Lying in the far northern Peruvian Andes Huaraz is ringed by startling 6000+ meter snow peaks. It is known among travellers as “Peru’s Switzerland.” Even though this title is misleading on several fronts Huaraz is, as indicated by its title, THE place for high mountain trekking and peak ascents in Peru. I actually returned to Peru from Ecuador under the siren call of these peaks and when, after more than 35 hours of travel across deserts in shoddy buses, I finally beheld the skyline of Huaraz I was not dissapointed. It is one of the great sins of the universe that I no longer had a camera at that time. The written word will have to suffice: Huaraz is a wholly unimpressive town more reminiscent of Bolivia’s dusty north than of anything else I had seen in Peru. It’s inhabitants were almost all quechua-speaking native peoples. I stayed in a hotel I had heard of from the Israeli girls I had travelled with down the coast from Ecuador. It turned out that the two others in the room I was shown into at 7 in the morning were two German guys I had gone trekking with in southern Ecuador just two weeks previously. One was Johann, the curley-headed jokester who had travelled extensively before in Asia. The other was his friend from home who had taken six weeks off from his job as a chef to come travel with Johann. They both had a hankering to go to one of these high peaks on a tight budget.

Before I knew it all three of us were in a minivan driven by a rather sober fellow by Peruvian standards with our “porter” sitting next to him chatting away. During our porter’s heart-wrenching account of his intensely poor and misdirected youth the driver interrupted him to ask what the three foreigner’s nationalities were. He replied that there were two Germans and that I was American. “Oh… an American!” he said, “Good thing we have him in the car to protect us!” which caused the Germans to laugh uproarously and ask me why America thought it had the right to police the world. Regardless of my mixed personal feelings about this question I surprised myself by my patriotic answer: “well, you Germans gave world policing a shot and look where THAT went.” They sat there mouths agape in stunned mirth. They took it in stride and moved on to other topics. I am not sure if the two Peruvians understood what I was referring too.


The approach hike up to the peak was only 10 hours total but all of that a brutally steep uphill. Our goal was a modest peak at 5,500 Meters (18,000 feet) that involved only 500 Meters of glacier walking with our untrained guide. About half way up I started to feel how weak almost three days of diahhrea had made me. Ignoring the complaints of my body I continued upwards. We had decided to make camp at 5,000 Meters so that the next day we would have to go up another 500 Meters. When we arrived at that level we were on a narrow neck of rocky land. Stark and stunningly beautiful in an icey post-apocalypse sort of way but very unwelcoming in terms of providing a comfy campsite. We spent the next hour hacking away at the ground trying to dislodge the sharp rocks from the frozen ground. After we had made a large enough area to pitch both tents we got down to the business of melting glacial snow for drinking water and dinner. When the sun bent over the horizon of jagged peaks dwarfing us to the west the cold set in like a pack of howling demons. I have never been that cold in my life. In just over an hour the temperature plunged to a windy –20 F and here I am totally unprepared with my GoLite half sleeping bag rated for 15 degrees at best. The porter Pedro and I crawled into my thin Stephenson’s Warmlight 4-season and attempted to sleep. Both Pedro and I were shaking so badly that we decided after half and hour that we had better snuggle up with the Germans or risk freezing to death. Four men in a two man tent and the gas in my intestines had grown to outrageous proportions. It was so bad that I had to sit up every few minutes to burp or I started to suffocate from the pressure on my lungs. We had also neglected to melt sufficient snow for drinking water and even rationing what precious little I had just to wet my mouth in the intense dry cold it was all gone halfway through the night. At 5 I figured I had suffered enough (and tortured the others enough) so I left the relatively warm tent (I think the temperature inside was –10 F) and went out into the excruciating cold wearing what little of my sleeping bag there was to get some snow melted. With spoon and metal pot in had I struggled up to the edge of the glacier and began to scrape, scrape, scrape the surface. It was much more solid than before and the scraping method was getting me nowhere. I took one of the ice axes and resorted to hacking away at the surface first and then scraping with the spoon. Despite my thick fleece gloves the metal was practically fused to my fingers. I took the pot of ‘snow’ back to our camp and tried to get the stove going. I had no luck getting the fire to start and eventually had to roust out Pedro to get the quirky old kerosene stove bubbling under the pot. I was not sure if I was going to try to go up to the peak. This made almost three nights that I had not gotten any sleep and I was feeling weak and flu-like. Everything sounded like shit to me when I went over it in my head – when my outlook is like that I know I am in really bad physical shape. I took at wait and see attitude and went behind nearby boulders for some violent diahhrea sessions.

About two hours later everyone had eaten and almost all their gear was on their bodies. At the last second I said “oh well, all I really want to do is walk on a glacier with these crampons so I will do that much and then see how I feel. I quickly donned my gear and we headed up the mountain. After about an hour I was feeling so dizzy and gastric that I had to suddenly rip off my layers and lay this big steaming pile of sick turd in the pristine swirling glacial sculpture. Everyone stood by in amused silence. I was actually in some risk since I had to detach the harness to get my pants down but soon I had buried the mess and we were once again stepping up the beautifully sloping form. I had never before been full-on hiking up an Ice cap and the feeling was like nothing else. The smoothness and almost improbable angles of the ice and snow made the whole eperience seem surreally simple. The world is made of perfect smooth white forms and I am a sticky ant trudging up it’s surface on my way to nowhere. After another hour the heat and the dryness inside and outside my body were taking their toll. I stopped and violently spewed bloody-looking vomit onto the beautiful snow. The others were shocked and worried. Truth is, this sudden vomiting was the best thing I had done in days. I jumped up from the snow, grabbed my ice axe and said “lets go.” Somehow I was filled with energy and we cruised to the peak without further problem. On the top our ‘porter’ greeted a heavily high-tech gear-laden guide with some other German trekkers. Despite the warmness between our porter and the guide, the guide turned to us and said something to the effect of “you are crazy to be up here with this guy – he has no training.”


The walk down was more scary than going up. The trick was to stride naturally and let the gravity of casual stepping plant the rear spikes of the crampons into the snow. When we reached camp I felt all the energy in my body leave me. The sun hurt my body, the dryness I felt inside could be slaked by no amount of nasty glacial meltwater. I could do nothing but lay in my stiflingly hot and dry tent and hallucinate. Finally, with zombie-like slowness I packed my bag and started down the mountain towards the Italian Mountain Hut we had passed on the way up. Uphill this part of the trek had taken four hours because it was so eroded and sandy. Downhill I took almost 6 hours to reach the bottom. I would stop on the dizzingly steep trail and while sitting pass out into unconcious sleep for 10 minutes at a time awaking with a start to find that I was not in my bedroom back in Evanston but rather perched on this mountain dehydrated as hell. At the mountain hut I bought a 3 litre can of peaches and drank it and all the syrup at one sitting in an attempt to re-hydrate. Just in the nick of time. That gave me some wonderful fuel for projectile vomiting later on from the building’s porch. That night I had my first sleep in four days and felt like I had been revived from the dead.