32.9 mi / 6.6 mph / 1100 ft. climbing
Home: D’Casaviaje Hotel

Our night at 15,900 ft. wasn’t as chilling as I’d feared, the temperature “only” got down to 32°F, which we’d experienced 3500 ft. lower a couple weeks ago. During the night I repeatedly heard rustling and clanking, and the idea got stuck in my head that it was the nearby horses (for carting tourists up to the glacier) wandering over looking for snacks, and knocking the wooden tables into the steel doors of the vendor stalls around us. I went so far as to get out of the tent with my headlamp to shoo them away (I didn’t want them knocking over our bikes or rooting around our tent), but couldn’t find any. Only in the morning did I realize that it had just been the wind all along, strong enough to clank the steel doors by itself. It had again flipped direction overnight, which worked out for us, because finally our tent was positioned to catch the morning sun in front of it, while blocked from the wind by the curving building behind it.

Except there wasn’t much of a sunrise; a surprising fog, or “low” cloud deck was draping the mountains, and while it likely contributed to the relatively “mild” overnight temperatures, it meant there was no quick morning warming like we’d become used to. Nonetheless, I was out of the tent cooking breakfast well before the sun was over the mountains anyway, with life again made easier by the wooden tables about.

Our plan had been to hike up to Pastoruri Glacier this morning, all alone, long before the tourist buses arrived in the afternoon. But the hiking group who had camped across the parking lot beat us to the trail, though we only saw them from a distance, up on a mountain slope that they told us they were going to the top of. I had assumed that some of their reason for sleeping up here last night was altitude acclimatization, or getting their climb to some major summit started super-early, but neither appeared to be true. As we began our hike up to the glacier, there was one ill-looking guy coming back down with a guide, presumably having serious altitude issues. It definitely made us thankful for the lengthy amount of time we’ve had to allow our bodies to adapt to such extremes, and even then we aren’t totally immune. I still randomly have nights where my breathing repeatedly stops, and Rett’s altitude-induced cough, while better now, is still making appearances.

The mile-long walk up a smooth stone walkway easily broke us above the 16,000 ft. barrier for the first time, to somewhere near 16,400 ft., but we were able to do it with fewer breathing stops than our ~15,000 ft. day hikes early in our time in Peru. Being able to walk right up to the face of a glacier (well, as far as the ropes would allow) was a pretty unique experience, though of course having had the privilege of landing on a glacier via a helicopter in New Zealand (and then hiking all over it) probably made us a bit more-difficult to impress than the average visitor.

A funny thing is that the road here is currently pitched as the “Climate Change Route”, an attempt to make lemonade from the melting lemon-ice of this tourist attraction as it rapidly disappears. The blogs we’ve been following from six-to-eight years ago warned that the glacier they saw could be gone “in less than 10 years”. But as far as I can tell (from historic satellite images), the glacier’s extent has remained essentially unchanged from the days of those dire predictions. So this “Climate Change Route” is something that could easily be seized upon by climate-change denialists, “proof” that the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about. In reality, it’s just proof that predicting the future is hard, and even the most careful science won’t always get it right. But it’s also a helpful reminder that climate-change predictions have become less-pessimistic over time (and hopefully more “correct”), a fact that should be celebrated. It’s unlikely that Pastoruri Glacier will actually re-grow any time in the coming decades, but I think it’s better for people to realize that climate change isn’t so dire that it’s beyond our ability to manage.

By the time we returned from the walk (around 9:30am), the temperature had only gotten up to 39°F. Thankfully the workers had already returned for the day’s service, though I’m not sure why so early since it would be hours before the tour buses would arrive. But it allowed us both to us the flush toilets (costing S/1) to do our morning business.

And then we mounted our bikes to roll back down to the main road. The junction is where the tour buses turn left, to take their clients back down to civilization on the west side of the Cordillera Blanca. We would turn right, onto one of the least-traveled roads in this vast high-altitude panorama.

The gravel road stayed high above the valley, but far below the mountain peaks. It would bounce between 15,000 and 16,000 feet for the next 15 miles, taking us on a tour almost-incomprehensible in scope. Every cyclist we read who had taken this road before us described it as one of the most-magnificent places they had ever seen on Earth, so our anticipation was high, but tempered by the clouds draping the high peaks. I tried to convince Rett that we’d already been granted our fair share of stunningly-perfect high-mountain days here in Peru, so we didn’t have much ground to complain that this day was shaping up to be only 80% perfect.

The road was in surprisingly-good shape, at least for bicycles. It was an unusual mix of a reasonably-smooth and well-packed surface, intercut with absolute-nightmare washouts that were capable of swallowing (or stranding) most vehicles. But with bikes, we were able to always find paths through the gnarly sections, shoving them up the abrupt elevation changes, or finding a thin path along the edge of the deep depressions. Four-wheeled vehicles had a lot less flexibility to overcome such obstacles, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a handful of people crazy enough to try. We passed a couple of parked vehicles that had presumably delivered hikers to climb the mountains, encountered a motorbike or two, and then had a few vehicles coming the other way near the end, including a beaten-down two-wheel-drive taxi-type car. But largely, we had the road, and this universe of mountains, all to ourselves. Nothing could have made us feel more small against the enormous backdrop.

Knowing the superlative reputation of this road, we had hoped to spend another night in our tent at these heights to maximize our time in this incredible environment. But pretty early on I decided (and Rett seemed to quickly agree) that it would simply be too cold to enjoyably spend another night at these elevations. At a minimum, we would need to be sheltered inside our tent and sleeping bag well before sunset, meaning we wouldn’t have a chance to enjoy the views anyway.

But that meant we had a big long day to return to civilization down on the eastern flank of these mountain ranges. Even with the mostly-rideable surface, it was still extreme slow-going, mostly because our oxygen input was half of what we’d have at sea-level.

Throughout the day we had a few brief instances of soft hail (aka, graupel) lightly bouncing off us, but as we neared the highest point of the ride (within 10 feet of 16,000, setting a new biking record for the second day in a row), it came down long enough to melt and start slightly wetting things. We stopped to put on our rain gear, less in defense of the graupel, whose attack felt cutely ineffective, and more in preparation of the freezing downhill ride that was soon to come. After all, it was 41°F at 4pm! The graupel stopped as soon as we were suited up, and thankfully that was all the precipitation that would fall on us, again confirming how dumb it would have been to skip all of this due to that rain forecast from a few days ago.

After 16 miles of some of the most massive and muscular vistas we’ve ever seen, we finally returned to pavement with a left turn onto PE-3N. From the view of the highway, the junction was a nondescript path that gave little clue to the wonders that lay behind it. Our sadness at leaving that hidden world was only matched by the joy of being able to fly down the smooth paved road. It was 4:30pm, and we had covered only half the distance required for us to reach the town of Huallanca, but with nearly 4000 feet to drop, we could cover the second half at about 4 times the speed.

Just as it was getting dark, we rolled into Huallanca. We were quickly greeted by a young guy at our chosen hotel, and while he talked too fast and slang-y for us to understand, he helped carry our bags up to our 5th-floor room, and took Rett’s bike over with me to his mother’s/grandmother’s(?) hostel a block away where we could store them in the courtyard.

With our exhilarating but exhausting day, we just went down to the in-house restaurant, but somehow a giant order meant it would take forever for them to get to us. So we headed out and ended up in an almost-cafeteria-like space where the host offered hot tea and coffee with our Lomo Saltado, something we never would have thought of on our own, but worked very nicely.

Day 2

The hotel oddly had no keys to lock the doors, and the power went out for about an hour on the second night (to the whole city, not just the hotel), but it got the job done as a place to recover from our third and most-epic crossing of the Cordillera Blanca (which is saying a lot, since the first two crossings are also among the most amazing riding we’ve ever done).