skipping ahead to the present finds us camped on scree surrounded by patches of snow. Hemmed in on one side by nevado coropuna, solimani and canon del cotihuasi on the other. At the moment I am attending to various contraptions that my oxygen starved brain has come up with to melt snow without using fuel. One of them consists of a garbage bag held by rocks covered with snow, waiting for mother sun to melt it, at which point the more valuable liquid water will be siphoned off for consumption. The other is a black water bag filled with snow that I am sitting on. Yesterday, at about 1 in the morning, we were dropped off at laguana pallacocha by a bus bound for the remote village of cotihuasi. We had been crammed on there for 8½ hours, the last 4 of which had been on dirt road, winding and bumping our way up to this pass at 15,385 ft. there is little doubt in my mind that our fellow travelers mus have thought us insane. We humped our packs up a few hundred feet to the lake, after carefully inspecting a ‘hotel’ on the side of the road. This ramshackle shelter was either never completed, or abandoned. Either way, it was filled with bats and some brand of nasty. The ‘rocks’ around the lake appeared to be supple and yielding, but we were too exhausted to lend that much thought as we dove into our sleeping bags and slept. Today we did a brief jaunt up to the base base of the mountain. As we came down, I had an epiphany: the Spanish weren’t in it for the slavery, the limb hacking etc…they were the forefathers of the modern DEA: protecting those crazy inca from themselves.
Can’t sleep. So continue writing. We stayed today at camp 2 to acclimate better after a sleepless (seemingly) night. Yesterday after spending the night at the lake-alternating between freezing and sleep, we got up at a perfectly lazy 11:30 to a blazing sun, a glaring blue sky and one of the most inspiring views I have ever awoken to. My crap-ass thermometer on my jacket zipper claimed the night had dropped to -10° F, but who knows. It was definitely below freezing. This is when we discovered that the ‘rocks’ weren’t rocks. Granted, there were plenty of real rocks, but the large green moss covered objects that had appeared the night before as supple rocks were in fact some sort of life. It may be that they are related to cryptobiotic soil-since indeed they are growing in a desert at an altitude of 15,500 ft. Llama tracks grazed our haphazard camp site and the lake was larger than expected. After a breakfast of granola and powdered soy milk we decided to move campup a bit. The altitude made it hard to focus on packing and thus it was about 3:00 in the pm when we finally started hiking. We made our way towards a jumble of rocks that looked like a good hiding place. We found an appropriately sized cubby hole and carefully placed our spare food (we took 6 days worth for our summit push) and fuel and unneeded clothing into garbage bags, into the cubby hole and then carefully covered it with rocks, marked the location with 2 cairns and on the gps, and we were off. The climbing went painfully slow and by 5 we had barely made it to the snow line. We hurriedly set camp-joe pitched the tent and I melted snow. The second the sun dropped below the horizon, the temperature dropped to below freezing. We cooked some sort of pre-packaged deliciousness for dinner and crawled into the warmth of the tent to eat.
