Friday, September 26, 2008

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!



Friday, September 19, 2008

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, HuascarĂ¡n 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.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

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!