Peru - Alpamayo Trek

 After completing the Santa Cruz trek we took a few days to clean up and relax before heading out again. It was also an opportunity to plan our last three weeks in Peru. Losing ten days to illness meant we wouldn’t be able to fit in everything we hoped to do, and in the end we decided to focus on trekking. This meant cutting out a second visit to Machu Picchu (we were there in 2008) as well as several other destinations. But given we were already fully acclimatized to the high elevation and in good hiking shape, and the undeniable fact that we weren’t getting any younger, this seemed like a good time to knock off two very difficult hikes we’d been talking about for years.

First up was the Alpamayo Base Camp trek. This is actually just north of the Santa Cruz trek we’d just completed, and is sometimes done in combination with it. We left Huaraz on the 7:00 AM bus and after an eight hour death defying ride back over to the east side of the Cordillera Blanca, we arrived in Pomabamba where we found a hostel and a good roast chicken dinner. The next morning we were up early again for a 6:00 AM collectivo ride up to the tiny village of Jancapampa where we started our hike. Just like the Santa Cruz trek, the Alpamayo runs west across the width of the Cordillera Blanca to Hualcayan, just north of the Santa Cruz endpoint of Cashapampa. It’s a much more difficult hike though.

Almost twice as long at about 90 kms, Alpamayo also includes five passes over 14,700’. Our starting point in Jancapampa was 11,500’ and this would be the lowest we’d be until we approached Hualcayan at the other end. From Jancapampa we wandered up the valley of the same name for a couple of hours until we reached the start of the serious climbing towards the Yanacon Pass at just over 15,000’. We stopped a couple of hours short of the pass as the inevitable afternoon rains came. We’d scheduled six days of hiking and an off day to cover the 90 kms, and our decision to finish the day shy of the pass meant we’d have to do two passes in one of our remaining days, or sacrifice our off day.

Looking up the Jancapampa valley.

View from our first campsite.

We made up for it on the very next day. By 10:00 AM we were cresting the Yanacon Pass in the clouds and wind, and we stopped for lunch down the other side where local alpaca herders had a small group of shelters at Huillca. By late afternoon we’d climbed up and over the Mesapata Pass and managed to set up our tent and eat dinner on the shores of the Rio Mayobamba before darkness fell and the rain started again. Coming from the Yukon where extremely long summer days let us hike and paddle late into the evenings, it seemed a little strange to find ourselves in complete darkness at 6:15 PM.

Alpacas grazing at Huillca.

Day three took us up over Garagara Pass, our new elevation record. At 15,919’ it beat out Punta Union on the Santa Cruz trek by a couple of hundred feet, but probably because it was the third pass in two days, it felt more difficult than Punta Union. We enjoyed a few minutes of  mountain peaks and glaciers peaking through the clouds at the pass as thunder roared around us. Then we dropped just over 2000’ in ninety minutes in the pouring rain to our next campsite.

Climbing over the Garagara Pass.

The Alpamayo trek is named after the Alpamayo mountain. Way back in 1966, a survey of mountain climbers by a German climbing magazine named it the most beautiful mountain in the world. We’d planned our off day to do some day hiking in the area around the mountain, hoping the extra time would give us a better view in the mostly cloudy weather. That didn’t really work out. We spent two nights and the full day in between hanging out in the valley below Alpamayo, the pyramidal top of the mountain covered by clouds most of the time.

Best view we had of the peak of Alpamayo.

The last two hiking days were much like the first three - high and hard. From our campsite we climbed almost 2000’ over the 15,650’ Paso los Cedros and camped just over the pass at 15,251’. After brushing the ice off our tent in the morning, we headed higher still over the Osururi Pass at 15,899’, and then past the beautiful Laguna Cullicocha.

A warming coffee in the cold early morning at 15,251'.

Climbing the final pass.

Laguna Cullicocha.

We’d originally planned three days from Cullicocha to Hualcayan, but we were a little nervous about getting back to Huaraz at the end of the hike. There is no regularly scheduled transportation out of Hualcayan, and we would be relying on our rudimentary Spanish in a small rural village to somehow find a ride. So we decided to push through to Hualcayan in two days in case we ended up stranded for a bit. Our fears were completely unfounded.

Our final descent to the village of Hualcayan.

As we descended down the mountain switchbacks close to town, a couple and their two young boys were working in the fields. We said hello, and seeing two gringos, the woman immediately asked where we were going and if we needed a ride. When we told her we needed a ride to Caraz to catch a collectivo to Huaraz, she pulled out a cell phone and made a quick call. She then sent her two boys, Fernando and Juan Carlos, to lead us into town. 10 minutes after arriving we were on the road back to our base in Huaraz.

Arriving back early, we had a couple of days before our flight to Cusco and were delighted to discover that our Australian friends Chris and Sarah that we’d met on Galapagos had arrived in Huaraz. We’d kept in touch through Facebook since our time on Galapagos, but our meeting in Huaraz was just a happy coincidence of scheduling rather than a planned rendezvous. In a continent as big as South America, it was amazing how many times we ran into people we’d met in other cities or countries as we traveled around.