Climbing in Colombia - Part 3

Part III

I am awake! It is only 10PM. My eyes are maniacally open wide, alert, ready to climb. Only two hours to wait like this.

Eric is awake also. It’s 11PM. I rustle around so much bumping into him occasionally that he can’t sleep either. He suggests we go climb. We begin preparation one hour early. None too soon for me. This is not the Himalayas but it is, for us, pretty weird. The stars are bright. There are no visible clouds but we are absolutely certain they will come soon enough.

After forcing down breakfast and scrambling over the glacial rubble in the dark, we are at the glacier. It is 2AM. The snow creaks and groans with our first tentative steps. We hear snowmelt crashing underneath the glacier. Following our small headlamp beams, we step ponderously, searching for our tracks. Yesterday’s precipitation has obliterated them. It is around 5:30. Uneasy about the crevasses, we wait for some daylight. Twenty minutes later, we continue.

The sunlight is orange on the jagged knife edge extending north from Ritacuba Negro. As we crest the ridge, the sun blazes in our faces. We put on layers of sunscreen on our already fried faces. We find our route and use tested snow bridges.

We are higher now than we were two days ago. Our objective is the heavy snow mass to our right. Ritacuba Blanco, 17488 feet. To the left, Ritacuba Negro, slightly lower at 17,389 feet. We are at the edge of a drop-off thousands of feet to the Grand Valley, the quick way in one easy jump. We are at 17,200, higher than any of us have ever been before. We take a few photographs.

Now it is time to push toward the crevasses, the white peak, the higher of the two. We are above the clouds. For what looks like hundreds of miles, an ocean of clouds floats over the llanos, eerily creeping up the valleys. Our steps break ice-crusted snow. Clouds smother smaller peaks to the south. A slight wisp tails like a comet over the summit of Ritacuba Blanco. The comet’s tail grows larger as we step slowly.

We are probably less than 200 feet away. The climbing ahead is more difficult. Words between us are strained. We push on, inching a little further than any of us has ever been before. The summit is no longer visible, the route uncertain. The weather worsens. We stop.

Maybe we shouldn’t have waited for the daylight; we shouldn’t have spent valuable time taking pictures; we should’ve gone for it two days earlier. All unpleasant hindsight. We wait. Visibility worsens to about 20 feet. It’s misty and the snow or hail will soon follow. We begin our descent, knowing that we will not be back. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.

We were beaten, not by the ferocity of the storms, but by their relentless consistency. A lot of our mistakes could have been avoided if we had been more familiar and comfortable with the bizarre weather. More experienced climbers might have pressed on to the summit. A firm resolve is perhaps most important. As it was, we assured each other that for us lowlanders and novices, it was a notable accomplishment to climb above 17,000 feet, unguided, in Colombia’s northern Andes.

The morning of the twenty-forth, we packed up base camp in the godforsaken glacial rubble and began our long descent. We hiked directly down the valley of the Rio Cardenillo, eventually intersecting the trail and following it over the 13,600 foot pass. At the top, it started raining as usual. From there it was a long, muddy slog to Guican. We arrived at about 5 PM and the rain quit.

Letting our legs fall naturally one in front of the other like plastic wind-up toys, we headed toward the center of town. Suddenly, children ran screeching and giggling away from a man with long stringy hair all over his body and bull horns sticking out from his shoulders. He was tethered to a rope around his neck. The rope was several yards long and held by a campesino. This was the "Mikolita," the monster that lurks in the hills and eats children. Every Christmas Eve he raids the town.

In the center of town there was a "bull" – a beat up bicycle wheel, big sticks, horns and a black plastic bag crafted around the person who makes the bull come alive. He held it like a wheelbarrow and chased the children. They ran away wildly, screeching. The bull went after an unsuspecting old woman. She smiled and tried to move a little faster while everybody roared with laughter.

Two pantomime clowns "fought" the bull and invariably fell into one another trying to get away. We enjoyed the spontaneity of their play while we sat on a curb and were immediately surrounded by curious children. Soon, the bull attacked us and everybody ran away laughing. We took turns respectively fighting the bull and being the bull.

From Guican we hitched a ride in a truck to nearby El Cocuy, a slightly bigger town, where we hoped to find a modern hotel with hot water. The whole town was gathered beneath the big "conversation" tree for the Christmas fiesta. As we arrived, we met Yolanda Mord and Lilia Fuentes, and they helped get us a nice room for 200 pesos. The shower consisted of a small pipe pouring ice cold water next to the toilet, disturbing the resident dragonfly that I initially mistook for a hummingbird.

No matter, tranquillo, it was Christmas Eve and these people were extremely friendly and accommodating. We were hungry but no restaurants were open, so Yolanda and Lilia led us through the back streets to find Yolanda’s mother. They took us to their home and fed us. After dinner, we returned to the fiesta, danced under the conversation tree, and drank Aguardiente (literally translated "firewater"), Colombia’s national drink, a crispy light anise flavored liquor that makes your face glow brighter with each shot.

Next morning as we were walking around the town, the locals hailed us into their bars for more aquardiente. Officials quizzed us about the three students from Bogota. Apparently, they were lost. As best we could, we explained where we had met them and that they had altitude sickness. The officials thanked us and sped away in their jeep.

That afternoon we walked almost all the way back to Guican with Lilia and Yolanda, to hot springs. Ahh, the first hot water since God knows when. We met two Venezuelan climbers. They told us that they had tried to climb the Ritacubas directly without acclimating and one of their party suffered pulmonary edema. All of this made us feel lucky and in a strange way, logical. Because the weather had been so lousy, we had acclimated properly.

Back in Bogota, we read in the newspaper that the lost students had been found, alive and in relatively good shape. Eric remained in South America to tour several other countries. I parted with John in Miami. He was returning to a job in New Jersey. Dressed in campesino hat and ruana, unshaven and dirty, flying back to St. Louis, I sipped Aguardiente from a paper bag, feeling the glow, having traveled to remote lands and returned transformed. Naturally, I wanted to share the glow, so I offered a drink to the stranger in the seat next to me, but he nodded and politely declined.

End.