The Road to Huayhuash

This is an automatic posting to give you something to read while I´m traipsing around in the wilderness. Enjoy!

When I first traveled to South America in the fall of 2008, I immediately fell in love with the Andes. I had always been drawn to the natural beauty of the mountains, embarking on a few short camping and back packing trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and a trip up Katahdin during summer camp. These were fun excursions for me, but not enough to pique my interest such that I might start thinking about hiking and climbing more seriously. When I arrived in Quito, however, all that changed.

I arrived in the middle of the night and the 9,300 foot high city immediately took my breath away – literally. I actually owed my journey there to this altitude; my original motivation for choosing Quito was my desire to experiment with long distance running at high altitudes, a method of training practiced by many elite runners. And so it was that my passion for distance running began to mesh with my love of the mountains.

That first morning, I woke up after a night of fitful sleep and altitude-induced nightmares to find a panorama as breathtaking as the altitude. I stood atop the rooftop terrace of our apartment building and looked up at the 16,000’, rocky peak of Guagua Pichincha, seemingly a stone’s throw away. To the South, the massive, 20,000’ glaciated volcano of Cotopaxi loomed over the city. In between, lay the strip of the densely populated valley floor that made up the city of Quito. Houses continued up the seemingly impossibly steep slopes until finally someone decided enough was enough. Farms grew corn and grain among a quilted patchwork along the sides of the green hills, moving farther up the mountains than seemed believable. I was amazed by the utility of the land and the natural beauty of the surrounding area. Though my day-job would keep me in the city center, I knew that it would not be long before I was venturing off into the surrounding wilderness.

Indeed, it was only a few weeks later that I found myself piling into a rav-4 at the crack of dawn and driving down the Panamericana towards Cotopaxi for my first real alpine climbing experience. Being a totally inexperienced climber, I had hired a local climbing guide to handle the logistics and lead me and a few friends up the peak. The climb was a success inasmuch that I reached the summit, but also that I discovered a new type of challenge that really got me going.
To me, climbing was a continuation of the reason that I love distance running. I felt that an enormous part of reaching the summit had simply been how hard you could push yourself through pain and discomfort. This mental toughness also dominates the mind of a long distance
runner, and so it was natural for me to apply it to climbing.

Unfortunately, running is also the reason that I haven’t taken climbing more seriously. To me, running and training are my top priority – outside of family, school, etc. This means running every day, generally twice a day. When I am in a competitive block of training, I will generally go about 6 months without taking any “zero-days,” where I do not run at all. This means that any type of climbing or hiking I do during that time must be able to be done in tandem with my training. More importantly, I worry much more about the risks associated with climbing while in a competitive block. Even a relatively small injury like a rolled ankle, which might not be an enormous problem to a normal person, might cause me to miss a few days or even a week of training. A more serious injury like a broken bone would most likely be a season ending injury. These are not risks I’m willing to take during the majority of the year.

There are, however, a few weeks every year where I’m able to put training on the back-burner. These weeks occur between competitive blocks – generally in June, after track has ended and before cross country training has started. For the last two years, I have taken these few weeks in June forced myself to take days off from running, serving as both a physical and mental break from the rigors of my training regimen. I realized last year that this period without the commitment to daily training would be ideal for traveling, hiking, and climbing. With this in
mind, I returned to South America, this time without the pressure of maintaining a strict training regimen.

I felt like I really made the most of this trip. Without the responsibility of daily miles to run, I found myself able to do all the things that I tried to avoid during the season: staying up late and going out dancing, and, of course, climbing and trekking. This time, I tackled a few slightly larger peaks and spent about two weeks solo trekking on a circuit through a remote region in the central Ecuadorian Andes. As much as I do love the daily grind and consistency of training, a break is healthy for both the mind and the body. This trip was one of the best of my life and so I decided to try to make it an annual tradition. With that in mind, I began to think about what I wanted to tackle next. I had climbed the tallest mountains in Ecuador and had hiked one of the more challenging circuits. I decided it was time to move to a bigger scale. This could be found a few hundred miles to the South in Ecuador’s neighboring Peru. Peru is said to be like a blown up version of Ecuador (or that Ecuador is a condensed version of Peru). The mountains are taller, the jungle more vast, the coast longer. This expansion does not come without a price; in this case, the price is that everything in Peru is much farther apart. I had hoped to make it to the Peruvian Andes the summer before, but my ended up running out of time. And so, I had to put my Huayhuash trek on hold for another year.

A few years earlier, I had been searching through a second-hand bookstore in Quito when I found a book called “Trekking in the Central Andes.” The book outlined treks ranging from a couple hours to a couple of weeks of varying difficulties. I picked it up and later would use it to plan my multi-week hike in Ecuador. A hike that caught my eye, however, appeared in the Peru chapter. This trek was billed as challenging and remote – two words that immediately resonated in my mind – called the Cordillera Huayhuash. The more I read, the more I became enthralled with the hike. The trek was said to be difficult not because of technical skill required, but simply because of its length and numerous passes of 4000m-5000m. This appealed to me because, with my lack of time that I could fully devote to climbing, I knew that a technically challenging trip would be out of the question. However, if it came down to fitness and mental toughness, I was as strong as I needed to be. This trip has really been growing in the back of my mind since the first time I read about it in that bookstore almost three years ago. I think that I am now stronger and more experienced with high altitude travel and navigation and am capable of planning and completing the trip.

Finally, this trip represents my foray into Peru – the bigger Ecuador. Each year, I try to tackle a slightly more challenging trip and this is yet another step in that direction. The Huayhuash trek and the snow capped 6000m+ peaks of Peru seem to be a natural progression from the hikes and peaks of Ecuador. To me, climbing is about pushing myself and raising the bar of what is possible. To complete this trip would definitely be resetting the bar on what I think I can accomplish. This is accomplishment is, for me, what climbing is all about.