the option of taking two slower days instead of pushing through two camp spots in one day, but as we started hiking Andre felt a bit better, so we just kept walking. By lunch time we ran into our friends from our hostal, who also were greatly mislead by the cairns, and Imran and Jiri, who had come up a different and apparently much easier way. We all made it to Camp 1 (on the glacier) that evening and enjoyed popcorn and the views while gazing up at what still appeared to be a massive slog to the top of Huascaran.

Camp 1 - 5,400m

The clouds really were black!

Day 3:
We think we will do a short hike to camp 2 the next day, so we left at 9am. I have come to really feel like waking up and leaving after dawn is a luxury. This tells you how used to getting up at 3am I have become. , it is very hard to keep moving. Anyway, the hike to Camp 2 took was more challenging than we had anticipated, and after we had climbed up the steep couloir I was struggling to get up even the slightest inclines. Nonetheless, we were crossing under dangerous serac fall area and we really couldn’t afford to stop and rest at all. Finally we made it out of the serac fall area and we absolutely had to stop and eat something if we were to continue. Like usual, we took  this snack break just around the corner from our campsite and managed to feed a hungry crevasse our entire bottle of sunscreen! Thank goodness Imran and Jiri had extra sunscreen to share, a sunny glacier at 19,000 ft is the last place you want to be without!

High camp -- about 19,300ft

Day 4:
Imran was feeling achy and unable to eat anything the day before, and so when we woke at 2 we found out that we would be a team of 3 with Jiri instead of two teams of four: Imran was simply too weak to attempt a summit. Our friends from our hostal were also a team of three, and they set off on the trail about 3 minutes behind us.  Fifteen minutes later I stopped to put on my warmest mittens (which I had bought specifically to climb this mountain!) and the other team passed us, beginning a game of leap frog we would play all the way to the summit.

This was the hardest mountain I have ever climbed. Mentally and physically, I was tested beyond what I had ever experienced before. After hiking long and hard days, for 3 days in a row before summit day, my body’s reserves of energy were running low, and my muscles were not able to repair themselves as easily at the extreme elevations we were at. The temperatures at the high altitude were so much colder that instead of stripping layers as we hiked and the sun came out, I added another layer every hour and ended on the summit with both my down jackets on! I felt like I was constantly coming up from being held under water for 30 seconds, which left me gasping for oxygen every 2 steps. The challenge was not only physical, but mental as well. One of my symptoms of being at altitude is the loss of motivation and the desire to sleep. I found that it helped me to push forward once I made the decision to dedicate my climb to my grandfather Jim. I knew he would have loved to be there with me, would have encouraged me to just suck it up and make it to the top, and that he would be proud that I had endured.

A large party had summitted the day before us so we had tracks to follow the route up, however it was less of  a slog to the top than we had anticipated. Due to the fact that there were so many crevasses to negotiate, the route wound under and around massive seracs, and Jiri led us up one steep pitch of ice.

This turned out to be a surprising challenge when Jiri belayed us up because we only brought one ice tool each and were tied to each other not more than 5 feet apart. I was most terrified because I could not get the image out of my head of what would happen to Andre’s face if I fell. Crampons + ice tools+ climbing steep ice tied close together = very very scary.

After this steep step my headache was definitely not getting better, and I was beginning to doubt myself so I stopped and announced that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it. Andre encouraged me by reminding me that the views from the top were going to make it all worth it, and Jiri gave me a goo. Afterwards, all that was left was a low-grade slog to the seemingly never-ending summit.

The final steps

Jiri, Kaeli, and Andre on the summit!!

Being that this was the hardest climb I have ever done, it was also the most celebratory at the top. All six of us were hooting and hollering, doing handstands and hugging.  (photos!) We had perfect weather, insane views (Andre claims to have seen the ocean!), but we still kind of wanted to get the hell out of there because we knew we had the very long, and much less exciting, retracing of our tracks all the way back to our tents.

Rapping down the steep-ish ice section.

Three and a half hours later, when we arrived at our camp, Andre and I decided out of sheer exhaustion (and laziness probably) to stay the night again at Camp 2. 19,000 ft. We put off packing up and walking down to Camp 1 until the next day. Imran however, who was feeling a bit better now, convinced Jiri to go down so they would be at lower elevation and not have to sleep on snow.

Day 5:
As it so turns out, we got about a foot of snow and drift around our tent in the morning, and a near-white-out to walk down in. The scariest part was that the snow was now possibly covering crevasses and snow bridges, making it a thrilling game of “guess the way and hope you don’t break through a snow bridge".

That day we hiked downhill a total of 1800 meters. We had enough food to split this torture up into two days, but I was at the point where had done what I had come there to do and just wanted a shower and a real meal. This trip had officially been the last straw with many meals for us. The smell of powdered milk makes me gag and Andre could not bring himself to eat another bite of Backpackers Pantry’s Hawaiian Chicken and Rice. We will definitely have to get more creative for our next few climbs!
It feels so great to have Huascaran behind us. Now we can gaze out at that massive snow lump we see from town with a sense of pride instead of anticipation and even fear.

Imran, Jiri, and Andre will go on to climb Shaqsha, but I am going to take longer to recharge my batteries for climbing than them. Could it be true that men enjoy the “sufferfest” more than us women? Or am I just a wimp? :)

Kaeli's summit handstand

A daylight view of some of the terrain we had to climb up and through