Reed Rombough
Jul 21, 2017 · 12 min read

My La Sportiva Gore Tex mid boots puffed dust off the rocky trail. My Patagonia technical shirt wicked moisture away from my body. My Arcteryx softshell pants were rolled up over my knees and my black diamond trekking poles clacked the rocks below as I pushed for Huascaran Base Camp. Vinciente was walking in front of me. He had a pair of no name brand low shoes, with purple socks, the heel of the sole was coming off. He had a blue long sleeve shirt, mottled with dirt stains and tucked into his black slacks held up with a leather belt. He carried a children’s school backpack from one shoulder. He had two Eucalyptus sticks cut to length for trekking poles as he walked slowly behind the two backpack laden Burros, tapping them to keep them moving. He was 49, and seemed to be moving easier than me.

The sun was hot, but the breeze was cool. The eucalyptus leaves rustled loudly in the wind and my senses were playing tricks on me. I stopped and closed my eyes. The fluttering shadows of leaves in the wind flickered across my eyelids. The sound of the breeze passing through the trees hit me hard with memories of Fall back in the American Rockies. I stood there with my eyes closed for a few minutes, enjoying the sudden teleportation. I opened my eyes to a 22,205’ glaciated summit, the tallest in Peru, and snapped back to the present, moving to catch up to Vinciente and the burros carrying James and my packs to Base Camp.

At Base Camp the sun was already starting to set. We were now 3,500ft above the small dirt road and adobe house village of Musho we started in. Vinciente tossed James and I a “Mucho gusto” and headed back down the trail, his kid’s backpack bouncing off his back. The sun took forever to dip below the Cordillera Negra, turning Musho into a tiny cluster of incandescent lights below. The stars were already brilliant, even with the glow of the sun still sending rays skyward from behind the Cordillera Negra. Never have I been able to see the glow of the sun, and the milky way in the same sky. The southern cross was high to the south, and in the same sky was also the Big Dipper, low on the horizon, turned on its head to the North.

The next day, we shouldered the 80lb packs the Burros had carried the first 3,500ft for us, and began to scramble up the slabs below the glaciated piedmont of Huascaran. Fixed chains assisted us through steep sections. We followed two porters working for a guide and his Californian client as they cruised up the route they do regularly for little money. My waist strap buckle snapped under the weight of the pack, luckily I was prepared and had an extra. 30 minutes later, the extra buckle broke too. From that point on, I carried that huge pack with a carabiner Macgyvered to fasten the waist belt. At the base of the Glacier we roped up, stepped into our crampons and began the slog across the radiant oven that was the sunny glacier. Nearing sunset once again, we strolled into Camp 1 at 17,700 feet. A previous party had already chopped out a flat platform on the snow so we pitched our tent there. The night got cold quick as we sat by the stove melting snow for the next day’s water. We were both exhausted from hauling the packs up 4,000 feet of rock and glacier. The wind picked up and we crawled into our sleeping bags for a fitful night of sleep at elevation.

The alarm went off at 2am and I fired the stove back up again. Everything was frozen, the tent stiff, the condensation in my sleeping bag now frost. In the cold wind we packed the heavy bags again, roped up and were off into the night. We had to climb up through the ice fall on the northwest face of Huascaran Sur. Through a choke point in the seracs called “The Candeletta.” After the candeletta a long traverse triggered the beginning of the most hazardous point of the climb. The unconsolidated icefall hovered above us, a precipitous stack of ice blocks enslaved by the perpetual pull of gravity. Every minute spent under that face was a percentage increase in the chances of getting crushed by a block of ice the size of a Volkswagen. The sun was just coming up now. We had left so early in hopes that the icefall would still be frozen together, making it more stable before the sun heated it up. The entire quarter mile of ice shelf was littered with blocks of ice, some crystal clear, from the size of golf balls to semi trucks. Every step we took was onto chunks of ice that could’ve fallen mere hours before we were there. We were playing the most high stakes game of dodgeball. The worst part was, with the lack of oxygen and the burden of our heavy packs and gear we could barely move. One step at a time, with breaths in between. It’s an odd feeling to know that the faster you move the better your chance of survival is, but you can't muster enough energy to move at more than a snail's pace. A slow motion race for safety.

We stumbled into Camp 2 at 19,700ft completely exhausted but happy to be out from under the icefall. We chopped a ledge into the glacier for our tent and I crawled in to rest my utterly spent lungs. I felt completely debilitated from the weight of the pack and the elevation. Laying on my back waiting for the sun to warm the tent I thought to myself “there’s no way I’m going to recover by midnight tonight for a summit push.” Then I dozed off in attempt to waste away the 19 hours of waiting to leave for the summit. We sat all day, trying to entertain ourselves, eating as many calories as we could and chugging water. When the sun started to set I still felt like I was battling a massive hangover. I told James I wasn’t feeling well but that I still just wanted to push as close to the summit as my body would allow. I had come to Peru to find the bottom of my barrel. To push myself until my body couldn’t go any farther.

The night was freezing, and my feet were cold, even in my high altitude boot liners with a warm nalgene stuffed to the bottom of my Cotopaxi sleeping bag. At midnight I couldn’t take it anymore, we weren’t supposed to get up until 1230 but I sat up and sparked the stove to life. I made a small bowl of oatmeal with trail mix and James began to stir. It was time to see how close we could get to the summit, I still had little confidence in my energy level but I was going to push it until I couldn’t take another step.

“Dude, my stomach is just straight bubble guts right now.” James said with concern. I looked at him and his brow was furrowed, he was looking at me as if to say he didn’t want to leave. Nonetheless, he was here for the same reason, and he took a few sips of water and started strapping into his boots. We left camp at 1:30am and moved up to the saddle between the two summits of Huascaran. After about 30 minutes of moving across the crevassed glacier, staring down into the depths of bottomless cracks in the ice, I realized, I felt great. James yelled at me from the back of the rope “Reed, how do you feel?”

“Honestly, I feel awesome man.”

“I wish I could say the same” he said looking down at his feet, unstrapping from his harness and squatting on the glacier in hopes to get the bad out.

We moved on, coming to a steep wall of Neve ice and snow at about 21,000ft. I pulled out my other technical tool, choked up on it, and started plugging upwards on all fours. 60 degree snow, lead to 70 degree neve, lead to 80 degree ice. We were about 500’ off the glacier at this point, I looked up through the glow of my headlamp to a low angle ramp about 15 feet above me and pushed to that, swinging my ice tool, panting, kicking the front points of my crampons, panting, standing, repeat. Just as I pulled onto the ramp James entered the steep ice section and called out to me “Hey man can you place a picket for me!”

I pulled a picket off my harness and hammered it into the hard snow and clipped a belay in and called down. “You’re on belay.” The rhythmic sounds of ice tools resumed and I could hear him plugging away in the darkness below me. “Thanks for the belay brother” he said panting as he came over the ramp. “No worries amigo.” I responded, pulling the picket, clipping it to my harness and climbing away again under the moonlight. Swing, kick. Another 100 feet and I pulled over another lip onto a large flat shelf. I turned around, sat down, planted my crampons hard into the glacial ice and gave James a hip belay to the lip. Onward.

We dropped down into a crevasse full of trundled blocks of snow and ice. A 10 foot vertical wall guarded the other side, we swung tools again, stemming the width of the crevasse and moved higher up the glacier. From there we entered endless switchbacks as the sun rose and the surrounding mountains, seemingly tiny, were illuminated in a light pink glow. Slowly the angle leaned forward until we were walking across a wide flat platform, the summit just ahead of us.

I was only 100 steps from the summit and my pace quickened. Suddenly I felt my throat closing up, hm? My eyes welled up, and soon, as I took the last few steps to the summit I was just crying. I wrapped James up in a big hug. “You know what’s crazy man?” I asked him. “When I was 8 years old, a pulmonologist diagnosed me with Bronchiectasis and told me if I wasn’t on medication I wouldn’t make it through my 30’s. Now I’m up here, without the use of an entire lobe of my lung, 9 years off my medication.” I could barely get it out through my choked up tears. The weather was incredible, low 20mph winds, blue skies and bright sunshine gave us visibility for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The entire Cordillera Blanca looked like a scale three dimensional map in a Visitor Center. I have never felt so fulfilled, and been so overwhelmed with happiness and accomplishment. I had overcome so many years of pulmonologists telling me I couldn’t do certain things.

We turned around, only halfway done with climbing the mountain, and began our descent. On the way down we moved quickly. Dropping elevation twice as fast as we gained it hours before. James moved into a small downclimb section above a narrow crevasse. I planted my feet and put him on a shoulder belay. Suddenly the top of the crevasse cornice collapsed and James disappeared over the lip. The rope went taught around my shoulders and I flexed my quads as hard as I could. I yelled out to James, “You okay!” No response. “James you okay?!?!” “I’m down, off belay.” I sighed in releif. He stepped out on the shelf where I could see him. “Thanks for the catch!” He said with an ironic grin on his face. I followed behind, shaking my head, and soon we were back at Camp 2. The cook for one of the guide parties came over to give us hugs and congratulations, followed by the highest shot of whiskey I have ever taken. Straight to the dome. We crawled into the tent to recover and wait to once again pass under the icefall that night.

We descended under the icefall and all the way back to the toe of the glacier in under three hours. Over the course of the day, we slowly descended 10,000 feet back to the village of Musho. We turned the corner onto an old dirt road, past an above ground cemetery with a leashed up pig laying in a pool of sewage water at its entrance. An old man stood under a small overhang, the road looking like at any moment a man in a cowboy hat would come out and ask us to draw you yella bellied sapsuckers. In my terrible spanish I asked the old man where we could find the collectivo (small public transportation van) for Mancos. He waved his hands around explaining it would come right down this road if we waited. He asked if we had just come from the summit and we said yes. His face lit up and he wished us congratulatons, which I followed by asking him where we could buy a beer. “Right here!” He responded. He walked up the road and went into a small shop, and came back out with a liter beer in each hand. James and I were all giggles as he cracked the beers and we cheersed in the middle of the street with Huascaran behind us. The old man set us out some chairs and shouted to a young guy in a white toyota hatchback. He looked over at us and said “5 soles each person and he will drive you to Mancos.” “Uhh, yeah that would be great! But we have beers” “No problema, finish your beers.”

A few minutes and a few more sips later another young guy came around the corner. Keep in mind this is a village of maybe 400 people with no paved roads or signs, just adobe and concrete homes nestled into the piedmont of Huascaran. This kid was pushing a tricycle with a large box on the back that read “Helados” or “Ice Cream” on the side. “Tienes HELADO?!” I shouted out to the kid pushing the bike. “Si” he responded like I was an idiot. I ran out, and he opened the box to reveal five flavors of ice cream. He loaded us up three big scoops each and we gave him the equivalent of 75 cents.

Sitting back in my chair, beer in one hand, ice cream in the other and a 30 minute taxi ride for $1.50 waiting for us I started to chuckle. I looked at James “Within 30 minutes of being back in civilization, a random old man gave us beer, hired us a cheap taxi and a random boy with an ice cream tricycle came by. The universe is definitely rewarding us.” I said, raising my beer to Huascaran.

Many parties a week summit Huascaran during the high season. But James and I prepared incessantly for this. Training, working our asses off to buy our own gear, our own plane tickets, teaching ourselves over the course of years all the techniques necessary, and carrying our own loads to the highest camps. We watched many other parties hire porters and guides to usher them to the summit and back, but nothing compares to the fulfillment of pulling it all off under your own power, knowledge and experience. Back in Huaraz people hugged us, gave us the signature Peru climber’s congrats, a hand slap and fist bump and were excited to hear our story. From the friends we made at the hostel, to our regular waitresses and waiters at our favorite coffee shop. That climb made my trip to Peru, unfortunately, it didn’t break me. Does that mean there’s something bigger to pursue on my horizon?

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International traveling rock climber and mountaineer. 6 year United States vandweller with my dog Sadey. Owner of Nomad Construction. Incessant storyteller.

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