A year ago today ...

We reached the summit of 6,088 m (19,975 feet) high Huayna Potosi in the Cordillera Real in Bolivia. Re-reading our post from that awesome adventure today.

Climbing a changing Huayna Potosi

We took a lot of photos while we were travelling: 3 months x 2 cameras = 6,000+ pics. We are editing and sorting through them now. We are also working on making a few digestible slideshows, you know short and to the point, rather than repetitive and, well, ultimately, a bit boring.

Huayna Potosi is the snowy mountain in the background.
We actually saw it from all of sides before climbing
to its summit.

As we do this, we are also going to fill in some of the blanks here left by "being out there doing it", rather than being pre-occupied with web access.

This pic taken in beautiful afternoon light shows another vibrant laguna at about 4,700 m and a mountain range that is overshadowed by the summit of Huayna Potosi. We had this 6,088 m high mountain in view every day for the last 3 or 4 days of our trek. We basically walked around it.

That gave us plenty of time to contemplate the ascent we planned. Each view of the mountain is quite different. Climbing all the way up to its summit by the "normal route", also meant that everything else we had seen of it was either way harder for any kind of ascent or impossible by today's standards. In part this is due to the rapid disappearance of glaciers on these sides of Huayna Potosi. The rock being revealed as previous glacier and ice routes melt away, appears to be very, very difficult to contemplate ascending.

Much of the glaciers in the tropical latitudes are disappearing and doing so quickly. It is as if we got a close up view of the true scale of these massive climactic changes.

At the very top of the summit ridge there were lots of rocks
to content with - while on ice crampons. Rocks are hard to
navigate with them. Also rocks mean increased risk of rock fall,
one of the bigger dangers now.

Huayna Potosi climb also truly regal

Inga and Pedro, our climbing guide,
after successful ice climbing practice.

November 19 was a long and memorable day! It started at midnight with the wake up call - like we were sleeping! By 8:10 we had summitted and then about 10:45 am we made it back to high camp for hot soup.

Jan´s first real ice climb: nice style!

In preparation for getting to the top of our first 6,000+ metre mountain, our climbing guide, Pedro - also of Bolivian Mountain Guides - taught us how to ice climb and walk with front pick crampons on a glacier and, at the same time, instilled a great deal of trust in his abilities in the mountains. For the ascent of Huayna Potosi the technical skills needed are minor (as long as you have a great deal of fearlessness and no issues with exposure anyhow) but he actually had us climbing with ice axe and crampons and covered belay and rescue techniques. As rock climbers we knew a fair amount, from knots to anchoring theory, yet learned plenty that day.



Inga with well-placed ice axes goes
for the kick.



Jan relaxing on the sun-drenched rocks
at high camp the afternoon before
our climb.

We´ll show you in pictures how we got to ascend Huayna Potosi.







Never seen a sunrise from this vantage point. About 5,750 m
on Huayna Potosi. 400+ m in elevation to go to the top.



There was this one crevasse we jumped
over both on the way up and down.
Pretty intense, but on belay, of course!



6,088 m. The summit. Yes. We made it.
And still got energy for the descent.
Thanks Pedro for some great guiding.