Why I Climbed the Same 6000 meter Summit Twice in Same Day
At 6549 meters, Nevado Sajama is Bolivia’s highest mountain. Seen from afar, it displays a perfect cone shape, very appealing for mountaineers, and even trekkers : there are no alpinism skills involved.
In 1999, two young guys hire the services of a man and his donkeys, to haul their gear til the basecamp. From there, it’s a few hours ascent til 5800 meters where a tent can be pitched on a tiny rock ledge.
Spending a night at the altitude of Kilimanjaro can cause a bit of a headache, but after a couple weeks on the Altiplano, that is not much of a problem for us. After a night of bad sleep – as often in spartan altitude conditions – we set for an early start.
Snow penitents, the result of ice being vaporized by sunlight, can reach half a meter. No point in trying to break them with ice axes : you just have to deal with them and adapt the way you walk. The terrain is quite steep until the last hour, when lines converge to a point suspended in the sky : it’s the summit. Or rather, an ice cap, surprisingly flat and large.
To date, neither of us had reached such a high altitude. We’re in our twenties and it’s worth celebrating this. We probably stay there half an hour, posing and cheering.
Now’s the time to head down, pack the camping gear and reach the village. We can see the hamlet from here : it looks so close ! We walk back towards it. After quite some time I have the strange feeling that the landscape doesn’t look quite the same. We are on the wrong side of the mountain.
What happened now becomes clear to me : we made the mistake to aim straight at the village, whereas the way up had been curving along the other ridge. The high camp is not under us, it’s over there to the right, past a steep and icy cliff more than one mile wide… and the only way to reach it is to head back up to the summit.
As I share the bad news with my friend, I know I will have to weather a flurry of insults. We kind of cut slightly underneath the summit, in a bold traverse where falling would be a bad idea. Now it’s becoming late and we’ll obviously have to spend a second night at the high camp. With no food.
Day 3… We finally go down and a few hours later, we gobble a couple liters of fruit juice at the village’s only grocery store. Heading back to La Paz at the back of a farmer’s pick-up truck loaded with five noisy sheep, we set our 6000-meter summit counter to one. Or let’s say, one and a half.
