dred

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has looked at my Instagram feed, but I like mountains. Since reading a book on the 1996 Everest disaster in high school, I’ve also been interested in mountaineering. I was pretty sure that I would never try it, but I enjoyed reading some of the amazing survival stories and mental toughness that the most successful mountaineers have displayed. Mountaineering to me seemed destined to be like football to my mate Ev, who in a friendship group full of footballers, watches more footy than any of us, but has never played the game.

However, thanks to the cheap prices and “relatively” easy climbs in Bolivia I had the chance to not be Ev. Huayna Potosi is 6,088m high and is located only 15km from La Paz. Agencies in La Paz market Huayna Potosi as the easiest 6,000m climb in the world. But as Erin said to me, that’s like saying Berlin is the easiest marathon in the world. It’s still a marathon.

It’s also more technically demanding than some other 6,000m peaks. Crampons and an ice axe were required, and due to the crevasses and huge drop off on either side of the ridge near the summit, I had to be roped to my guide Silverio at all times.

To give me the best chance of success I opted for the three day option, which on the first day included a training course on a glacier teaching me how to use the crampons and ice axe. It turned out that they weren’t too difficult to use, and after a bit of practice my guide rappelled me half way down a 20m vertical ice cliff and got me to climb up – his idea of “fun”. I didn’t think so, but when I fell and the rope didn’t break and I didn’t die, it gave me a lot of confidence that the path up the mountain would be fairly safe.

The second day was a hike up to the second camp, and after an afternoon of relaxing and attempting to get some sleep, we woke up at midnight for our 1,000m climb to the summit.

I had two worries for the climb. My biggest concern was that during the exposed or technical sections I’d either be too scared or not good enough with the crampons and ice axe to summit. I was also completely unsure of how my body would respond to the high altitude.

As a rope had been fixed in the steepest section, the technical aspect of the climb wasn’t too difficult. Up until about 5,600m, the altitude hadn’t been a problem either. Silverio and I were setting a great pace, and I was feeling strong. At some stages I even thought we were taking unnecessary breaks, although I was soon glad that I didn’t voice this opinion.

The transition from feeling like a mountain goat to being exhausted happened quickly, and by around 5,700m I was borderline begging for more rest. In my exhausted state our progress seemed unbelievably slow. It was devastating to hear that we’d only climbed an extra 100 vertical metres when I was sure it would be 200m at least.

As the air got thinner and thinner the breaks became more and more regular. During one rest period I foolishly tried to both take a photo and have some water. This left me almost as tired at the end of the break as the start. Obviously I had to remain as still as possible at future stops, which was complicated by the fact it was so cold that I had lost feeling in my hands. My solution was to do nothing else but curl up in a ball when we stopped, knowing full well that I had an extra jacket in my bag, but worried that the extra energy used would mean I wouldn’t make the top.

By this stage, it became pretty simple. Worry about nothing else but taking that next step. Over and over again. Take a break for a while. Repeat. Slowly I got closer and closer to the top.

The final section to the summit involved walking along a cornice ridge with a 100m drop on one side and an over 1,000m drop off on the other. I had seen a few photos of the climb before I started and this section made me more nervous than anything else. I was sure that if anything was going to make me fail, it was this ridge.

Maybe it was the focus purely on taking that next step. Perhaps it was because I was so close to the summit I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself without getting to the top. Or maybe the pictures made it look worse than it was. Whatever the reason, the final ridge didn’t bother me at all, and I arrived at the summit just before sunrise. The next half an hour, as we watched the sunrise, and could see all the way to Lake Titicaca and along the Cordillera Real mountain range was pretty special.

The descent passed without major incident (for me – another climber lost his camera in a crevasse) and when we made it back to base camp Silverio and I celebrated the climb with the first beer I’ve ever had at 10:30am and not felt bad about myself afterwards.

Andrew