Chachani or 6075m to the top of the world

Having completely exhausted ourselves climbing up and down a canyon for some reason we then decided to try and climb our first 6000+m hill. Daft or what?

No matter about our sensibilites we were waiting at 7am for the bus to pick us off and whisk us up to about 4800masl (meters above sea level) where we start our climb. Only 400m or so on the first day but it is carrying 5 litres of water each, tent, sleeping bag, ice axe, crampons etc. so the bag on our backs is very heavy indeed. A very slow walk up to base camp. After a sleepless night we arise at 3:30am to start the climb. Really feeling the altitude the walk up to the first pass is very slow, sadly Clare is hit by the altitude (headache, sickness, disorientation etc.) so had to head back down the path. I, for some unknown reason, carried on. Just over the first pass the guide stops us and asks us to put on the crampons - a very tricky task in the dark and freezing cold! Ten minutes later everyone in the group was ready to go so we walk across the first drips of snow, no problems. Round the corner we suddenly see what we have to get over, a traverse round the hill on frozen snow at an angle of 75ø or so. Maybe easy to those who are used to crampons and how good they are but for a novice like myself this looked like certain death.

Having built up courage we all managed to get across the snow to be faced with a huge brute of a hill infront of us. We could now see it in all its glory as the sun was just starting to shine on it. An hour and half later we reached the top only to find that that was exactly what it was, only a top on the way to the peak. Guess what faced us now, yup, another traverse across a whole lot of snow. At least this time it was daylight so we could see the huge drops below. In actuality this traverse was easier than the last one so we all made it round to face the final heave to the peak. Only a couple of hundred meters but the slowest and most tiring I have ever faced in my life. About 10am the cross at the top hove into sight and the feeling of being on top of the world, elation and relief at no more climbing hit us. Fantastic! The views were truly awsome, Ariquipa, a city of 600,000 was a meer speck below.

Coming down was a sprint, what had taken 7 hours to come up was 3 hours going down, sadly with the same ice traverses necessary coming down that we had crossed on the way up. Back at base camp was a collapse point before the quick run down to where the bus picked us up to take us back to Arequipa. Needless to say I was asleep by 8pm!