Higher Love by Kit DesLauriers

Author:Kit DesLauriers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2015-01-20T19:58:42+00:00

After buying our climbing permit the next day, Damian, Eliana, and I piled into a hired van with our gear for the afternoon trip through dry upland country and vineyards into the mountains and eventually arrived at the deserted ski town of Penitentes, where we checked into an almost-empty hotel and I finally caught up on my sleep.

After getting up at nine-thirty the next day, I found Damian in a gear room beneath the hotel sorting through our food and equipment. We pulled out only what we’d need access to during our overnight trek to base camp, and the rest went into carefully weighted duffel bags for the mules that Damian had rented through an outfitter. Don Andres, a seventy-two-year-old expedition outfitter and lead snow-safety employee for the Penitentes resort, then drove us to pick out the mules, and a vaquero herded them to meet us at the nearby trailhead.

It takes most people three hours to hike the moderate uphill trail to Confluencia Camp, located at 11,000 feet ASL, but it took us only an hour and a half. Our speed was probably due to our high levels of fitness as well as my lingering acclimatization from having been on the summit of Vinson Massif just seven days before. Along the way, Damian had been greeted a dozen times by rangers and others who seemed to make their living on or around Cerro Aconcagua, and I felt like a groupie of the mayor of Aconcagua as I was introduced to them. After my experience on Vinson Massif, it was a welcome change to be on a mountain with a guide and colleague who was fast becoming a friend and who had a lifetime of experience and the relationships to prove it.

The next morning, we finally got on a mountain-esque schedule when we began our ten-mile hike at first light in order to reach the Plaza de Mulas base camp, at 14,100 feet. As it turned out, we hadn’t needed to go so early, because this time we covered an arduous trek that takes most climbers eight hours in just over five. That included stopping to chat with more of Damian’s mountain friends who were on their way off the mountain and happy to offer condition reports from up high.

When we arrived at Plaza de Mulas, I felt like I was early to a gold rush. About 200 people were already there in various stages of climbing or working for the season in support of the climbers, and Damian told me the number would soon swell to 500. There was a medical tent as well as large-scale canvas-and-nylon kitchen tents everywhere with outfitters’ names on the outsides. Our kitchen tent was labeled “Fernando Grajales Expeditions” and was ideally situated next to the glacier; water was siphoned straight from the melting ice into storage barrels where we could fill our water bottles. Though the mules had carried our duffel bags and skis this far, it was our responsibility to carry them the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.