9.4 mi / 3.7 mph / 2100 ft. climbing
Home: Pastoruri Glacier Visitor Center Camp

Our camp under the Puya Raimondiis had dropped just to freezing by morning, which wasn’t too bad given how close to that temperature it had gotten by bedtime. So our water remained in liquid state, but the wind had flipped direction overnight and it was quite annoying. It’s as if it always emanates from the sun here, inevitably pairing a windblock with shade. But with those photons blasting onto the unshaded tent, Rett was able to eat breakfast and get dressed in a 74°F “room”, warmer than literally any building we’ve been in in Peru.

Rather than backtracking up the path to the road, Rett hiked her bags straight up an even rougher path, and I followed with her bike. Tough work at nearly 14,000 ft., so for my bike we just hiked up my front bags (to make it easier to squeeze it between the sharp grass tussocks), and then I pushed the rest back up the “official” switchback. Rett began pedaling up the road, while I soon collected my waiting front bags and took off after her. Today’s work was to elevate ourselves another 2,000 feet, replicating yesterday’s climb, but the accumulation meant we would nearly hit 16,000 feet above sea level, a new record on our bikes or anything else.

The gravel road surface remained less than ideal, but better than we expected, allowing us to ride most of it. There were certainly bad sections, but it was probably 75% decent. That meant we could even look up at some of the increasing grandeur of the rocks rising above us, rather than remaining affixed on the next large rock below us that we would need to steer around. Today’s round of tour buses were generally larger, but fewer (only 5, with four conveniently passing during our lunch break), and beyond that, the day’s traffic was limited to a handful of other vehicles.

When we finally reached the turnoff to Pastoruri Glacier, around 2:30pm (glad we had shortened today’s ride by lengthening yesterday’s), Rett was struggling emotionally and ready to be done, despite the fact that I could just barely keep up with her. I had made her worried whether the ticket we had bought yesterday morning would cause us to be denied entry to the glacier, but over the last couple days, after observing how few people traversed this road, I was confident that National Park Rangers or Catac Community police were not among those few.

Two of the tour buses headed back down toward Huaraz before we arrived, but three still remained, so we suddenly found ourselves amidst a surprising amount of humanity milling about. In addition to the tourists, there were horse-wranglers (you can pay to ride a horse up to the glacier), a woman running a food stall, and a woman running the bathrooms. For S/1, I was able to do a rare afternoon #2, with my body subconsciously deciding that it hadn’t need to do its normal morning routine where digging a hole had been the only option; we could hold off until now. In addition to the flush toilets, there was also ample running water and soap at the sinks, so the opportunity to easily wash my face was amazing after two days in the wilderness. Compared to old reports, it seems there has been a bit of a bathroom upgrade here in recent years, mainly by routing a stream toward the bathroom building, and I was also able to easily fill our bladder from a spot where a gutter had been placed to waterfall it down a small ridge.

Unfortunately the woman was closing up the bathrooms as I finished up, so Rett didn’t have a chance to experience the luxury, and was forced to do her business elsewhere, and wash up with our bladder hung from a post (in a spot where the grass was covered in ice, water that had frozen from the morning’s cleaning and never thawed).

Otherwise the routine matched what other reports had led us to expect: before 4pm, the remaining buses had cleared out, and just minutes after that, everyone else had disappeared as well, with all the workers apparently packing into a single taxi-looking car to bump back down the mountain. The woman at the food stall had hot soup available just moments earlier, and we could still smell it through the locked steel garage door (earlier we bought a couple of Cokes and a water for a high-but-understandable S/13, or ~US$4).

So then it was just us, set to camp at this underused visitor center, taking advantage of the windblocking buildings and their overhangs, and able to use the scattered tables to cook on, making an evening at 15,900 ft. much more tolerable than it would have been otherwise.

Except, then we noticed that we weren’t alone! At the far end of the (also-overbuilt) parking lot (a hundred yards away from the main complex we were at, but closer to the bathrooms), a few big tents had been set up, and now more backpacking tents were being pitched. Initially annoyed and feeling awkward at their ability to observe our not-exactly-sanctioned campsite, we felt a little better when a couple of them wandered over and we learned that they were a group of European tourists just as new to this place as us. And at least we learned through them that the bathrooms are now completely locked overnight, unlike the situation from years ago.

The reports about the round, empty, “tourist information” building were still correct though: one of the windows was unlatched, held closed by a rock sitting on the interior sill, and could be easily pushed open and climbed through (there was even a big rock sitting below it as a step), and then the door could be unlocked. While Rett snuggled down in the tent, I spent an hour sitting inside the building, where at 7pm it was about 5 degrees warmer than the 37°F it had dropped to outside (and more-importantly, windless).

In our different locations, both Rett and I were confused and surprised by the same sound, which turned out to be a brief rain (or hail?) shower clattering on our roofs. I had nearly forgotten how afternoon rain in the forecast for today and tomorrow had nearly caused us to abandon this route. We’re equally glad that the forecast didn’t come to fruition, and that we didn’t skip this mountain majesty for a 3-minute event that didn’t even come close to getting us wet. But we’ll see if we get through tomorrow as luckily!