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We’re back from Yanapaccha. The short story is that I got pretty sick the first night we were there, which wiped me out for a couple days, along with any chance of doing any significant climbing. Instead, we hiked over to Laguna 69, and spent an incredible day there — it’s a crystal-blue lake nestled among the snow capped peaks, and it was one of the most beautiful places that we’d ever been. If we’d climbed Yanapaccha, we probably would have missed this spot, which would have been a tragedy.

So now we’re back in Huaraz for our last night. It’s Ieva’s and my 10th wedding anniversary tonight, and we’re going out for a really nice evening. Our friend Bill Lockwood actually arranged to buy us an incredibly nice dinner here, even though he’s in the US. Bill was also the inspiration for us to take this wonderful trip in the first place. Thanks so much Bill! We’ll be hoisting a fine beverage in your honor this evening!

Tomorrow we start the journey back home. I’m really looking forward to putting some of our stories and pictures online when I get back. So far this has been the terse, flavorless, newswire-style version. This has been a fantastic trip.

See everyone soon.

We spent a few days rock climbing and attempting Vallunaraju with our new friends from New York State — Will, Shawn, Chris, and Monique. We gained some valuable experience, getting turned back less than 100 feet from the summit. With our lack of mountaineering experience, we just didn’t think that the corniced and crevassed ridge looked safe enough to climb — it was late in the day, the snow was getting soft, and we didn’t have a good way of protecting ourselves. Lots of crevasse crossings on the way to keep things exciting.

We descended again, staying roped the whole way, and staying just ahead of the snow that blew in for the next 24 hours. No regrets whatsoever. We’re glad to have gotten some more technical snow experience, and we’re really glad to be back in one piece.

The rock climbing in the valley was pretty good — a lot of granite slab climbing that was reminiscent of Yosemite valley. We had a failed attempt to set up a zip line from one end of the steep narrow valley to the other, but that’s another story.

One huge highlight was getting to meet some of the special forces from the Peruvian military. They were there on a training exercise for 20 candidates for their equivalent of the Navy SEALs. Get this: as part of the exercise, they climb Vallunaraju with their combat gear, and spend the night up there. That’s some serious toughness and suffering. We made friends with one of their officers, Oscar, who is their doctor, and an incredibly nice guy. He let us get a bunch of pictures in and around the huge trucks that they brought up there. They’re giant old Spanish bohemoths that are about 27 years old. I’ll post the pictures when I get back.

We had a blast hanging out with the New York folks. We had a big birthday bash for Chris when we got back to Huaraz, which included a bunch of dancing at the local discoteca, La Tomba. They all left Peru yesterday after 5 weeks here. I’m sure we’ll meet up for more adventures back in the states.

We’re off tomorrow morning for our last mountain excursion, Yanapaccha. This one’s a little more technical than the rest of them (which weren’t really technical at all). It’s also more off the beaten path, so hopefully we’ll get a little more opportunity for doing our own exploring and route finding. Up until now, we’ve had enough to deal with, learning about altitude, basic snow/crevasse travel, and logistics. Hopefully we can have a little fun on this one and throw in a little technical climbing too.

We should be back on the 2nd, which is our tenth wedding anniversary, in time for a night on the town to celebrate. Yahoo!

We’re back in Huaraz after a 10-day trip up to the Ishinca Valley. Basically, we were able to climb two medium-sized peaks there — Ishinca, and Urus Este. Both of them were beautiful and incredibly rewarding, and while neither one was technically difficult, it gave us some some well-needed experience and let us focus on acclimitization.

We opted not to try Tocllaraju during that visit to the valley, since I was feeling pretty sub-par, both in terms of health and acclimitization. Nothing serious, but enough to keep us from wanting to bump it up a notch out of concern for safety.

Since this is our 10th anniversary, we opted to go all out, and hired a cook, Elias, for this particular trip to basecamp. He stayed with us in basecamp, and prepared all of our meals. Let me say that this was one of the best decisions that we made so far! Elias’s cooking was out of this world, and it was such a luxury to have all of your meals prepared and cleaned for you, without having to worry about getting sick because of the food or water (the cooks are very careful). We had a cook tent and dining tent (which we actually just used as a gear tent so that we could hang out with Elias). We got to try a lot of Peruvian dishes, as well as some good old standbys that taste out of this world after a hard day or two.

Speaking of luxury, we hired five burros to carry all of the loads up to basecamp and back for us. Actually, practically everyone does this, but it sure felt luxurious! Climbing in Peru is quite a switch from what we’re used to.

We found out that the 18th was Elias’s birthday, so we turned the cooking tent into la discoteca using a bunch of headlamps on blink mode, and an iPod and speakers supplied by some other Americans. Party!

Basecamp is beautiful, with all of the white mountains surrounding the moraine and meadow. There were probably 50 people there at any one time, but it didn’t feel crowded. Just about everyone that we met was friendly and incredibly helpful, since we’re mountaineering novices.

We fit in a couple days of rock climbing on a granite cliff above basecamp, and on some sweet boulders down in the valley floor. The rock in this valley is amazing, and amazingly similar to Yosemite in some locations. We saw someone on what must be a new route on a pretty impressive overhung wall on the way out.

Still no chance to offload pictures, I’ll post them along with some more details as soon as I can.

We don’t know what our plans are next, but we’ll probably head out to another peak after a day or so of replenishing and reorganizing.

By the way, we did get to go bouldering and mountain biking before leaving for Ishinca Valley. Both were outstanding. The mountain biking here is phenomenal, and getting shown thousands of vertical feet of singletrack by a local was an absolute treat. More pictures and info on the riding when I get a chance, maybe after we get back.

Ieva and I are taking a month off for our 10th anniversary to go to the Cordillera Blanca, Peru to go climbing. If you´re not familiar with the area, this site has a pretty good overview of where we are, and the type of stuff that we´ll be doing if everything goes well.

We just made it in to Huaraz, the small mountain town that will be our home base, and it´s actually been an incredibly easy pleasant trip so far. Despite 24 hours of straight travel, and not speaking a lick of Spanish, all the transportation changes weren´t bad at all.

One of the highlights was the bus ride into the mountains. We got the front-row seats against the windshield on the second level of the double decker bus (exposed!). We followed the coastline for about 4 hours, then crept up to 10,000ft through the mountains to get to Huaraz after another 4 hours. The hotel that we´re staying at is beautiful, and the beer and food are delicious. No stomach problems yet, other than what I brought with me from last week. We´ll probably go bouldering today, mountain biking tomorrow, and then head up to Ishinca (sp?) valley for the basecamp of our first climbing leg of the trip. We´ll stay there for about a week.

While we haven´t run into anyone that we know directly yet, of course we´ve already run into people that we have tons in common with already — one of the nice things about the relatively small climbing world. The people we had breakfast with yesterday are all from New York. A couple of them live in Keene Valley, and one of them grew up and lives in Wappingers Falls (a few miles from Hopewell Junction, where I grew up). They´ll probably head up to Ishinca valley the same time as we will, so we´ll have good company.

More updates to follow!

Ieva got invited out to Marmot’s offices for work, so I decided to meet her out there so that we could go to Yosemite. Of course, with getting the business going this year, I wouldn’t have much time, but we figured we could manage 10 days. Just enough time for a short wall and some good free climbing.

Basically, we had an awesome time. We did Skull Queen on Washington Column, had a great time, and had amazing luck with the weather. We got to see and meet lots of great old and new friends (one of my favorite parts about climbing in the valley, actually). We got to work on a new project and get new motivation for training when we get home. We fit in some super high-quality bouldering in Bishop, and I got to go see my sister in Fort Worth, TX on the way home.

That was about as good as we could have done with only 10 days! Here is the gallery of the best pictures and commentary from the trip.

Two weeks ago Ieva got an out-of-the-blue offer to go to Greenland for a week. Eric Post, a professor at Penn State, does research up there and needed someone to go along on this trip to, well, basically just carry heavy loads.

She left on Saturday, the day of Michael and Sharmishtha’s wedding. She was really bummed that she had to miss the ceremony itself (and the partying!), but she did get to hang out quite a bit for the rest of the day.

She doesn’t really know a whole lot more about the trip, since it was such short notice. She probably only talked with the members of the other group for about an hour total before leaving. In any case, we bought a new digital camera for the occasion, and I’m sure she’ll have lots to tell when she gets back. I got an email from her this morning that said that she’s tired, but doing great. She got to ride in the cockpit for a while, which is really nice considering that the flight is on a C-130 (military cargo plane), so the atmosphere everywhere else in the plane is less than stellar, so I’m told.

In any case, here are some interesting links that I found while I was trying to dig up any information beforehand that I could:

• Here’s a satellite photo of where she’s flying into. Note the runway in the center of the photo. Drag on the picture to see the edge of the Greenland ice cap, several screenfulls to the right. Zoom out gradually to see where this is in Greenland (or where Greenland is at all, for the geography-impaired). Very cool.
• Here’s a political map of where she’s flying into. The tiny town is also known as Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s the home page for Eric Post, the professor who’s sending Ieva on this trip. Those same caribou antlers that are in the photo on his home page wound up in Ieva’s possession on the first day of buck season in State College. She got to carry them to App House from our apartment and tell passers-by that they were from the buck that she shot that day. Very impressive.
• Here are the best weather forecasts that I could find for Kangerlussuaq. Note that there’s no civil/nautical/astronomical twighlight listed, since she’s above the arctic circle. Neat.
• Here is someone’s weather station info in Kangerlussuaq (I just keep copying and pasting this name) for up-to-the-minute weather info.
• Here’s a picture of the town of Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s a really cool picture of the edge of the ice cap.

I’ll let you know when I hear more from her, but I suspect that we won’t hear much until she gets back!

We got to go climbing from August to November this year. The big destinations were City of Rocks, ID; Tuolumne Meadows & Yosemite Valley, CA; and Joshua Tree, CA. Here are the highlights.