7.3 mi / 4.7 mph / 3000 ft. climbing
Home: Laguna Culacocha WIld Camp

We went to our usual breakfast place, where Rett shocked the waitress by ordering six “pan con huevos” rather than our usual four. Hey, we’re actually riding our bikes today, not just hanging out around town, so we need the extra energy!

We weren’t riding immediately though, because Rett’s bike had yet another flat on the rear wheel. I’d wanted to check on it earlier than “it’s time to go” during our Oyón stay, but our bikes had been in a locked unused room at the hotel. At least this time we hadn’t yet checked out of our room, so I was able to work on it comfortably indoors. This time I switched her rear tire to the front, because if that tire is just a lemon, it’s easier to fix future flats on the front than the rear. The hole this time was completely-unrelated to any previous leaks, but possibly could have been caused by inflating (and over-stretching) the uncontained tube when searching for the last leak!

There are two routes east out of Oyón; I thought we were going to be taking the longer, more-climbing, but more-paved 113, since we needed gas for our stove, and that’s the route that had the gas stations. But luckily a failed search yesterday for a yogurt shop mentioned on iOverlander ended up not being completely fruitless, because the walk back revealed that Google was wrong about the two in-town gas stations that it said were “permanently closed” (I had been willing to believe Google because gas stations in Peru really seem to be at town entrances/exits, and almost never in them).

So that allowed us to take PE-18, and even without trying 113, I can unequivocally say it was the right choice. It was a direct steady climb on decent gravel, with almost no traffic, all the way to where 113’s steep sequence of switchbacks climbed back up to meet it. So many thanks to Rett’s strong preference for yogurt over oatmeal for breakfast!

We made it nearly five miles up the road without encountering any of the reported caravans of mining trucks, so I was optimistically thinking that the just-passed holiday meant they weren’t going to be active today. But nope, here comes a line of 8 of them coating us with dust as they come down the narrow road. The good news is that miners don’t like traveling on bad roads any more than we do, and the value of their minerals (the usual silver, zinc, and lead) mean that they can pay to build better roads. So soon we reached not just asphalt, but solid, wide stretches of concrete, which collectively covered about 2/3rds of the 18 miles we rode today. I had been counting on the smooth surface to greatly increase our speed on the massive climb, but I hadn’t considered how the dust-elimination would be just as valuable.

After nearly 2000 feet of climbing in 10 miles, we reached Laguna Paton, where our unaware mentor Timothy Tower had camped on his first night out of Oyón. But we’d had a longer rest in Oyón, and an earlier morning start, so we felt good to continue our plan to camp even further up at a lake that his mentors, the Shaws had scouted out in 2018. Laguna Paton would have been a beautiful place, and likely warmer than our target, but pushing onward and upward would make our next day easier.

Once we entered the ever-thinner atmosphere above 14,000 ft., the road decided to add insult to injury by tilting up to 7-8% grades for a couple of miles, but after puffing and stopping and pushing our way through it, it kindly leveled off to let us enjoy the scenery again.

My confidence that we would actually be able to camp at Laguna Culacocha was less than 100%. After all, the most-recent report I could find of anyone doing so was the Shaws, seven years ago. That was before the main road had been paved, so would the mile-long gravel access road still even be connected, or would massive earthworks have changed everything? StreetView suggested a path still existed, but even that was two years old. And seven years ago the mining company already had a pumping station in the middle of the lake, so could they have expanded operations there and closed off public access?

Thankfully, the turnoff still existed, there were no signs of any sort (neither “private property” nor “public recreation area”), and the gravel was easily rideable. After Rett selected a pleasantly-flat and slightly-protected spot to pitch the tent, we noticed a few workers tending to some piping project on a hill 50 yards away, but they clearly had no issue with us setting up camp here.

After dinner, when Rett had retreated to the tent, a teenage boy somehow came walking by from the far side of the lake (that seemed to be fully-closed-off by mountains). His three dogs came to investigate our tent and bikes, and they all comically ran circles around our tent as he attempted to corral them. He had a handful of something that looked a bit like green onions in his hand, that he had clearly picked from wherever he had come. I asked if it was fine to camp here, and he barely answered since it seemed like a dumb question to him, but instead pointed to the light and constant humming noise coming from high on one of the surrounding slopes, telling me something about it being a cement plant. I’m not sure why!

It was 50°F when we arrived, dropped to 42°F by 6pm, and down to 37°F by bedtime. And once we were safe in the tent, we could hear the patter of some form of light precipitation. The forecast had indicated a chance all afternoon, so at least it had held off until night. And inside the tent, in this remote high-mountain wilderness, I could make a blog post because there was a good cellular signal! Like the concrete road, it’s presumably a bit of a public benefit that the mining company shares in exchange for exploiting the country’s natural resources. I mean, I’m sure they intend it just for their own use, but thankfully there are no passwords required on LTE networks!