Nevado Ranrapalca

After a day of rest, Michael and I were mostly healed and feeling ready to take on another challenge: the North Face of Ranrapalca. Nevado Ranrapalca stands over 20,000 feet tall at the end of the Ishinca Valley, dwarfing Nevado Ishinca, our first climb about 2 weeks before.  It is a difficult climb - certainly the most technical we´ve attempted together.

The imposing North Face of Ranrapalca

While notoriously "scary-looking," this route caught our attention for several reasons: the face is a beautiful, kilometer-high wall of rock, ice and snow with two distinct, horizontal rock bands. It's a committing route with great exposure (and great views!) that may only exist through this season due to the rapidly-changing climate. In fact, this is the first time in about five years that it has been climb-able as a snow route and the chance may simply never come again.  In addition, the descent was via the Northeast face of the mountain - a steep rock and snow headwall towering above a heavily-crevassed glacier - giving us a full tour of Ranrapalca in all its glory.  Also, we felt acclimatized and in shape, and wanted to try something hard.  The climb, which requires 7,500 vertical feet from start to finish, normally takes 4 days, but we figured we could move fast and do it in 2.5 days in order to be back in Huaraz when our friends, Matt and Kelsey, planned to arrive.



Our ascent is in red and our descent is in black

We hired a particularly fiesty burro to carry our packs to just below Ranrapalca.  From there, we carried our packs up a steep, rocky morraine where we set up camp just in time to enjoy a beautiful sunset.

 

A beautiful sunset from our Ranrapalca camp

The alarm went off at 1 am and we awoke to one of the darkest nights we have ever experienced - there was no moon and even the stars seemed dim. Completely dependent on our headlamps, we made our way through crappy rock and up the rest of the morraine to a steep snow slope at the base of the face. After a long stretch of stairmaster-like steps, we hit our first crux at 3 am - an ice bridge leading to a vertical, 75-foot pitch of mixed rock and thin ice above a huge cliff.  This was completely unexpected as snow was supposed to extend all the way to the base of the face.  I was not happy. In addition to being frightening, this little section exemplified a whole new level of technical difficulty to which I have no amibition to reach - there's just a point where it's so hard it's not fun anymore, and this was it for me.

But Michael wasn't ready to give up and could see that the vast majority of the face (after this section) was manageable (albeit very steep) snow and ice. Using a combination of two technical ice axes, crampons, bare hands, and sheer force of will, Michael slowly and steadily made his way up the rock and ice to a safe anchor in the snow beyond. After a brief yelling match about whether we should turn around, he proceeding to literally haul his very reluctant wife up that section. That was the low point of the climb.  However, the next several hours were spent kicking steps and planting our ice axes, slowly but surely, up the roughly 65-75 degree snow and ice, watching an absolutely magnificant sunrise from what felt like the top of the world.

Just below the summit plateau, at around 20,000 feet, we reached the second rock band.  It was quite difficult to navigate and climb, but wasn't nearly as scary as the first - probably because we had sunlight at this point.  Michael, again, did a great job leading the pitch and I followed, with less reluctance and less assistance from the rope this time.

Taylor at the top of the North Face

Happy and tired, we were a little disappointed to look down the other side of the mountain - our descent route.  It was much longer and hairier that we expected.  Fearing the inevitable late-afternoon rockfall, we didn't dally in starting to go down.

The first part of the descent was a rock and ice face about as steep as what we had just come up. It took several pitches of exposed rappelling to get to the bottom of the face, navigating around a few crevasses along the way.  Unfortunately, at the bottom of the face where the glacier begins to slope at a more reasonable angle, there was one huge crevasse. After some scouting, we found an overhang just far enough over the opening that we could lower ourselves over the 10-foot edge and get one foot onto the other side. To be honest, this was really exciting to do and I'm sure I wore a silly grin on my way down, hidden behind my neckwarmer.

Taylor, thankful for good weather on the descent

Once past this hurdle, we were able to actually walk (finally!), a much faster means of getting down. I led our way through the crevasse field, avoiding the exposed cliffs and trying to find the safest and easiest route back to camp. While it took a long time, with some unfortunate back-tracking, we made it down, enjoying stunning views and perfect weather, arriving at camp a little before sunset.

A photo taken on our descent

Our descent wasn't over - we still had to pack up camp and descend 2,000 feet to the refugio in the valley where we had left our extra supplies and planned to sleep in actual beds with mattresses. As we slung our full packs onto our backs,  we wished we could have arranged burros for this leg of the climb too.

We thought we were out of the danger zone, but only a few minutes into our descent down the dusty and slippery morraine, my biggest fear came true: Michael fell. I watched from about 10 feet behind, screaming in horror, as his plastic boot somehow faltered on a rocky step and the weight of his heavy pack pulled him off-balance, sending him cascading backwards over a small shelf, where his poles stayed put, and then over a 20-foot cliff, finally coming to rest after another small shelf. It was like watching an action movie in slow motion. He came to a stop sitting upright, stunned.  Unbelievably (and reminiscent of his bike accident last spring), he came out of the whole incident with only a few scrapes on his hands and a small tear in his jacket. That man is blessed. And so am I, because we were about 8 hours round-trip from any help whatsoever and it was quickly getting dark. It's truly a miracle that Michael got up and walked out to the refugio, carrying his pack the whole way.

The cliffs Michael fell over

The rest of the way down was painful with the little agonies of cuts, bruises, blisters and burned-out muscles, but was otherwise without incident. We both crashed hard at the refugio after a little warm food, never before appreciating the comfort of old, used and smelly mattresses quite so much.

We met the burro driver the next morning and made our way out of the valley and back to Huaraz, sore and still tired but feeling very proud of ourselves for having completed our most challenging climb yet. Most of all, we were ready for several rest days in Huaraz and perhaps a nice, gentle backpack when our friends, Matt and Kelsey, arrived.