We climb a mountain…
After a couple of rest days in Huaraz Nick gets the urge to climb one of the many snow capped peaks in the Cordillera Blanca. I don’t have this urge but after speaking to a couple of agencies I decide to join him on Vallunaraju, a 5,686m peak just outside Huaraz, mainly swayed by the day of ice climbing and crevasse rescue rather than the actul peak itself.
The first day was a bouncey drive to the base camp and then a “2 hour” walk to the morraine camp (according to our guide), it was closer to 3 and a lot harder than we expected. Partly because we were carrying a whole host of things we don’t normally put in our bags when trekking (e.g. a reading book) on the basis that it was only a 2 hour walk (the plastic boots, helmet, harness, crampons etc aren’t usual equipment either!), but also because it was a tough walk, steep and bouldery – plus anything that takes you from 4500m to 4900m is going to be hard!
Atfer starting in lovely weather, shortly after setting up camp it started to snow and so we spent the rest of the afternoon in the tent, eventually going to sleep around 6pm (well it is just about dark then!)
The next morning we were full of beans (after such a long sleep!) and ready to brave the ice climbing on the glacier below Vallunaraju. The hardest part was climbing down to where we then had to climb back up – it took at least twice the time to climb down as it did to climb back up and considering I’ve only ever ice climbed once before it was very testing.
Having said that coming back up wasn’t a piece of cake, trying to slam in ice axes at 5025m is tyring to say the least, but also rewarding. We had hoped to do a basic ice rescue course in the afternoon, but the weather turned again, and we were both exhausted from the climbing anyway. We were grateful for the lazy afternoon considering we’d be up at 1am for a 1.30am breakfast and 2am start for the summit.
1am came round far too quickly, but we were off and walking by 2.05am. What can I say, after the 20min walk or so to the bottom of the glacier it wasn’t long before we were cramponed up and tied together.
4 hours of solid walking saw us arrive at the top for sunrise at around 6.10am. It was damn hard work. No real stops, just an ongoing tug of the rope from the person infront reminding you that you couldn’t stop. About 2 to 2.5 hours in (I wasn’t looking at my watch – too cold) I had a real feeling of nausea, but luckily it went away, coming back in waves every now and again. Walking in the pitch black was interesting. The snow was so sparkly and pretty, but it meant that you really couldn’t see where you were going and whether or not, what felt like steep precipices really fell away to nothing, or if it was just a slope.
Whilst the majority of the route was walking (uphill all the way) the top 80m or so is slightly steeper, but nothing like we were on the day before. At the bottom of the col betwen the two summits (Vallunaraju has two summits) I swore that I would never do something like this again, but the top and the views of the surrounding mountains in the sun rise – never say never – but it won’t be for a while. So I reached the top – 5m higher than Gilman’s Point – what a lot of people call the “top” of Kilimanjaro (the real top is 5895m) just shows what acclimatisation can do for you.
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We didn’t stay too long at the top- only about 10 mins or so, we were all really cold and there was a wind chill to add to the minus numbers. Coming down we got to see what we’d walked through – stunning snow formations. Only about one and a half hours down too – including some bum sledging towards the bottom – much fun!
And this just about sums up how we felt at the end!
Tags: Huaraz, Peru, Travel, Trek
Jenni
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