Part II

The next morning, we made the pass, through a hole in a stone wall built along the ridge with at least a hundred stick crosses jammed into the rocks by God-grateful travelers. Not wishing to appear ungrateful, we made a few crosses of our own, and Eric spent fifteen minutes constructing a star of David.

In the early afternoon, we crossed the Rio Cardenillo, had lunch and pushed on toward the second pass at 14,600 feet, higher than any of us had ever been, carrying packs heavier than we’d ever carried. The weather soured. Rain, snow, and sleet pelted our faces as we overcame the passage. We immediately looked for a place to camp. The terrain was rugged, still pasture at that altitude, but not quite as green, more a washed-out yellow, full of Frailejon, the high Andes desert plant. We camped at about 14,400 feet on a gentle slope.

The next day we followed the trail north to Laguna Grande de Los Verdes. Just before arriving at the lake, we met three students from Bogota who were trying to make a fast hike into the Grand Valley but had to stop because of altitude sickness. One of them was white-faced and weak. We offered them help but they declined, warning us to be careful of the altitude.

Anticipating bad weather, we set up camp early, at the lake. By now we had come to expect afternoon fog, rain, and/or hail. The clouds would creep up the valleys, gloomily engulfing everything, until finally the high peaks were shrouded. The Grand Valley was just over the next ridge and, beyond that, the llanos – the vast plains of Colombia, home to cocaine factories, bizarre wildlife, and alluring stories.

At Laguna Grande, we met a Swiss couple, living in Honduras. They told us the only way to climb the two high peaks, Ritacuba Blanco and Ritacuba Negro, was from the west, and even then, they had to turn back because of weather, and they weren’t properly equipped.

Our Swiss friends roused us early and said goodbye, hiking the trail toward the ridge and Grand Valley. We retraced our steps, looking for a western approach, and the clouds came even earlier than usual. At 10AM we were in our tents, making cards out of notebook paper while the hail rapped against the nylon.

Two campesino hunters, dressed in pants cut to the calves, cloth shoes, hats and ruanas , stood in the hail, shotguns loosely held at their sides. John was napping while Eric and I greeted them. The guns were the first and only ones we saw carried by campesinos. We were nervous. The two rugged men stared at us while we tried to make idle conversation. Then they left abruptly, marching off the trail and disappearing in the mist.

Later, while we were cooking dinner, two men and a little girl visited. We let them look through our binoculars. The girls shyly returned them as if there were only so many times she could make things look bigger. The men laughed readily and pleasantly (revealing gold teeth) at our foibles, us gringos trying to cook powder in a hail storm.

The following day we edged closer, hiking off trail, up a dark rock slab slanting into the thick fog. A little after noon, we set up another camp. The fog grew denser, flying fast, rising from the earth. During a brief period of morning sunlight, we caught glimpses of moraine and the gray rubble-strewn edge of a glacier. We scrambled, slipping and bashing skins, making our way through the moraine and into glacial rubble, well over 15,000 feet. Small pale blue lakes like giant filmy eyes were linked to the glacier by ribbons of gushing white water, surging and crashing from the base of the glacier. Blue-white rivulets emptied down the rock slope, sending mist floating, disappearing and appearing like the fog. Even now, we see the blue water flow for miles far down the valley.

We selected a camp in the midst of the desolation, walked to the glacier’s edge and touched it – huge slabs of snow, and deep blue ice, like the chin of a giant blue whale scouring out the rock. A few stubby Frailejon jutted from the glacial edge. Strange plants, seemingly not good for anything, yet they grow everywhere.

That night, our eighth, we listened to rock fall from the glacial snout and the water gushing beneath. We slept to the familiar rapping of the hail, the storms not violent, but incessant. We never knew when one might become dangerous.

To us, what lay ahead was an unknown among many. We had never been to this country and these equatorial mountains. They were strange. Where was "timberline"? What sort of storm was hidden in the relentless fog always creeping up the valleys? What was higher?

Late in the morning, we climbed onto the glacier. We wanted to establish a route and evaluate the need for a higher base camp. The climb was not technically difficult, but we needed our ropes, our crampons and ice axes. We slogged past gaping crevasses, blue glistening walls of scoured ice descending into darkness; we stepped cautiously over snow bridges, exploring the northwest approach. Extending ourselves further than planned, we climbed to 17,000 feet, stopping on a "saddle" between the two imposing Ritacubas.

Eric and I were sitting on our packs, resting. John walked about forty paces, onto the rounded edge of a huge cornice, and he stood at the edge of a sheer drop-off thousands of feet to the Grand Valley perpetually shrouded in clouds and beyond, clouds seemingly forever over the llanos of Colombia.

I knelt at the edge and peeked over. A climb from the east would have been spectacularly dangerous. To the left was the dark, sheer rock face of Ritacuba Negro, the route to its summit following a (comparatively) narrow snow ridge along the fantastic rock cliffs. To the right, the white route to Blanco’s summit, rolling glacier full of crevasses. We were within range of either peak.

It was 2PM. We were baked by the fierce equatorial sun. Black clouds boiled ominously to the southeast. We toyed with the idea of making a summit bid on Blanco. So close, but we were only establishing a route. It was late. The storm looked as though it would hit at any moment. Plenty of reasons. We descended and, unlike most of the previous days, the storm did not move in. The fierce sun held, melting into some of our snow bridges. My leg plunged through, foot touching air.

The rain and hail finally arrived for dinner back at base camp. The hail lasted throughout the following day. As usual, we were holed up in one tent, only today, the twenty-second of December, was Eric’s birthday. We celebrated with great enthusiasm. His present was a tiny C-ration of peanut butter. He shared his treat as we discussed our summit plans.

I made a half-hearted vote for an attempt on Negro, suspecting that the higher, yet technically easier, Blanco would have to suffice. The tent bottom felt like a waterbed. With our ice axes we dug drainage ditches out of the silt and rock. We agreed to wake at midnight and prepare for the summit of Ritacuba Blanco...