The West Face of Bolivia's Huayna Potosi
by Andrew Wexler, IFMGA
AAI Instructor and Guide
When legendary AAI guide Danny Uhlmann and I stumbled out of our La Paz hotel room and into the elevator at 3 am, I'm pretty sure we were both looking for any excuse to kibosh The Brilliant Plan. We hadn't slept for more then six hours in the past two days, and our strict hydration program of Corona, Pisco, and coffee was beginning to take its toll. Without making eye contact, we rode the elevator down, looking like two drunken monkeys clad in the latest climbing chic.
"How do you feel?" I asked Danny.
Silence ... No reply.
"You look terrible," I told him. "But don't worry, the driver probably won't show, and we won't have to go do this thing."
More silence ... No reply.
The elevator came to a jarring halt. The door opened. And there, standing before us in his signature aviator glasses, blue tracksuit, and penny loafers, was our driver, Hidalgo. "Vamonos!" he declared, "Huayna!"
Over the past few days, we'd come up with The Brilliant Plan to climb the 3000-foot West Face of Huayna Potosi - roundtrip, in a day, from La Paz. The Face is the longest, most sustained ice, rock, and snow climb in Bolivia's Cordillera Real and had been hanging over my head ever since my first trip to Bolivia in 2001. Back then, I had foolishly placed too much stock in my own robust youth, and had left to climb the face directly from one of La Paz's finer late night establishments. I barely made it to the base of the route on that attempt and was forced to watch in shame as my wiser partner (who had stayed home and slept) soloed the climb without me. Although this year's attempt was not getting off to the smoothest start, it was still leagues better than the first time.
It took Hidalgo two hours to navigate his mini-mini bus through the empty streets of La Paz, up to the town of El Alto on the 13,500-foot plateau known as the altiplano, and along the bumpy dirt roads to the trailhead. When at 16,400 feet the mini-mini bus could take us no further, Danny and I exited the vehicle, said good-bye to our trusty friend, put on our action suits and slunk away in to the cold, dark night.
For three hours we connected roads, hills, llama trails, llama dung, faint footpaths, talus, scree, ice, and snow before finally emerging below Huayna's West Face. We took a break and scoped a line. Since we carried only two pickets, a handful of ice screws, and a single 8 mm rope between us, we looked for a route with more snow and ice than rock. After a few minutes of recon, we pieced together what looked to be like a fifty- to seventy-degree line of appropriate terrain. After a few more minutes spent laughing at our own weakened state (Danny's especially), we unsheathed our tools and began climbing at a pace that would've made slug racing seem exciting.
The terrain started out mellow enough that neither of us wanted a rope and I decided that it would be best if the Legendary Danny carry the entire cord in a mountaineers coil around his neck. Slowly, the hours crept by and the exposure increased. We continued to climb unroped on terrain pushing seventy degrees. Conditions were perfect as we front-pointed, daggered, and swung our way up. After two thousand feet of climbing, one of Danny's water bottles got away from him and we both watched it tumble for many seconds before disappearing out of sight. A quote from Mark Twight ran through my head: "After mediocrity ... The ground." I swallowed hard. It was a subtle reminder to gravity's unerring gaze and to the consequences of a mistake.
Just then, as if on cue, the perfect névé that had been assisting our slow progress disappeared, and we were knee-deep in unconsolidated muck. Danny hand-placed two pickets, equalized them, clipped in, and shrugged. He uncoiled the rope and passed an end to me. "Hey, Andres," he said, "don't fall." I tied in and started up. Without going into too much detail, all I'm going to say is that the following pitch sobered me up fast. It took at least one hour to go one hundred feet and I would've been better off climbing the pitch with a shovel. Had I fallen or slipped at any point during the lead, Danny's pickets would've come out as though they weren't even there, and the next team to climb the face would've found us in a final, frozen dance of bloodied limbs and rope, two-thousand feet down, on the flat glacier below.
Once out of the muck and back on firm snow, we untied and continued on steep, exposed terrain. I desperately wanted to take photos of Danny glowing in the sun, soloing below me, and loving life with twenty-five hundred feet of air below his feet. But my gloves and fingers were frozen after battling with the deep snow, and I couldn't find the strength or the will to operate my camera. We plodded on to the summit cornice and set another fictional belay. Once again, Danny clipped in to the anchor and I tied in to the rope. I traversed right from our stance and burrowed my way under and around the cornice until there was no longer any snow or cornice or mountain above my head. Bafff! The Summit!
We lingered on top for a few minutes, watching the Cordillera Real turn from gold to red in the setting sun ... reminding us in that fading instant why we'd come. It was 5pm. The mountain was empty. Illimani, Mururata, and the entire altiplano were ablaze in light while Huayna cast a huge, conical shadow for miles. We shed the rope for the last time that day and packed it away. It was time to go down. Tired but refueled, we were eager for another endless night in La Paz and ready for the next Brilliant Plan.
Editor's note: Andrew and Danny's 21-hour itinerary sorts out as follows:
Depart La Paz: 3:00 am
Arrive trailhead: 4:30 am
Reach base of route: 9:00 am
Reach summit: 5:00 pm
Reach Zongo Pass: 6:30 pm
Mini-mini bus arrives: 9:30pm
Reach La Paz: 11:00pm
Dinner and drinks served: midnight
About the author: Andrew Wexler has been guiding for AAI for over 8 years in Canada, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. Aside from time spent writing seriously funny stories about seriously hard mountain climbs, Andrew equally enjoys ice and rock climbing, and he has done numerous big wall routes in Yosemite, Colorado, the Cascades, Patagonia, and the Bugaboos. He is also a keen skier and has spent many days gliding throughout the Canadian and Alaskan backcountry, including several major ski traverses.
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