Amy and Chris backpack South America: Huayna Potosi

La Paz is awesome! You could get lost in wandering the streets for hours! Through the witches market and black market you can get anything and everything you could possibly want - including dried llama fetuses!

Yum?¿

So colourful

Someone call an electrician!

There are tons of excursions out of La Paz so arranging our first one we had no idea what we were in for! Mount Huayna Potosi is a 6088m summit where you spend 3 days hiking and ice climbing. Sounds fun right? It was an amazingly horrible experience!

Huayna Potosi

Lake on the drive up

Day 1 was great! We got to base camp and donned our winter gear, crampons, and ice axes and hiked up the glacier to do some ice climbing. Getting used to the crampons was hard on the feet. It´s like hiking in very uncomfortable ski boots! We arrived at a part of the glacier where we harnessed up and practiced climbing up a vertical wall of ice! Every swing of the ice axe you just hope it sticks and doesn´t douse you with a cloud of ice down the shirt!

Getting used to the gear :)

So uncomfortable!

wahoo !

Swing that axe!

Day 2 we loaded up our heavy bags and hiked to "high camp".

Day 3 (Summit Attempt) The alarm went off at 12:00 midnight and only having got about 30 minutes of sleep we ate a small snack, put on our mountaineering gear and stepped out onto the glacier. The air was a cool -5 at 5200m where we began and we followed the dim beams of our headlamps like carrots infront our noses. As we pushed on up our lungs burned and hearts pumped battery acid, by the time we reached 5600m it was -12 deg C. Stepping and jumping across crevasses that swollowed our light made me thankful we were wearing harnesses and all roped together! In the dark we had now been hiking for three hours when we reached a technical section where we really found the use of our crampons and axes. The trail narrowed to a spine only about 0.5m wide sloping upward at 70 degrees where a fall to the left was directly into a giant cravass and a fall to the right was a roll down the steep glacier for 100m then a cravass. Take your pick! Digging in our ice axes and toes of our crampons we blocked out the exhaustion and the lack of sleep and moved on forward. Our guide set 7:00 as our turn around time (summit or not) because mountaineering when the sun has been on the ice for too long is dangerous. It was 6:00 and still another hour and a half from the summit, the effects of the altitude were beginning to take their toll on Chris. Making the call to turn back at 5850m was a difficult decicsion but necessary. The summit so close yet so far! The sun was now up and the view was spectacular. Hiking back down was just as hard as going up and Chris really getting sick now would dig a hole with his axe and puke in it then cover it up like nothing had happened!
This hike was the hardest but most rewarding thing I have ever done!