Expedition: Pt. Two - Headaches & Heartbreaks

The first step was a right, pointing east, with the morning sun at my face. We had awoken at the beginning of the valley's dawn, as the first bits of light slipped through the self-imposed fog of the high Cordillera Blanca, to ready ourselves for the day ahead. We hoped to hike the entire trail to Lake 69 that day, a tantalizingly possible feat sitting there in the morning sun. Our path would take us from Cebollapampa through the valley, up over the granite wall into the high mountains and onward through boulders and meadows to the lake. From our campground, the trail stretched twelve miles; a more than respectable distance, with almost a mile in elevation gain. But on that first right, into the sun, it didn't matter.

The sierra of Peru is much like the Sierras of California taken to its fairytale conclusion; everything is steeper, snowier, taller, more transcendent than even those most transcendent of American peaks. The scale of the mountains is staggering, a range absolutely beyond comprehension. Every vista stretches for miles, innumerable waterfalls tumble down endless cliffs, and always, always, more above you. There is no end to the heights. North America has three mountains above 6000m. In our national park, we saw nearly fifty.

By noon, when we stopped for lunch on the switchbacks leading out of the valley, I could feel the altitude coursing through my blood vessels, pounding away at the walls with little ball peen hammers. Cebollapampa, our campground three hours back, is at 12,000 feet and we've only been going up since then. We all popped our pills - available without a prescription, like usual - and took our chances.Though it's midday, we're getting our first taste of hail off the mountain, sometimes falling in complete sunshine, sometimes mixed in with the fog. Halfway up the switchbacks we're treated to a visual reward: a plummeting nine-tier waterfall running off the altiplano. As the image alternates from our left to our right and back again, we debate its height. All agree hail is better than rain.

A few ridges and a few hours later, we clamber over a small boulder and look out on the most surreal valley I could have imagined. I was honestly surprised to see it. A massive plain, over a mile wide and eight miles long, rests between vertical cliffs of granite, some rising to peaks of over twenty thousand feet. The meadow is made up of a dense mat of lichens and mosses, shrubs and sparse tufts of grass, each one a golden firework caught mid-burst. Oxygen is difficult to come by, so Jeff and I take a breather by an old signpost. Our map tells us the good news: there in that field, sitting on that rock, looking at a green poof, we're at 14,600 ft. Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48, is 14,505.Without much change, the mood goes grim. We're an unknown distance from the lake, our heads are pounding, light is fading. A sharp wind tumbles down from the mountain, cutting across the plain, chapping our skin and making life just that much more difficult. We're stuck; we can't retreat, we can't stay exposed on the mountainside, and we can't risk the conditions at the lake. It begins to hail. I'm miserable, Jeff's miserable, Alex is going delirious, and the weather is turning against us. A lone French climber passes us - the first person we've seen all day - and she's heading downhill. She points to her head, saying she cannot go on. As she slips beyond the ridge, I see something bright and dull next to my pack. It's a cow vertebra, long since cleaned by the snow. I hold the bone up to the horizon: Oh, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune!

After some fruitless debate, we decided to pitch our tent behind a little toe of the mountainside, the only area we can find with any sort of protection from the wind. A few cows saunter over to investigate, and finding no comfort, content themselves on some low bushes. Our bodies floating away on the thin air, we throw in the towel on getting to the top. It's about two in the afternoon, and we're napping the day away...