Day 9 – Climbed Pisco
We meant to wake up at 1:30am, but slept through the alarm and woke up at 2:30am from the sounds of other groups. Granola bar and trail mix for a quick breakfast and we were off towards the flacier of Pisco. There were quite a few other groups setting off around the same time, so it was easy to follow the trail of headlights. At the glacier we roped up and readied our crampons and ice-axes and then set off towards Pisco.
It was beautiful getting up to the Pisco-Huandoy col still in the wee hours of the morning. The silhoutte of Pisco on one side, Huandoy the other, and endless starts in front and begind. The route wasn’t difficult, but Alex and I were both feeling exhausted from the altitude. There was one steep pitch of about 60 degrees, apparantly not there last year due to the changing nature of the glacier.
We were thrilled to arrive at the summit, about an hour after sunrise, and posed for some summit photos before descending back the way we had come. There were many groups still on the ascent, but it wasn’t hard to skirt around them.
We got back to moraine camp around 9:30am looking forward to taking a nap. But when I got to our campsite I found it flooded with streams of runoff from the glacier. I immediately grabbed our thermarests, sleeping bags, and packs and threw them above the water line. Luckily the tent floor of the EV2 is quite waterproof and nothing got wet… until my sleeping bag blew off the rock it was perched on and into the muddy water.
We spent a long time packing up, tired from the morning’s adventure. We were thinking of hiking an hour or so in to Yanapaccha but decided instead to just hike back down to Pisco base camp. We stopped in at the refugio to collect our excess food. I was happy to see the same person to whom I had entrusted the bags the day before. The refugio was quite posh and inhabited by those who did not wish to sleep in tents.
| Published on June 9th, 2011 | | Posted by admin |