Failed attempt on Alpamayo

For our last peak Robbie and I decided to wander up the Santa Cruz valley and tick an easy route on Alpamayo. We had heard that the peak was consistently crowded, but it is such a classic that we wanted to give it a go. Maybe we would climb it at night, be fast enough to pass parties in front of us, or just get lucky.

The trek up the Santa Cruz is really a phenomenal walk. I kept thinking how much I would like to bring a certain girl up this valley… beautiful streams, soaring mountains, diverse ecological terrain, it was fantastic. BUT, we were focused on the climbing and worked our way up as fast as possible.

Two days in we reached base camp. The Cordillera, for all its vastness, is really a small place, and we met two Americans that we’d met on Ranrapalca and two others we knew from the Ishinca valley. The Ishinca guys were part of an organized group and they offered us a place in their dining tent for a night. What luxury! Robbie and I were used to bad high bivies, not big spacious tents!

Anyway, as we hiked into base camp we heard stories of tons of snow on the route and consistently bad weather. Once there we started talking to parties who had been up to the col camp and tried to reach the route. The news was bad, of waist deep postholing and lots of fresh snow on a consolidated slide layer.

We decided to see for ourselves and hike up to the col. That hike felt like ascending into a death zone, it just felt wrong somehow. As we walked we could see and hear point release avalanches come roaring down the face across from us. When we arrived at the moraine camp we met a Peruvian guide who brought his team off the mountain. Conditions are impossible, he said, and very dangerous.

It took about 30 seconds with those conditions to make the decision to back off.

We headed down to base camp, spent the night there, and headed all the way down valley to the road the next day. The hike out was a 15 mile Batan death march (why do most peaks seem to end this way?), but soon we were headed back to Huaraz. Oh well, we clearly made the right call. As the Peruvian guide told us, “Las montagnes es las montagnes.”

Getting to the summit is optional. . .Getting back down isn't.

-- Ed Visteurs