Alpine Climbing

My pictures from the Bugaboos are now online in the picture gallery.

There isn’t a full write up yet but the short story is…

Simeon and I drove to Roger’s pass and had bad weather for an attempt on Mount Sir Donald. Went and had a look at getting into the north end of the Selkirks but were defeated by a very closed logging road.

Carried on driving, driving, driving to Golden for lunch and then into the Bugaboos where we climbed; the Kain route on Bugaboo Spire and the West ridge of Pigeon Spire to warm up. Then after a weather enforced rest day, during which we hiked out to the car for beer, we managed the NE Buttress on Bugaboo and the Kraus-McCarthy route on Snowpatch. We also climbed a route on the Crescent Towers on out rest day.

The weather looked like it was going to break so we spent the last couple of days in Penticton doing a little bit of cragging on the Skaha Bluffs. It was very hot but we managed to stick to the shade and get a few nice routes done before heading back home.

Ended up road tripping the Selkirks, Bugaboos and Skaha in two weeks.

Photos will be up later this week…

More updates to the Peru gallery. I’ve added pictures of our climb of Pisco Oeste and a somewhat less successful visit to the Ishinca area. That’s pretty much all the pictures online now.

Over the winter I might try and get some of my slides from trips to Bolivia and Ecuador back in the 90s scanned. One of the interesting things about this trip was seeing how much South America has changed in the last decade.

I’ve uploaded the first of my pictures from Peru and created a gallery for South America. This is the first installment, mainly Huaraz and some of the hiking trips we did around the city. I’ll be adding the rest within the week.

So my Peru trip is over as far as climbing is concerned. I leave for Lima tomorrow.

Not that it was a totally bad gig. Sure, bad weather, and illness marred the second half of the trip but Huaraz was entertaining and I saw some of the sites of interest even if the climbing didn´t happen as planned. Good scouting for another trip maybe?

Next time I would…

• Come a bit earlier. The weather usually bags in mid-August but this year it seemed to deteriorate around mid-July.
• Expect to be sick. Plan for a week of being ill. The altitude, odd food and water, pollution and other stuff will hit you really hard. Almost everyone we met in Huaraz had been ill at least once since arriving.
• Take it easy. On a month long trip the urge is to push hard and start climbing right away is really big - bad idea.
• Bring less ¨stuff¨. Climbing here tends to be short trips from Huaraz to a valley to climb from a basecamp below the snowline, probably only attempting one or two routes per trip. Lots of the junk you might bring for a trip involving a couple of weeks at a basecamp just isn´t needed.
• Bring less food. Most climbing type food can be bought locally. The exceptions being good dehydrated main meals and good bars, soup and Mars bars are available but not AlpineAire meals or PowerBars etc. You can also buy a lot of common climbing items in Huaraz if you need to, so no need to bring spares. Cheap simple snowstakes can also be had very cheaply.

So I´ll spare you the details but the lack of posts over the last couple of days has been largely related to further weight loss attempts. This was largely unintentional and not my competitive streak going into overdrive (¨I can get sicker and loose more weight than you¨). Suffice to say even in Peru computers and toilets aren´t sufficiently co-located to make blogging possible.

Today is actually the first day I´ve felt even remotely well in about the last two weeks. I´m not climbing fit but at least travelling isn´t going to be a Herculian task. I´ll be in Lima tomorrow night and back home by Tuesday unless the airlines foul up or the Peruvian teachers go on strike again.

Each trip I managed to end up getting forced, blackmailed or otherwise tricked into reading something truely terrible. Usually its a panic buy before a long flight or the only English language book in an otherwise empy alpine hut. Previous winners of this prestigious title have included such notables as Dean Kootz, John Grisham and Ayn Rand.

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Dopers Suck, really.

So apparently I simply wasn´t doing enough drugs. And to think I was actually sorry to be missing this year´s Tour De France before I left home. A travesty of a farce of a sham. Time to find another sport to follow where half the contestants get caught cheating and it starts to feel like the other half just haven´t got caught yet.

Pity really as cycling is fun to do and quite a lot of fun to watch.

Loosing weight the ¨easy¨ way. 1 - Get something akin to flu. 2 - Pick up a stomach infection. Try climbing at altitude - unsuccessfully - while still dealing with said illnesses. Live on a diet of cytomax and two PowerBars a day for a couple of days to try and shift 2 while still dealing with 1. Sleep a lot. Become deeply distrustful of any food that isn´t shrinkwrapped and made entirely of chemicals.

Realize that you´re probably not going to summit anything but Pisco Oeste - which doesn´t count as ¨climbing¨- this trip. Try not to sulk too much and console yourself that at least the mythical goal of better back defintion has been partially achieved and none of your clothes will fit for several months.

So it´s offical… Having managed to get pretty well acclimatized and get up Pisco with no real problems I´ve managed to get sick.

Usually this means some sort of stomach ïssue¨and days spent on the can, chickenus eruptus to give it the full medical name. In my case I´ve opted for the slightly less usual cold or flu option. A few days ago Robert and I went to Ishinca basecamp try Urus Este (around 5400m). This is an easy trekking climb of which I managed the first 300m before heading back to the tent as it felt like my chest would collapse. Ended up lying in the tent for the rest of the day and then heading down early - even downhill was hard work.

We´re now back in Huaraz and I´m nursing a nasty cough among other things. Hopefully I can shake this off and head out before the weekend. I foresee several days of sitting around watching pirate DVDs and trying to recover ahead of me.

Fore what it´s worth Ishinca is not a very nice place. Far too many donkeys, cows, horses and people and more to the point the shit that inevitably comes with them to call the place clean. There´s one stream running through the place which pretty much drains all of the above along with people washing in it.

We packed out a load of trash as loads of campers dump their litter rather than packing it out. There´s no excuse for this as pretty much everyone uses donkeys to carry their stuff in and out. I have a feeling if you stay there long enough you´d get really sick. All in all a bad scene that can only get uglier with time. Makes me long for Da Wadd.