Alpamayo 5947mt
Alpamayo 5947 Mt
I thought the face of Alpamayo was 6 rope length to climb, now I’m standing on the sixth belay but there is no summit in sight! I should know better than that, it’s always longer than you think…
It started of with a bumpy car ride threw the Peruvian landscape to Cashapampa. Here we met up with the donkeys that were going to help us carrying all our gear up to the Base camp. The goal of the day was to take us as far in the Santa Cruz valley as the day offered. The big fisherman Akilles, our ariero, invited us to new catched thrucha, from the lake Ichiccocha where our first camp was sat up for the night. (3900Mt). A wonderful place, like a picture taken directly from a fairytale.
We woke up the next morning of some tissel and tassel from the kitchen tent. Tonyo and Huan, our porters and chefs, where preparing a big breakfast.
During the trek, parts of the team ended up on the wrong side of the Santa Cruz river and needed to nude to get over, it was cold but at least it gave a big laugh to the other guys ;) After four hours we arrived at the Base camp of Alpamayo ( 4330Mt), this were just like the next page in the fairytale book, a spectacular place, surrounded by the peaks of Quitaraju, Alpamayo, Paron and Artensonraju. The place is full of quenual trees and the big powerful Condors (the peruvian Condor is the biggest bird in the world, about 3 meters over the wings) are keeping an eye on us.
Day 3. We walked up to the moraine camp (4925Mt). Crappy weather with a lot of wind and snow coming in.
Day 4. The tracks of the fox are always good to follow and so we did. As we reached higher altitude it was harder and harder to breath and the climb up the glacier started to be more demanding. Finally we reached the col (5500Mt) and there she was, the “Muddy Water” ( Alpamayo in quechua).
The plans were to start our climb at 03.00, but the weather didn’t look to good, strong wind and a lot of fresh snow coming in. As Giorgio was tracking in deep snow to the base of the face, the weather was getting better and the stars filled up the sky.
It’s dark, it’s cold and above all a lot of snow. The higher we get on the face, less snow and more ice there is. The season is dry this year. We have to look around in this fairytale book that we are in. The sunrise is lightning all the peaks and the colours are amazing.
Tom and Giorgio reach the top and we meet them on their way down on our last rope length. At: 12.13 team Eva Jacopo and Jenny are on the summit of Alpamayo 5947 Mt.
French direct route. D+ 485m.
Yieaooo!!! The summit photo is taken before we start to rappel down. Eleven hours after that we started in the night, we were back down again.
What a feeling, everybody did their best and…what a BlackLight* team!
Just to let you know, we all did a really hard work going back down again except for the lucky guy Tom…he took his paraglide and flew down!
