Blogging at warp speed....

OK... so where did I leave off? I was in Areiquipa, Peru, and then went to Cuzco to see Macchu Picchu. Did it. It was awesome. You´ll have to wait to see the pictures. Tried to go to Bolivia. But there was a strike. Jumped on a plane for the short ride to La Paz. Got into La Paz, and headed straight to Copacabana. Went to the beautiful Isla del Sol, spent the night there, and then returned to La Paz. Biked the ¨World´s most dangerous road¨. Took a ridiculous 16 hour bus ride down into the jungle. Saw more alligators and capybaras than I could count. Took a puddle jumper back to La Paz. Stayed in a brewery hostel. Saw lots of llama fetuses. (Joyously) watched a black man become POTUS. Brewed beer. Went to Potosí to see the silver mines (crazy place). Blew stuff up. Went through the desert on a horse with no name (just kidding, it was actually a 4D/3N 4WD tour from Uyuni to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile). Saw geysers, flamingos, and sat on top of my guitar in the salt flats. Climbed a 19,500 ft volcano. Took a 24 hour bus ride to Santiago. Picked up Katie at the airport. Stayed at a party hostel with lots of Americans. Drank some good wine. Biked around the city. Met James´ friend Carolina (now my friend!). Got on a bus to Pucon. Rented a car. Drove for the fist time in 3 months. Went to hot springs. Climbed an active volcano. Skied it. Now going to Isla Chiloé. Then on a boat for 4 days. Then towers. Or Torres, as they are called here. Then to the city of good air.

Truckin': Trujillo->Mancora->Lima->Arequipa

After two weeks in Trujillo, I headed up the North coast of Peru to the lovely (and warm!) beach of Mancora, which is close to the Ecuadorian border. I spent a couple of days there hanging out on the beach, swimming, surfing, and gorging myself on seafood! Mancora is the place for Peruvians to go for a beach holiday, and it's not surprising -- Mancora is one of very few beaches in Peru that has water that's warm enough that you'd actually want to swim in. Even though the country is close to the equator, the water is cold (see, current, Humboldt). Anyways, I really enjoyed a few days there, especially knowing that it would pretty much be the last warm weather I would see until next June or so (the rest of my trip is basically in cold places, and I get to return to CO winter in December).

I only took a few pictures there, but here they are:



After Mancora, I took the ~18 hour bus ride to Lima, and spent a couple of days there in the very fancy neighborhood of Miraflores. The highlight here was paragliding above the coastal cliffs of Lima. Really amazing!



OK, so after Lima I headed to Arequipa, where I stayed for a few days and did a trek down into the massive Colca Canon (which is almost 3 times as deep as the grand canyon in parts). The pics really don't do any of this justice, but I'll put em up here just to give a flavor of what it was like.

There once was a man from Peru...

After spending a month in Huaraz, in the mountains of Peru, I headed down to Trujillo, which is on the coast, for a couple of weeks of Spanish lessons. In addition to learning Spanish, I also taught some English classes (both basic and conversational), and took some surfing lessons in the nearby beach at Huanchaco. It was great fun, and a really good learning experience (including learning how to teach English! -- I found that limericks were a real hit with the conversation class!).

Right now I´m in La Paz, Bolivia, anxiously waiting to watch the election coverage tonight. I´m in a sweet hostel called The Adventure Brew Hostel, which is a brewery hostel. A dream come true! Oh yeah, and they also have CNN English, which is perfect for the election watch!

A College Try on Huascarán

I´m in Arequipa, Peru right now, after having spent a couple of weeks on the Peruvian coast in and North of Lima. I´m WAY behind in posting pics, but am trying to catch up.

Anyways, as my grand mountain finale in Huaraz, I attempted to climb Huascarán Sur, which at 6746 m (22132 ft), is Peru´s highest peak. Joining me on the climb were two very experienced and strong mountaineers I met in Huaraz (Andrew Stokes-Rees from Canada/Scotland and Assaf Gal from Israel). I have to give them huge credit for taking turns leading while on the glacier, and feel incredibly lucky to have been able to climb with people who were quite a few rungs higher than me on the climbing experience ladder.

The Huascarán climb was a pretty serious multi-day undertaking, requiring 3 different camps on the way to our high camp at 5900 m. As I have only been to 5950 m twice in my life (and not on this trip), even sleeping at 5900 m was a bit daunting. Also daunting was the weather in and around the Huascaráns, which had started to look pretty bad in the week before we attempted the climb. Well, nevertheless we decided to give it the old college try.

The long story short is that we didn´t quite make it to the summit, although we did make it to 6000 m. The climb was really beautiful, even though the weather was fairly crappy, with it snowing on and off while we were on the glacier. And for a mountain this popular during other times of the year, it was really spectacular to spend 4 days climbing and not see a single other climbing group! (okay, okay, so maybe thats testament to the fact that we shouldn´t have been attempting it in the first place...)

Hope you enjoy the pics!

PS. All of the albums I post here can be seen on my picasa webpage, or by clicking on the lower left corner of the screen before the slideshow starts.

Goodbye mountains, hello playa.... !

Two weekends ago I left the mountains of the Cordillera Blanca, where I had stayed for a month, and headed towards Trujillo, Peru. As I mentioned in my previous post, I attempted to climb Huascaran Sur before I left, and before that I spent several days in the Ishinca valley climbing Urus and Ishinca. I´m way behind on getting my pictures uploaded, but here are some pictures from Urus and Ishinca, as well as a day trip to rock climb at Llapa, near Huaraz.

I´ll put up the Huascaran pics as soon as I can get them uploaded. Hopefully that will be before I leave Trujillo this weekend!

Cordillera Blanca: Futura Negra

White Mountains: Black Future.

I read the headline upside down, but I´m pretty sure thats what it said. I was in an internet cafe in Huaraz, and the clerk was reading a magazine/newspaper-type thing (like The Onion, except not funny).

Anyways, I didn´t get to read the article, but I can imagine what it said. Probably something to the effect of ¨...within this century, the Cordillera Blanca will lose all of its permanent snow and ice fields¨. Having spent the past month trekking and climbing through much of the ¨Blanca¨ in the Cordillera Blanca, it´s hard for me to imagine the disappearance of that much snow and ice.

But I did experience some of the glaical lost firsthand. Last week, I attempted (unsuccessfully) to climb Peru´s highest peak, Huascarán Sur (6768 m/22,000 ft -- more on this in a following post). On the way up, we past the so-called ¨Base camp¨ at 4200 m, the former site of the glacial terminus. These days, the glacier terminates around 4900 m -- representing about a 700 m loss since 1970. Doing the math very roughly (I had plenty of time to think about this on the way up), that´s about 700 m out of about 2500 m -- a little more than 1/4 of the glacier gone in the last 40 years.

This intrigued me, so when I got back I did ¨a google¨to see what I could find out about glacial loss in this part of the Andes. I found one link that has a couple of interesting before-and-after pictures of glaciers from around the world, as well as one that pins the retreat of tropical glaciers directly to temperature increase, and not decreasing precipitation (hint: it´s all about the isotopes...).

But one of the more interesting pieces of trivia I came across was from Wikipedia:

Snow melt from the Cordillera Blanca has provided Peru with its year-round water supplies, while 80% of Peru's power comes from hydroelectricity. With global warming, the area of permanent ice pack shrank by about a third between the 1970s and 2006.

Given that most of Peru´s population lies in the arid coastal regions, it is likely that the implications of retreating ice will be profound, and not just for mountaineering.

Vallunaraju , Pisco

I´m back in Huaraz after having climbed several of the surrounding mountains, including Vallunaraju (18897 ft / 5760 m), Pisco (18963 ft / 5780 m), Ishinca ( 18143 ft / 5530 m), and Urus (17782 ft / 5420 m).

I´ve only uploaded the pics from Pisco (named after a Peruvian Whiskey), but below are some pics and movies. All of these climbs were fantastic, and for the most part we had good weather on the climbs. Although each climb was different, I think the pics from Pisco are some of the best, and are pretty sufficient to give an idea of what climbing in the Cordillera Blanca is like.

Well, I dont have much time go into more detail, but Ill let the pics speak for themselves. Enjoy!

So long, and NO thanks for all the Fish

OK. So this post is not about what I've been doing in Peru, but rather about what I've been reading and thinking. Just a couple of random tidbits.

First, I recently finished a book called The Coldest March, by Susan Solomon, which is about Robert Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole. I thought it was a great book and would reccomend it to anyone interested in Antarctica, weather, and unbelievably epic adventures. Anyways, one of my favorite quotes from the book came from Apsley Cherry-Gerrard, a member (and assistant zoologist) of Scott's team. Cherry-Gerrard was part of a team of three men who ventured out in the middle of the Antarctic winter to attempt to collect the first specimens of Penguin eggs from a Penguin rookery. Their little excursion was epic, and is described in a book by Cherry-Gerrard (cant remember the title, but it's something like "The worst journey ever").

Anyways, the quote of interest came from after C-G and others were rescued from the Discovery hut (right next to the current day McMurdo Station where I stayed), C-G lamented the return to "civilization" that was the Cape Evans hut where Scott and the rest of the men were.

The luxuries of civilisation satisfy only those wants which they themselves create

I really like this quote, and it is something I think about everytime I head into the backcountry (although certainly the luxuries of civilization -- e.g., fancy tech gear -- permeate these experiences). However, it is a nice reminder that living simply can be fulfilling, and against getting caught up in a materialistic lifestyle.

OK... so without letting that digress even further... One thing that has inevitably happened as I´ve been travelling is that I´ve been reading alot. Some books, some lonely planet travel guides, and a decent bit of online reading. I can´t seem to shake my addiction to the NY Times. There are always really thought-provoking op-eds and in-depth analyses of various things going on in the US and around the world.

A couple of such pieces that I´ve read recently have really caught my attention. I saw one such piece before I left home, by NY Times op-ed columnist Stanley Fish. Fish´s article -- a blog entry, actually -- is entitled Travel Narrows. Essentially, Fish argues that travelling -- immersing oneself in other cultures, marveling at the beauties of antiquity, the natural landscapes -- is a big waste of time. At first I found this funny, and then was somewhat offended. All of these things that he said were some what shocking. What? Someone who doesn´t like to travel.

It´s taken me a while to realize why I was so shocked by this, but I realized that you almost never here any educated person (which Fish is) with a platform (which Fish has) advocate so intensley for such ignorant parochialism. Sure... I´ve seen such parochialism at some level. Although generally not verbalized, I´ve witnessed the reaction some people have had to my descriptions of wanting to go to some foreign "undeveloped" country to travel (without a plan too. That´s a big thing -- if you go on a package tour, that´s perfectly understandable). But I´ve always chocked those kind of responses up as being "Well, they just don´t get it..." (a la John McCain).

Well, if Fish wants to live in his little provincial hole and never experience what the outside world has to offer, all I can say is "So long, and NO thanks for all the Fish".

17 Aug - 26 Aug: Lima, Huaraz, and the Peruvian Alps

Well, it's been over a week since I've been in Peru, and about time for a blog post.

I left Denver on August 17, spent the night in Toronto at my friend Matt and Bec's place, and then caught a flight from there to Lima on the 18th (kind of a weird itenerary, I know, but you take what you can get when using frequent flyer miles). As my flight arrived late on the night of the 18th, I decided to relax the next day and check out Lima, the sprawling oceanfront capital of Peru that is home to over 8 million people. Although it's a huge city, there are only two primary areas that are frequented by tourists; the center, and the affluent coastal suburb, Miraflores. As I had booked a hostel near the center of town, I decided to walk around and check it out.

I'd heard alot of negative things said about Lima, so I was really curious to find out for myself if such insults were warranted. As it turns out, some of what I'd heard about Lima was true. Lima is huge, noisy, dirty, and polluted. But although it's certainly not a place I'm inclined to spend alot of time in, there is something intrinsically fascinating to me about massive cities like this. I find it amazing to just walk around and watch people, and contemplate how such a massive "machine" functions. But beyond that, central Lima did have some interesting plazas, colonial architecture, and an interesting 17th century monastery called the Monasterio de San Francisco (pictures weren't allowed) which houses some really really eerie catacombs. Here are some pics of my day in Lima:



Although Lima wasn't as bad as what I'd heard, I really was anxious to get to Huaraz, which is in the Peruvian Andes next to the Cordillera Blanca (White mountains). So I booked an overnight bus from Lima, which left at 10 at night and arrived at 6 the next morning in Huaraz.

Huaraz is a fairly small (80,000 people), relatively mellow city at 3090 m (10,100 ft), which has an awesome climate with warm days and cool nights. The views of the surrounding peaks of the Cordillera Blanca (which go up to 6,769 m, or 22,200 ft) are just jaw dropping.

Although I plan to do some climbing, my first goal was to find some people to go on a trek to try and get used to the altitude. After spending the day searching around for people, I got connected with a group of people who were getting ready to go do the 4-day Santa Cruz trek. The trek is quite popular, and is most commonly done guided (with a donkey carrying all of your stuff), but as I had prepared for trekking I was looking for a group to do it unguided. Fortunately, this is exactly what the group I found was planning to do. Even more fortunately, the group turned out to be in-shape and experienced, as well as really cool and international. Among the members were two Dutch (Lotte and Hilda), an Israeli (Itamar), two Americans (me and Katrina), and a Kiwi (Sam). Below are some pictures from the Santa Cruz trek. I wont go on too much about it here, as I've put captions on the pictures. I wasnt able to upload some of the pictures from days 2-3 for now (long story), but the pics here give the gist of the trek.



Well, I returned to Huaraz from the Santa Cruz trek on the 24th, and have been somewhat anxiously trying to get set up to go out and climb some real mountains here. It's been a bit slow getting that organized, but it looks like I'll be heading off on the 28th to climb Vallunaraju, and work with a guide to refresh some of my glacier travel skills. Then, depending on how I'm feeling, I may attempt Chopicalqui, which would be a pretty big climb.

Heading down South...

So I'm only a few hours away from heading down South, and I finally got this blog set up. For those who don't already know what I've been up to recently, I recently finished school and have a few months until my new postdoc job at NOAA starts. I decided to head down to South America with the hopes of finally learning Spanish, and experiencing whatever cultural and outdoor adventures I can get myself into.

My plan, if you can call it that, is pretty simple. Fly to Lima, Peru, leaving Denver August 17th. Fly back from Buenos Aires on December 5. Take backpacking gear (American backpacking -- like, the kind where you camp) and some guidebooks, and see what I can find.

I'll be posting my whereabouts as I meander around. I hope you enjoy, and I hope this will be a good distraction from work for those who are unable to make it down.

Sean