The main reason I started this blog is for myself to re-live the memories of climbing and see how much I progress. I had no intention of writing about climbing Skywalker that I climbed a few weeks ago because it really didn’t stand out that much any more. However, after reading my last experience up there, I guess I should share the new climb almost exactly a year later.
This time around, the best way to describe the climb is just simply fun. Gone were any pre-climb jitters, any self doubt, any imagining of a body tumbling like a rag doll down a steep snow slope. We took a rest at the half way point where I decided to go down last time and I was just enjoying the views and thinking to myself how lucky I was to love in Colorado. As we progressed to the steeper sections, I’d look down and thought how amusing it was that even if I fell, I could arrest myself without any problems. Everything was just easy, uncomplicated and fun. The Arapahoe peaks traverse was equally fun although a little edgier in some spots.
Further proof that with enough work, it is possible to overcome almost anything.
Getting there
We left Denver at 3pm on a Saturday on a AeroMexico flight which cost around $360. The flight was uneventful and we landed in Mexico City at 7pm. Customs went by very quickly and we were in the main airport terminal.
Although we had read that people take a taxi to the bus station, this is not necessary. As soon as you get out of customs, take a right and go all the way to the end of the terminal, there is a bus station there. Express buses on the Estrella Roja line depart every hour to Puebla and cost 194 pesos. There are 2 bus stations in Puebla, a smaller one, and the main one from where the bus to Tlachichuha departs. The bus is very nice and modern and you arrive in Puebla 2 hours later.
Since we were expecting to arrive late in Puebla, we took a taxi to the Holiday Inn express ($90) which is brand new to spend the night. We were out at 6 the next morning at the main bus station, again via taxi. The buses to Tlachichuha depart roughly every hour as well and cost 43 pesos. This is not an express bus and stops at almost every village, but takes about 1.5-2 hours depending on the number of stops. Once we got out of the bus station in Tlachichuha, we were greeted by the awesome Sunday market in the main square with Orizaba looming overhead. This might not be a bad place to buy some fresh fruit for the trip.
We made reservations with Dr. Reyes previously via email. His compound is organizable when you go to the left out of the bus station by a store with Quaker Oil signs all over it and a green roof. Around 9am, we were treated to a nice breakfast, got 10 gallons of water, and about 1.6 liters of white gas from Reyes ($30). Since we were initially planning on staying possibly through Wednesday – up to 3 nights, we wanted to make sure we didn’t run out of supplies.
The trip to the hut was pretty brutal: an old pickup with a bed cover with 500k KM over a dusty road for 2 hours in the heat. If I were to do this again, I’d bring a medical mask to protect your breathing from the dust. The driver would stop every once in a while to give us a breath or two and take some pictures.
The road itself isn’t anything especially hard, easily accomplished with any high clearance SUV, 4WD Low might not be a bad idea, but not necessary because we saw a tiny Isuzu tracker at the hut.
The Hut
When we got to the hut, there were no less than 5 other trucks with people wandering around everywhere. My initial reaction was “oh ****, this is what we’ve been reading about, we’re not even gonna find a spot to rest.” After going inside the hut, the original “oh ****”, was replaced with a sigh of relief when we found out that the 15-20 people in the hut at the time were on their way out. We had later learned that there were so many people in the hut that night, that people were sleeping on the floor. Within a few minutes, everyone cleared out from inside the hut and we were able to get the lower bunks on one half of the hut all to ourselves. There were some sleeping bags/gear on the other side of the hut, so we knew there must have been some people still up on the mountain.
Around 2pm, two Mexican climbers came in, one of them just got to the glacier and didn’t go up any farther. The other one reached his 5th summit. We found out from them that there were 6 other climbers out there – 2 rope teams of 3. All 8 arrived the previous night and decided to go for the summit right away. As the day went on, we kept going on about unpacking, cooking, etc while looking up at the mountain every few minutes; partly to look for the climbers coming in, partly to admire the mountain. The way the windows in the hut are placed, the mountain is daring you to climb it every time you get near the windows. Around 5pm, the 6 climbers came in, all dead exhausted and looking incredibly tired. 3 of the 6 summited.
The reason I’m going into so much detail about the other climbers at the hut has a lot to do with our initial plan:
- Sunday: Arrive at the hut, hike up not more than 1-200 ft.
- Monday: Acclimatization hike to the base of the glacier, go down and rest
- Tuesday: Summit
- Wednesday: Weather/rest day on the mountain.
- Thursday: back to MC
- Friday: Fly back to Denver.
Basically, we were fully planning on spending 3-4 days on the mountain, so we supplied ourselves accordingly and mentally prepared for this strategy. However, with combination of us feeling great at 14k, the climbers coming down after just one night, and probably, most importantly, the beautiful mountain summoning us from the windows of the hut, someone threw out the idea of just going for it that same night. My initial reaction was a resounding NO. However, the more I looked up, the more I wanted to just go. For the next few hours until sunset, all 3 of us were pacing back and forth in the hut fighting with the decision to go for it or not. On one side, we’d knock it out and it would stop the psychological torment. The other side: HAPE. Finally, we devised a plan which would give us an escape point: leave the hut at 3am, if we’re feeling good by sunrise, we’d go for it; if not, we come down and call it an acclimatization hike and go for it the next day.
As the Mexican climbers departed, we were left alone at the hut for the night and started cooking and packing for tomorrow’s “acclimatization hike.” At one point, Paul said, “Sure feels like we’re packing for the summit”. We all passed out around 8pm.
The alarm went off at 2am. All of us got a great night sleep, undoubtedly due to our camping in CO the previous weeks. The wind gusts outside were fierce, but we decided to start packing and hoping it would die down. After some coffee, a dehydrated breakfast, filling up the water bottles:
“You guys ready for our acclimatization hike?”
“Who the **** are we kidding? We’re going for it”
The Climb
After chugging a liter of water, at exactly 3am, we walked out of the hut and started up the aqueduct. About 100ft out, we put on crampons. The previous group left some great tracks for us, so all we had to do was put our heads down and follow the tracks in the dark. There were multiple times in the dark where we lost the tracks for a few yards and and were not sure if we should turn or keep going up the same path, but the tracks always reappeared to lead us into the moonless clear night. All I remember from the next 2-3 hours is we rested twice and drank as much water as we could and forced down a frozen protein bar or two. We were going at a steady and what seemed slow pace. Step, axe, breathe, step, axe, breathe… The trance like state was finally broken when we got to the base of the glacier just as the sky was beginning to get light right at 3am. Our “acclimatization hike” was going well and all of us were feeling great.
After a brief rest/water/snack and fishing out my music, we started going up the glacier as the sun was coming up. The snow was great and felt very good under the crampons. We couldn’t really see any coherent tracks, so I started zig zagging up the slope using the french technique. The wind that we feared when we left the hut wasn’t very bad at all, probably 20-30mph, so we tried to face away from the direction of the wind. Roughly at 17,000ft, the snow got really rotten and much steeper to a point where front pointing became a more safe way to travel for me (my partners were walking duck footed with crampons flat on the snow still). The air was also getting awfully thin… who woulda thunk at over 17k ft?! My strategy went from slow and steady rest stepping lower on the glacier to bursts of about 30 steps non stop front pointing and then self belaying, falling to my knees and resting for 30 seconds to 1 minute. This is probably very far from the recommended technique, however, I felt that my crampons were not providing the grip I was looking for unless I was front pointing… and front pointing slowly is very brutal on the calves.
After some moments of self torture, I finally made it to the crater rim and don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved climbing any mountain. With the adrenaline kicking into full gear since summit itself was just above, the final few feet felt easier than going up a flight of stairs. At 8.40am, I made my last steps onto the summit to DJ Tiesto’s – Adagio for Strings with Paul and Michael arriving in a mere few minutes for some celebration and summit shots. The views were phenomenal, however, we were getting cold and only spent about 20 minutes on the summit. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been too lazy to put on the belay jacket and enjoy the accomplishment a lot more.
The Descent
The whole time I was going up the rotten snow, I kept being very worried about descending it since I would not be able to front point like I did on the way up. As we started down, we were all being very careful not to step on our feet with the crampons, trip, or do anything else stupid that could have ended very badly in the ever softer snow. We crossed a small crevasse at the base of the rotten snow and once we hit the bottom part of the glacier, the going got a bit easier. Paul and Michael decided to glissade a few hundred feet; I was too lazy to put away the hiking pole I was using so I kept plunge stepping. However, by the time we got to the labyrinth sections, the snow was quite wet and made for pretty miserable going. All I kept thinking was that I didn’t remember the labyrinth to be anywhere near this long. Around every bend I thought now the hut would come into view, of course this didn’t happen. In fact, the whole labyrinth section felt very much like the hike down an access road after a long day on a winter 14er… you all know what I’m talking about. One step in front of the other, dehydrated, exhausted, almost stumbling. We looked so tired coming down the aqueduct that a 70-ish year old lady who was there for the day actually moved out of the way for us! At 11.15am, we stumbled back into the hut.
Around 1pm, the drivers arrived to drop off a few groups from Servimont and were surprised to see that we needed a ride back down that soon. After giving a quick beta to the arriving hoard of people (at least 10 people looked like they were taking over the hut) , around 2pm, we were on the way back down.
