Tocllaraju: Shoots and Ladders at 6000m

\tohk-ya-RAW-hoo\, noun:
1) mountain in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca Range; 6035m
2) word synonymous with having to relieve oneself in a precarious cirsumstance or location
Example: If I don't get to a bathroom soon, I'm going to pull a Tocllaraju

You've been warned. Here's the the mountain.


And here´s the story...(its a long one)


First off, what a climb. Our team's climb of Tocllaraju actually started 5 days earlier, the day we arrived in Huaraz, the staging town at the base of the mountains. Kori and I woke up at our hotel, went upstairs and met the rest of the climbing team. The owner of the agency was there as well. He did his best to introduce all of us but he was constantly intrerrupted by his mobile phone. It seemed that something was wrong in the mountains with one of his guides. No one wanted to pry, so we went on with our breakfast and introductions. Later that day, I was working out logistics with the owner and I asked him what happened. He said that one of his guides, who is also his brother, was involved in a rescue high on a mountain in the Ishinca Valley. Hmm...weren't we headed to the Ishinca Valley? I asked him which mountain and he [reluctantly] told me it was Tocllaraju, the final moutain of three we would attempt in the coming week. After further questioning, I learned that a French team had fallen into a crevasse right under the summit and worse off, one of the climbers was badly injured. The French team was three, a couple on their honeymoon and their guide. But wasn't I getting married in only a few weeks? Great. Worst off, with crevasse open near the summit that meant bad things for the rest of the route. The summit is naturally the coldest part of the mountain; if a the snow bridge over a crevasse breaks near the summit, one could assume that the crevasses lower on the mountain are as weak or weaker. Even worse, the high half of the route is East facing, meaning that the morning sun will bake the glaciers as we pass over them.

Umm..weren't Kori and I going to get married in a few weeks. But this was the most interesting of the climbs in the valley...been training for months. What to do....

We climbed Urus, then Ishinca the next day. We had a partial view of the route from the summit of Urus, but not the crevasse which at that point had become the talk of the base camps in the valley. All week we had been questioning our head guide about the route. The team simply didn't want to climb to 5,990m and have to turn around because of a crevasse that we already knew about. On the day before the climb, we the team decided to talk to the head guide, Eli. To this point, we were not getting the answers and we were all getting a little frustrated. We decided that we would rather bail and do another peak than get right under the summit and have to turn around. Eli had to call the owner to ask what to do. Turns out he climbed up to 5,200m to get cell reception, called the owner and returned to camp a few hours later. The resolution: a ladder.


We hiked to high camp the next day, three hours up to 5,200m. Tea, powder soup, gruel pasta and to bed early. I feel asleep fine, a good thing for being above 17,000 ft. Too bad my little buddy didn´t have the same luck falling asleep as I did. And at around 9pm, my stomach started turned with full force. I had to go and go fast. But going to the bathroom at high camp isn´t always the easiest task. First off, the camp was surrounded by boulders on all sides but one, the side with the cliff falling 500 ft below onto an icefall. The boulders around camp were not iced over so they were safe to walk on without crampons. Now I just had to put on my layers and boots and do my best to sneak out of the tent without waking my tentmate. I did my best, made it out and delivered the goods just in time. The irony of having to bundle up, go out into the unforgiving cold just to take a large portion of those clothes off and stay in one position for longer than you want to is something that I´m sure many of you can appreciate. We´ve all been there, whether its at the beach in Mexico, in a tree stand, on a hike or just on a walk. Its like that, just subtract a few degrees and add the sound of ice avalanching somewhere in the distance and you´re there. Anyway all went well and best off, I was excited because the shoot was clear now. So I thought.

Up at midnight, roped up and started to climb at 1am. We climbed steadily through the night, traversing a large glacier below in a long approach to the ridge. Once we reached the base of the ridge, we climbed a 70 degree section of ice and topped out a few hours later to the first open crevasse. Porters were climbing ahead of us with the ladder and when the team reached the top the ladder was just getting set up to span the crevasse. We were all surprized..the open crevasse was supposed to be right underneath the summit. We were at the base of a ridge still 800m way below summit. This meant one of two things: the beta we got from the other climbers was wrong and the crevasse was lower than we were told OR more crevasses had opened up since the last team attempted and we were in for a long, long day.

First crossing


Sunrise over the clouds

First ladder crossing after ladder was moved

In total we crawled and climbed over the ladder six times on the ascent. A few were short crawls and a few were pretty intense. One of the shorter crossings spanned a very narrow crevasse. As I was crawling over the ladder, I naturally looked into the crevasse and below me was a room that could have easily fit the 5 story office building I used to work in. We climbed, crossed another crevasse, climbed more, crossed another etc... We finally reached the now infamous crevasse; the site of the French accident. It was big and worse off the snow bridge was angled. The top lip of the crevasse was 25 feet higher than the bottom. Our ladder was 18 feet long. The guides and porters did an outstanding job of setting the ladder up here. At this point, I was well beyond my expertise...I had never set up a ladder over a crevasse. This one was more tricky than the others. We were to walk a few meters down to the base of the ladder, climb up the ladder then start to ice climb once the ladder ran out. We were on belay (roped up from above) which made this easier, but it was definitely a trip. Once we all topped out, we thought we were home free. There was one more 80m ice climb to the summit and we were done. It was around 10am, our water was freezing, our appetites were shot because of the altitude but we knew we had to eat. I pulled out a Clif bar (one of the 30 remaining that Kori and I had been carrying for 4 months) and did my best to chizzle through its frozen oaty greatness. Although it took me over 10 minutes to gnaw and chew it up, my stomach apparently made very short work of it. And of course, it awoke my little buddy and somehow turned him into a furious beast.

The best toilet shoot in Peru: at the end of the tracks is the avalanche scar

Once the contract was signed, I quickly roped back up and got ready to climb again. This was a hurry up and wait scenario. We were waiting for quite some time at the base of the fall. Something must be up...why were we having to wait so long right below the summit? The weather was starting to turn and we were already very tired. We started to climb...crossing a small but deep crevasse and climbing up the last iceface. About halfway up the face the climbers above me stopped. I waiting for a few minutes..nothing...a little longer...still nothing. The rope wasn´t moving, the other climbers above were not moving so I was not moving. We ended up hanging from the face for 45 minutes, just long enough for the porters to do whatever they were doing and long enough for the the sunny weather to turn. Once we started moving again, I understood the hold up. Tocllaraju saved the best for last: a crevasse that split the summit in two and seemed to fall all the way through the mountain to its base. This was easily the largest crevasse I´d seen in S. America and even better, we had to cross it to reach the top. The ladder was laid and it was my turn to cross. I didn´t belabor the task my looking down too long, I just scurried across on all fours and made it to the other side. Once across, I looked back and realized what everyone had just crossed. The snow bridge that likely spanned the crevasse only a few days earlier, had fallen into the abyss. But only in the middle. The edges of the crevasse were corniced remnants of the snow bridge and the ladder was securely positioned on the edges. In essence both ends of the ladder were attached to 3 feet deep snow, under the snow was dead air and a fall into a gnarly, dirty, scary, don´t even want to remember it crevasse.

Crevasse and sight of French accident

The cornices held for us to cross...we hung out on the summit for a few minutes and started our way down. We didn´t walk back over the cavern of death, instead we decided to rappell off the side of the mountain and over the crevasses we had crossed on the ascent. Of course, yours truly decided not to push off the wall at the base of the rappell and I ended up lowering myself directly into the crevasse. With help from a guide, I walked out easily..but that was enough to make me very ready to get off the mountain.

Final ice climb

Summit

We made it to high camp at 6pm, rested struck camp and hiked back down to basecamp, arriving at 10pm. 22 hours, 6 ladder crossings up, 2 ladder crossings down, 1800 meters and one dodgy bathroom session later...we were back at camp safe and sound. And near a toilet that on a good day I would call atrocious, but on this day, it was a site for sore intestines.

Tocllaraju Summit. June 11th, 2008

For Todd