Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bivvy bag. It was not that bad. A couple of sweets each and some ice to suck. The
moon was now a friendly face offering hope and a measure of time. We sang all
night, anything we could think of to stave off the uncontrollable shivering. Mostly
we sang a song to the tune of John Philip Sousa's
Star Spangled Banner
.
'Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody's mother; lives
all alone in a swamp, where it's always cold and damp! Now I come to the end of
my song, and to prove that I'm not a bloody liar, I'll sing it through once again,
only this time a little bit higher!' And so it went until our voices broke and we
laughed. We were alive. We were the best of friends in a difficult place.
In the morning, the sun shone temptingly around the corner. We allowed
ourselves the luxury of its warmth for an hour or so and even drifted off into semi-
consciousness. Then we geared up.
'What shall we do, up or down?' I asked.
'Going up makes you warmer,' Alex stated.
His ice axes bit into the mountain and he pulled over the top of the ice lip above
our hole in a shower of sunlit ice fragments. Now we were on the eastern flank of
the south face and there was real ice to climb. A vertical rock buttress gave me a
chance to do my bit. To our right the steep flutings and ice walls connecting our
mountain to Caraz I were like the inside of an elaborate crystal bowl. We made it
to the top by early afternoon. I should really say Alex got to the top. I sat on the
last solid bit of mountain with a belay while he swam up the last pitch. Faced with
heavily corniced ridges in all directions, he carefully sank back down.
'Straight down we go. No chance along the ridge.'
We found our way down the east face with only one more bivvy.
Before returning, we tried to repeat the extremely long north-west ridge of Huas-
carán Norte. We gave up after three days, realising we would run out of food and
gas before we even got to the end of the ridge to reach the mountain proper. We
descended, humbled, to the beautiful Laguna Peron and were lucky to find a taxi
dropping off some Spanish climbers to take us back to the beautiful town of Huar-
az. Half the population had been killed and ninety-five per cent of the town
flattened in the great earthquake of 1970 but most of the evidence was now gone.
It was like being in Chamonix that summer. Many of our friends were in Peru.
[1]
We stood on the roof of the Hotel Barcelona with Tut Braithwaite, Brian Hall,
Terry Mooney, Alan Rouse and Choe Brooks taking in the sun. Alex and I noticed
the south face of Ranrapalca (6,162 metres).
'What's that?' I asked Brian pointing to a high, distant but clearly big peak. Brian
and Al had been out for six weeks so knew the view.
'Ranrapalca,' he replied. 'That's the south face; it hasn't been climbed.'
