A Really Big Mountain
Our next outing from Arequipa was to climb the extinct volcano of Chachani, which looms over the city at an altitude of 6,075 meters (19,930 feet). The mountain is known as one of the easiest climbs of this altitude, mostly because its base on the Altiplano side is over 4000 meters and because sulfur miners in the middle of the last century carved a good dirt track most of the way up. The climb therefore requires no technical experience and you can do the whole thing with just crampons, and you could probably get away with not even having those in this season.
Nevertheless, we should point out that nothing at this altitude is inherently easy, even if you are well acclimatized as we are. Just to give a bit of comparison, Chachani is well over a mile higher than the highest peak in Colorado, and the lack of oxygen and cold has a lot of unexpected effects on the body. Your stomach gets swollen so that it is hard to eat or drink, your head hurts, the slightest physical activity puts you out of breath to the point that you see stars, and your extremities ache. You get diarrhea, shiver all the time and in general are just exhausted.
In other words, 6000 meters is the altitude at which hiking stops being fun for us. We are happy to have climbed Chachani, it had great views and having gone so high comes with certain bragging rights, but I think that for the rest of our hikes we are going to limit ourselves to 5000m or less.
We did manage to get some descent shots from this height, though. We hope that you enjoy them!
August 16th, 2010 - 04:28
Glad you still managed to click the camera… A suggestion, though: why don’t you select mountains that start well below sea level! I mean, from OUR point of view, the pictures you get are quite as terrific, so no need to suffer for OUR sakes…