Chopicalqui, SW Ridge, AD+

For our next peak, Robbie and I decided to try the Northwest Ridge on Chopicalqui, one of the higher peaks in the Cordillera. We loaded up for a week plus in the mountains, intending to do both the NW ridge and try a route on the back side of Huondoy, where we’d gotten bouted the year before. After some cab negotiating we were on our way to base camp.

One of the dangers of simply hailing a cab outside your hostel in Huaraz is the cabbies frequently don’t have any idea where they’re going. We headed towards Caraz, stopping to ask directions to Chopicalqui along the way. In short order we are lost… we seem to be on the right road but can’t seem to find the turnoff. Anyway, long story short we finally find our way back to where we are supposed to be and lug our stuff the 20 minutes to base camp.

It’s lucky that the base camp is so close to the road because we brought a big wall-sized haulbag, hoping to find some burros to take us up. None are to be found due to our late arrival, so we end up making two trips to get this monstrosity to the camp. The following day turns out to be my birthday, which is announced in rather unceremonious fashion. We are chatting with some other Americans in base camp and I look at Robbie: “Is today the sixth? Well, happy birthday to me!”

Our intended route, the NW ridge looks verrrry scarrry, and decidedly out of condition, we conclude. After we got back to town we did some research and learned that the ridge has changed a lot since the original ascent, from a nice snow and mixed climb to a horrendous double corniced traverse. Anyway, after some deliberation in camp we decided to do the normal route, the SW ridge. We’ve heard good things about it and plan to do it in really light and fast style. Since it’s relatively easy we take no rope, no protection, not even a tent. Just our sleeping bags, personal gear and a little bit of food.

The standard assault of the peak usually involves three days or more depending on acclimatization strategy: however many days at base camp, one day ferrying gear up to moraine camp and a night there, one more day to high camp then do the peak and back down to base camp. Our strategy was to blast up to high camp, bivy for six or seven hours, tick the summit and race back to base camp. We would bring one dehydrated dinner each, a few Clif bars and a ton of goo.

Around 11 the morning of my birthday we got our stuff together and took off. Because we had so little gear we made the arduous slog up to high camp in four hours, about half what it would have taken fully loaded. We set up camp on the glacier (since we have no tent “camp” involves two stamped down areas about the size of coffins to lay our bags in). Then begins the monotony of boiling snow for water and waiting for nightfall. The glacier is HOT.

Finally night falls to a beautiful sky. On the way up one of the Peruvian guides we ran into claimed that bad weather was headed in, but not that night. The upshot of being so clear, in part, was the cold, almost 15 below. I slept in everything I had with me, four layers on my torso under my bag, and was (mostly) warm. Around 3am we are roused by a Spanish team of six that had camped below us on the glacier and were headed up. We stamped around for a while to warm up and launched.

Robbie and I moved fast on this climb since we didn’t bring packs. We quickly passed the Spaniards and got to the schrund below the summit around 7, just as the sun was peeking its way over the horizon. This route on Chopicalqui was not terribly hard, but we had to navigate somewhat carefully around the schrund. Robbie made two or three overhanging moves on bad snow and pulled through. I scouted a path around the schrund by descending and using a snow bridge 10 or 12 meters down the slope. This required pulling over and around through thigh deep snow and up a 50 degree slope. At one point I looked down and realized that I had pulled around the Chopicalqui ridge and was looking at a slide down 7500 feet of snow and rock into the Peron valley if I slipped. Nice little added focus for my concentration.

A slog up the slope and back onto the summit ridge, across a 12 inch wide snowbridge and up to the summit. Yahoo! We were the first party there to fantastic views of the Cordillera. What an incredible place.

We started the sprint down and made it back to base camp around 11, just under 24 hours after we left. The slog down was long and painful but it was great to be back! And not a moment too soon, as it turned out, as rain and snow moved in by early afternoon. By evening we were headed back toward Huaraz, enjoying cold beers along the way.

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

-- Rene Daumal