Hyuna Potosi
Trip Start
Apr 14, 2006
1
43
51
Trip End
Oct 27, 2006
La Paz, Bolivia
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
After a shop round the tour agencies after arriving back in La Paz, I found a tour operator that I was happy with for an attempt to scale Hyuna Potosi, a 6000m plus peak about an hour or so´s drive from La Paz.
The climb was a 3 day trip with the first involving an afternoon´s training with ice axes and crampons on the glacier, about an hours hike from base camp. This was one of the reasons I chose to go with the tour agency within the Hostelling International hostel in La Paz (the other being that they would not take you near the peak unless you had spent at least 4 days at altitude in La Paz)
High Camp
. Other agencies were more than willing to send you up with no experience whatsoever and asked no questions about time spent at altitude! In the end I was in a group of 4, two guys and two girls, going for the top. After our afternoon on the glacier, we spent the night camping in tents as base camp, 4700m. The next morning we started out on a 3 hour hike up to high camp, a lodge at 5130m. It wasn´t so much the distance and height which was the challenge, but rather the altitude and that we were carrying our full back packs with water and wind proof clothing, crampons, ice axes and everything we were going to need for the next day. As we got higher I definitely found it hard going, but I found that if I copied the guides and took slow, short steps, but kept going then I wasn´t running out of breath so easily.
Once we got to the top the weather started to close in and the snow started to fall so I was glad after a hot lunch to curl up in my sleeping bag. We spent the rest of the afternoon asleep as going for the summit entailed a 1am start!
The next morning when we got all kitted up and ready to go, snow was no longer an issue, but there was an electric storm blowing ominously around the mountains
Me at the foot of the glacier
. Nevertheless my group and others heading for the top on the same day set off up the steep slopes of snow, as the more permanent snow line began just behind high camp. I was roped together with one of the guys, with our guide at the front. Certainly for the initial steep sections I am not sure how much I climbed and how much I was dragged up the mountain! In the end I found using my ice axe as a walking stick an aid to keeping all the effort from my legs and I managed to get myself in a bit of a rhythm, just trudging up through the snow and keeping going. Unfortunately, at the first step, an ice wall about 20m in height at 5700m, the storm which was bellowing around the peaks got a little too close for comfort and out lead guide called an end to our climb. It was simply too dangerous to continue and our group, like all others that day headed down without making it to the top. My descent, however, was not uneventful. I had climbed half way up the wall before being called down and the descent involved moving sideways to the left before landing safely on the snow beneath in order to avoid a rather large crevasse at the bottom. The fresh snow on the wall made climbing all the more difficult, as I was finding that even though I was slamming my axe hard into the wall, it was only catching fresh snow rather than the ice underneath so that when I tugged hard on the axe to make sure I had a good grip, it simply came away in my hand. So the problem emerged when I slipped on the wall, lost all my grip and ended up swinging around, hands, feet everything away from the wall, dangling over the crevasse with my back against the ice!! It took a few minutes for me to turn myself back towards the wall and get enough grip to make my way over to the kind of ice bridge which led over the edge of the crevasse and to the base of the wall! The rest of the descent was filled more with disappointment as the storm died away with the beginning of the sunrise and we watched as the sun rose over mountains, now coated with snow. It was absolutely beautiful...I only wish I could have seen the view from a little bit higher.
