Huayna Potosi, Bolivia - May 2012 - Trip Report

I was a young lad on a gap year and I had big ideas. I wanted to climb some mountains.

I’d hoped to kick off my alpine career the previous summer, with a season spent in Chamonix. However, an incident at the start of the summer involving a kayak, a rock, and a trip to the hospital dashed any hopes of that.

So I decided to cut my teeth on Huayna Potosi, a 6,088m peak near La Paz. I’d spent the first few weeks in La Paz struggling to get up the stairs due to the altitude, how on earth was I going to manage thousands of metres of ascent at a much higher elevation?!

Still with cheerful naivety off I went, at least having done the sensible thing and hired a guide! Huayna Potosi is only a couple of hours drive from La Paz, and that means an all-inclusive guided trip can be had for around $200 - not bad going!

The hike up to the first hut was hot and hard. I’d never been at anywhere near this altitude before and the key thing that struck me was how hard it was to stay hydrated. Water was plentiful and soup came with everything, in fact even the soup came with soup, but still I remained dehydrated.

The trip was three days - the first walking below the snowline to a hut, the second to the high mountain lodge and the third the summit day (and long descent). My rope team was two guys I hadn’t met before but we got along well. Unfortunately one of them had to turn back on the summit day due to altitude illness and so it was just two of us that made it to the top, cresting the final narrow summit ridge just as dawn broke.