That evening after supper I walked down to spend the night near the car. Jim and Pedro arrived at about 10am the next morning, followed by the mules half an hour or so later. The car started and we cheerfully set off up the 4,800 m Paso Sanches towards Lago Suches, above which is the base camp for Chaupi Orco on this side. The morning was perfectly clear and the views were terrific. We picked up a couple of men from Puina who’d walked over the pass that morning. At around 2pm we reached Lago Soral and met up with the muleros who were to take us to base camp a few hours up the valley above the lake.
I had to take the car down to park it near the house of the mulero and Jim and Pedro went ahead. I left the muleros to pack and walked up along the lake alone. At the top of the lake there is a spectacularly violent cascade of glacial melt-water. This isn’t mentioned in any of the climbing guides I’ve read but it should be: it’s a sight to behold, the water boiling white as it smashes down onto the rocks below and erupts into a huge mushroom of air and turbulence. I thought of my friend Ron Davies who makes water turbines and who told me that the energy-density of hydro power in the mountains is far higher than that of direct solar or wind energy. I still wonder what all this power is used for in Nature. The answer suggested by the Principle of Maximum Entropy is that it is used for tearing down the mountains and distributing the minerals.
I looked for Pedro and Jim at the top of the pampa above the lake, but I couldn’t see any sign of them. I walked further up, thinking that Pedro had decided to make the base camp a bit higher to shorten the next day’s long climb to high camp. I wasn’t sure of which way they would have gone though: the glacier which I had expected to be able to see from the top of the pampa wasn’t evident. There was a high waterfall over a big lump of ruddy ice-polished rock and it seemed likely it was up above this, out of sight of anywhere below. However there were other such waterfalls further up so I had an embarrassing number of possible options.
I spent an hour or two wandering around exploring the valey above, but still found no sign of Jim or Pedro or the mules. This was baffling, because there seenmed no way that they could have passed me in such a narrow valley. When I crossed over to the top of a long moraine I looked down and saw the camp a few hundred meters below me on the pampa. It was completely hidden from the view of anyone coming up the trail across the pampa. Pedro must have realised this, but didn’t see fit to tell me! Apparently he had seen me following a mere ten minutes behind he and Jim.
The next morning the arrieros arrived as we were enjoying a breakfast of fried bacon and eggs. They had brought with them a small flock of llamas for the trip to high camp. Jim and I set off ahead, leaving Pedro and the llameros to pack up the camp and load the animals. The walk up the moraine was steep and strenuous, especially for Jim who still had no apetite and must have been running just on reserves. It was made more interesting by the sighting of a pair of large hawks only a few meters away from us, enjoying a breakfast of some fairly large furry animal (all we found was a quantity of fluff and some of the less edible-looking internal organs.) We stopped for a break as the llamas arrived. They were very suspicious of us and grouped together before making quickly across the path in front of us and on up the slope.
After ascending the moraine the trail follows up above the long glacier and into a cirque where we found ourselves almost surrounded by nieve-topped peaks reaching up into the clouds. Chaupi Orco itself is not actually visible from the camp, but we got a good view of the entire route were going to attempt from a point a kilometer or so before the camp. The route was one that Jeff and a client had down-climbed a few weeks before. This route takes a direct line up scree to a col and then follows the ridge faithfully over a series of false summits before finding the actual summit ridge. It looked pretty steep in places, up to 70 degrees and I wondered if I was going to get another go at soling some steep nieve. After having watched Pedro on Azcarani I resolved to give it a more concerted effort this time.
On the way up to high camp I found the highest flowering plants I’ve ever seen. A fetching little white alpine daisy at about 5,000m ASL.
We ate early. I ate a lot and knew that as a result I wouldn’t get any sleep before the 12.30 am start that Pedro had scheduled. I sat up all night chewing coca and slowly digesting my dinner, which is not a bad way to spend a few hours of darkness at 5,000m ASL: one cannot fully appreciate the warmth of a sleeping bag and a tent when one is asleep.
At around 1.30 am we moved off together by torchlight. Again I took the most direct line I could see towards the col. I held the left-hand side of the cirque so that I made as gentle an ascent as possible without ever losing height or veering too far from the direct line. This proved pretty efficient and I had left Jim and Pedro far behind within a few hours. For some reason Pedro led Jim down into the valley floor which must have cost them almost 100 meters of ascent. I suspect he did not feel that a proper mountain guide should follow a gringo so he had to take a different route.
I made the col within a couple of hours and proceeded to look for a way up onto the ridge. At first I tried the obvious gentle ice slope but I was rather alarmed by the very clear sound of running water beneath my feet. This indicated thin ice. I gingerly stepped off to one side until the sound faded and proceeded up to a point where I found me way cut by a deep crevasse just below the top edge of the nieve I had been heading for. I moved off the ice and a few minutes of easy and enjoyable scrambling on fairly safe rock got me up onto the ridge. I waited there for half an hour or so until I could see the lights of Pedro and Jim below me on the ice. I shouted a warning about the crevasses and continued on up the ridge.
The first step was about 150m of fifty degree hard nieve and climbing it was sheer joy. At the top I easily found my way along the ridge to the much steeper section that from the high camp I’d judged would be about 70 degrees. At first it was a good firm surface and an easy walk. Things looked good. I found what must have bneen Jeff and his clients foot?rints further on, but they had been filled in with drifting snow. Then the firm nieve gave way to deeper, soft snow. As the angle of ascent steepened, the snow seemed to get deeper. Eventually I was climbing by pushing the handle of my walking axe directly down. The slope was about sixty degrees but the soft snow made it hard to get any purchase with my feet. I was also worried about an avalanche: I cut a shaure trough in the slab and the center piece slipped down with very little help from me. I decided to retreat and look for a way around.
On the laft was a deep bergschrund with what appeared a very uninvitingly thin cover of snow, given the fresh soft stuff I had just been wading in. I firsdt tried the left-hand edge of the ridge and got to about the same height before hitting the same problem: deep snow ona steep slope. I tried the ridge further to the right. The nieve there was harder at first, but just before the crevasse became too soft to climb, as before. By this time I was tired and the sun had come up. I reluctantly decided to give up.
It was only an hour or so before I arrived at the high camp and was relieved to see that Pedro had not packed up and gone down without me. I had a hurried second breakfast of salami and cream crackers and we packed up the camp and set off, leaving the llameros to pack the animals. Pedro and Jim set off first, then I left half an hour later, then the llamas and their keepers. We all arrived at base camp at pretty much the same time. For everyone the descent was slow and difficult. The steep slope and the hot sunshine being the main contributing factors to the misery. It was nice to sit at the base camp and do nothing at all!
The next day we packed the base camp up and walked down to the car. The battery was flat and I’d not been able to park it on a very good slope so we had a half hour of quite serious effort pushing it around to get it facing downhill. It started at the second attempt and Jim and I took an unauthorised excursion to visit Puina which is probably the most remote village in Bolivia that is still on a road. This was probably a mistake …
On the way back the engine started mis-firing because the battery was so flat it couldn’t power the distributor properly. Eventually we stalled, to my horror on a hairpin bend on Paso Sanches. This was a bend on which I had expected to have to do a three point turn to get around. The car was facing a steep drop of a few hundred meters or so, I couldn’t start the engine and there was no possibility of the three of us pushing it back up the slope ourselves: it is far too heavy. Jim got out and thoughtfully surveyed the situation. It’ll go! he said. Are you sure? I asked. Yes. He was still looking thoughtfully at the front wheels. … I let the brakes off and sat there holding the wheel in full lock and watching as the bonnet appeared to reach out a meter or two over the edge of the drop. This is just like climbing, I thought. You make a rational assesment of a situation, then hang your life on it!
We made it down to the foot of the pass without further mis-haps, but the engine was very poorly without enough voltage to make sparks. We didn’t have enough to work the wipers either, nor to open the window, so Jim jumped out while we were moving, ran around to my side, wiped the windscreen, and then ran back and jumped back in, all without stopping the car, which would have risked stalling the engine!! Later he did the same trick to guide me around a corner. It was quite good fun for everyone. But eventually we stalled on another three-point hairpin and there was no chance of getting around in one this time. We were about half an hour’s walk from Pelechuco at this point so Jim and Pedro set off on foot. I stayed with the car.
They were gone for hours and I had nothing to do so I started piling up rocks. I eventually built enough of a road that I could have actually driven the car around the bend forward, though at some risk of it getting severely stuck if the road collapsed underneath the wheels. But before I had a chance to test it another car arrived. I had completely blocked the road so he had no alternative except to help me, but I think he would have helped me anyway, as he was a nice guy. We swapped batteries and I was able to start the car and reverse out of his way. At this point the car that Jim and Pedro had sent to rescue me arrived. I asked them to go ahead so that I could follow behind without using headlights which would drain the battery (it was dark at this point, about 7pm or so).
We drove back to Pelechuco like this. Me following the car in front as close as I dared, only using the headlights on the hairpin bends. We got in to Pelechuco at around 8pm.
The next day we set off with the re-charged battery which got us to Antaquilla, an hour or so up over the pass. There we found a mechanic with a charger who charged the battery again which got us as far as Willa Calla, though it was touch-and go and we arrived backfiring and spluttering at the mechanic’s shop. I stopped the car outside and the engine immediately stalled.
This mechanic had a charger too, but when we came back after lunch the ‘recharged’ battery didn’t have enough juice to start the engine. The mechanic didn’t seem to know what the problem was. He showed me that all the fuses he had for his charger had blown. The battery was hot though. I wondered if maybe he’d spent the last hour trying to charge it with the wrong polarity. Later on he seemed to say that the battery was bad.
Jim and Pedro had had enough. There was a mini-bus leaving for La Paz and they jumped on board. I phoned Jeff and he said he’d send Carlos out in another car the next day to fetch me. I settled down in the car for the night and recalled Amy telling me how she much preferred having a car to having to use buses. She likes to be in control of where she’s going. Something else about freedom …
Carlos arrived at mid-day the next day and we drove back swapping the batteries every hour or so. We were back in La Paz that evening. Jim and Pedro had got in 24 hours earlier.
