Ojos Del Salado

My flights brought me from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to Lima, Peru and finally to Copiapó, Chile. COVID protocols throughout my travels have included wearing masks and face shield combined. During travel travelers were allowed to dine together with their travel mates.

We are quite far south, so the longer days are much different than at home in Park City! The sun sets around 9:00pm and rises around 6:30am.

From Copiapó, it was a six-hour drive to the Atacama desert. During the drive, we were stopped at random for Covid temperature checks.

Upon arrival at our first camp (where we will be for two days), we set up tents and prepared for the morning acclimation hike the next day. It’s extremely windy and dry, and the sun is especially bright against the multicolor sand. This is the driest climate I’ve ever visited and there is very little vegetation, save some small grasses here and there. A welcome surprise—there are llamas everywhere!

Our acclimatizing hikes are intense. Extremely bright and relentless sun, steep terrain, and so much sand that I’m often traveling further backward than forward with each step.

The stars! Oh, the stars! They are even brighter and more abundant plus seem much closer than what I witnessed in Nepal!

Today was a long and tedious day as we made our way to high camp. Thankfully, there is a super sandy road that a truck can take up to high camp. Otherwise, our itinerary wouldn’t have worked with the multiple trips required to move our water, food, and gear. Even then, the truck had to make five passes through an area that is often impassable.

The wind was so relentless that we had to wait as long as possible to start hiking to high camp, where the wind was even more intense.

Upon arrival, the wind was too strong to pitch tents, so we opted to sleep in two shipping containers (with bunk beds) set up in the area for that exact reason. Three other groups were there, as well, and no one summited. This was not welcome news! We had decided to make our summit push a day early for weather reasons!

This mountain, Ojos Del Salado, is taller than Ama Dablam in Nepal, for which we spent two weeks acclimatizing. This mountain is less technical, but still 100 or so feet higher and I’d pushed my acclimatization schedule to only seven days. I tried not to dwell on this, knowing the pain may be more intense this time around. The other challenge was that I hadn’t brought an 8,000m jacket and had to be extremely mindful of potential heat loss.

It was fiercely cold when we started at 4:30am, our best estimate at a manageable wind window. However, it meant we had no sun for most of the morning and everyone had cold feet and hands for way too long. I think we may have been better off with more sun and more wind.

It was way more challenging in terms of mechanics than I expected. The monotonous landscape everywhere had a mind-numbing effect and when combined with incessant sliding backward, it often felt like I wasn’t moving while expending so much energy. It was like climbing a huge pile of gravel. I’d slide backward when I stepped forward, and I celebrated every big rock in my path because I knew it could hold my weight without forcing me to lose ground on the step.

The last section was a vertical rock wall that all of us had enough experience to free climb (without ropes). The descent down the mountain was basically boot skiing. We slid down the hill using our boots trying not to hit rocks that would stop the flow. It took an enormous amount of mental energy to make sure a slide wouldn’t take out an ankle or foot.

Ted and I climbed together, and this summit happened because of him. He lent me gloves and a jacket, both without which I wouldn’t have made it. Each time I said I was about to turn around, he asked for one more hour, and all those concessions added up to progress I couldn’t deny. I’m forever grateful. We can always do something longer than we think.

Everyone in our group summited except one teammate, and we had roughly three hours difference between the first and last to summit. On the way down, the time spread grew to about five hours.

I’m so grateful to have this one done. There were two moments when I thought I might have to come back another time, and idea that honestly felt like having to succumb to another stint in fiery hell. It was a difficult mental space to inhabit when the thought crept in.

We stayed in the desert after our descent. The wind was so extreme that shipping containers were dropped at base camp for shelter. They are great for wind control, but not for cleanliness, and even in the containers water freezes at night.

The desert is barren. There are no birds, bugs, rodents, or grass. Just a mind trip of different colors and textures of stone and sand. The sun was so bright that I was finally able to use my crazy glacier sunglasses originally purchased for climbing in the Himalayas. They made everything so dark there, but in this Martian-looking landscape I still had to squint at everything with them on. My eyes and nose watered continuously due to all the fine particles always floating in the air. I’m so grateful for my ski goggles in a way I never thought possible at home in Park City. It’s hard to believe that my surroundings were on the same planet!

We woke up this morning and packed up camp, and I was giddy to be moving out of the cold! We had an eight-hour drive to the hotel, and it was the first time we had running water since we landed over a week ago! The warm shower, bed, and staying in Bahía Inglesa, a beautiful beach town was lovely. Yes, more sand! But it was connected to an ocean.