Not the best picture of these guys, but the only clear one I got in which they’re both together. Standing on the right in the black jacket is our guide Jorge from Grajales Expeditions, and in the red on the left is our other guide whose name is Vicente but had the middle name Miguel and went by Miggy or Mickey. There isn’t a very big weather window during which you can climb Aconcagua each year – I think November through February is all you get – so most guides max out at 3-4 expeditions per season. They also say that because of the weather and the altitude that less than half the hikers who set out to climb Aconcagua end up reaching the summit. That said, over the years, Jorge has racked up twenty-something successful summit attempts and Mickey, who’d been doing the job for longer, had 50-something. So, with these experienced guides leading the way, we felt like we were in pretty good hands.
If we’re starting from the beginning, my flight route was from Chicago to New York to Santiago to Mendoza – it was probably like twenty hours in transit. And then after that, I had a couple days in the city of Mendoza to meet the group, go to the store to rent whatever additional gear I’d need for the trip, and then try to relax a bit before heading off to the mountain. Here’s a rough map/itinerary that our artistic guide “Jorge DaVinci” drew for us to follow from base camp and beyond. The drawing doesn’t include the first three days on the trail that we spent getting up to base camp, but the itinerary on the right does. The planned itinerary was accurate until we got to Camp 2 where we ended up spending an extra day due to inclement weather. And we actually had to do the same thing at Camp 3 as well, so by the end we didn’t have any contingency days left. Grajales’s official itinerary can be found on this page https://grajales.net/en/aconcagua-polish-traverse/
The Way Up
The two main routes on Aconcagua are the normal route and the 360 route. The normal route starts and ends in Horcones Valley. The 360 route starts in Vacas Valley and you wind your way up the mountain to the top and then go down Horcones valley on the other side. I did the 360 route. So, after we got dropped off at the hike starting point, here we are somewhere on the first day making our way up Vacas Valley. On the right are a couple arrieros (muleteers) who – via their beasts of burden – are responsible for transporting food, luggage and other supplies from the end of the road up as far as base camp from where they carry garbage back down and out. Mules don’t go higher than base camp. The upper camps are serviced by human porters who carry goods, supplies and trash between the camps.
Some chicken and salad served for dinner by the Grajales staff at Pampa de Leñas (2950m) on the first night
This is more or less how the little cubicle bathrooms looked at all the camps up until base camp. The urinal thing on the left says “peebottle” because up on the mountain it’s common practice for everyone, instead of getting out of the tent to go in the middle of the night, to urinate in a bottle and dump it out in the morning. The thing is, they don’t want people’s piss all over every campsite, so they encourage you to dump your pee bottle specifically in this urinal thing. Our guide Mickey said the first time he’d done this hike was like 25 years ago. He said there was nothing here or at any of these campsites, but as it’s become more commercialized over the years, stuff like this began to appear. The most recent luxury added to all the campsites – one that I was not expecting – was connection to Starlink WiFi.
While walking on Day 2, I popped behind these shrubs to take a quick piss and stumbled upon this here dead mule
On the right side of this river valley is the second camp, Casa de Piedra (3240m)
As we were walking along the valley, I wondered what types of events over how many millions of years led to all these different colored and different shaped rocks sitting on top of one another here
Another interesting “capricho de la naturaleza” as my guide Mickey would’ve said
First glimpse of Aconcagua’s east face as seen while approaching Casa de Piedra. The following morning, we’d be crossing that river and heading up into that valley towards base camp
The next day, while hiking up the valley mentioned in the previous photo, a few of the mule guys had a tough time keeping their animals on track. Instead of staying on course with the rest of the pack, here are three mules grazing on the hillside while one of the muleteers (hard to see, but near the top center of the photo) throws rocks and yells at his beasts, trying to get them to keep heading up.
Looking back down the valley towards where we camped the night before at Casa de Piedra
Moving forward after saying goodbye to the valley in the previous photo
Approaching base camp
Plaza Argentina base camp (4190m). Here, before you’re allowed to go any higher, everyone’s gotta go visit a doctor for a quick check-up. They check your pulse and your blood pressure, and they listen to your lungs to see if there’s any fluid in there. I don’t know what my numbers were at this camp, but they gave me the go-ahead. About a week later while at Camp 3, I put a pulse oximeter on my finger just for the heck of it. My pulse was 92bpm which is quite high for me. I’m normally around 60. And then my SpO2 was at 69% which, if we were at sea level, I’d be intubated immediately. But yeah, it’s good they do those checks. When auscultating his chest, they discovered that one guy from another group had already developed pulmonary edema and was evacuated by helicopter several hours later.
The food “dome” at Plaza Argentina. We ate pretty good here. So, according to one of the guides, all the domes in these camps are assembled by porters at the beginning of the season and then are taken down again at the end of it. The pieces making up the metallic structures are left there on the mountain, but the canvases are carried down for the winter.
One of the dinners we had during the 3 or 4 nights at base camp
We spent the first acclimatization day at Plaza Argentina walking around the area
Another base camp meal
Carrying gear from base camp up to Camp 1 (4800m) and then heading back down to sleep at base camp. Camp 1 is located at the top of the hill somewhere on the upper right quadrant of this here photo
Climbing through a stretch of pointy snow formations known as “penitentes.” They’re called as such because they resemble the (very KKK-esque) white hoods worn by some Spanish Catholic dudes (penitentes/nazarenos) during Holy Week
One guy scaling the rocks while another couple guys spot him as seen on the stretch between base camp and Camp 1
Camp 1 – quite a bit more sparse than base camp
Unlike at the lower camps where you get your own tent if you paid for a single supplement, at the upper camps you gotta share with another person from your group, which can make it a bit awkward with the whole using a pee bottle in the middle of the night thing. Anyway, in the foreground is my tentmate and the tent we shared, and in the background on the bottom right of the photo are some guides digging below the ice in search of water to use for cooking and to supply each hiker with 3-4 liters for their daily drinking needs.
The way the bathrooms at the upper camps were supposed to work is that nobody pisses inside these things. Everyone does #1 away from camp. But in there, you’re supposed to hold a black plastic grocery bag up to your ass and shit in it and put all the shitty toilet paper in there, then tie it up, bring it outside and put your little bag of shit into one of the big purple bags that can be seen on the ground just to the right of this bathroom. Then one of the porters – after carrying supplies or luggage up to these upper camps – are supposed to load that bag of dumps into their backpack and carry it down to base camp where it’s probably put on a mule and carried out of the park. I had diarrhea for about a week up there and was shitting about five times a day and spent most of the time dreaming about how I couldn’t wait to get back to civilization and have access to a normal functioning bathroom.
Unlike base camp and the camps below it that had full-time kitchen staffs to take care of all our culinary needs, the upper camps were unmanned and the meals were prepared by our guides
A stew served at one of the upper camps – pretty typical dinner up there
Because I had to get up and go to the bathroom pretty early every morning, I caught the sunrise every day at Camp 2 (5486m)
My favorite Camp 2 sunrise
Heading up to Camp 3
This trip was my first time wearing double boots and, whereas I appreciate that they did their job insofar as protecting my feet from frostbite and working well with crampons to keep me in place on the snowy icy stuff near the top, I gotta admit that I’m not too big a fan of these things. They’re a bit too rigid for my taste. I felt like fuckin Frankenstein stumbling around in ‘em and my toes got destroyed smashing into the front of ‘em during long stretches of downhill
A heavily saddled porter making his way from Camp 2 up to Camp 3
The day we got up to Camp 3, another group from Grajales had been attempting to summit. It wasn’t the nicest day – there was thunder and lightning and wind blowing snow in our faces while we were hiking up – and so it wasn’t surprising that the majority of the people from the other group turned back to camp before reaching the summit. Here’s my group huddled up in the dome at Camp 3 right after arriving, listening to a couple guys from the other group fill us with fear about how difficult the route to the summit was for them.
Camp 3 (5970m) on a sunny morning
Unlike at Camp 2 where there’s some liquid water to be found on warm days (or even on cold days if you look hard enough), at Camp 3 everything is totally frozen. So here what you’re looking at are porter/guides Juan and Grigorio who are carrying big sacks full of clean snow to the campsite where the guides will spend the next several hours melting and boiling it for their cooking/our drinking needs.
Summit Day
We were originally supposed to summit the day after arriving to Camp 3. We were supposed to spend the afternoon relaxing, eat an early dinner, get some decent sleep and then be woken up at 2:30am to get ready to leave for the summit by 4. As it happens, even though it stopped snowing overnight, these terrible winds started up. They were shoving the walls of our tent all over the place making it very difficult to sleep. I spent most of the evening wide awake with a pounding high-altitude headache, waiting for Mickey’s wakeup call. When he finally came, he said it’s off. He said we can’t go. It’s too windy. We’d have a seriously fucked-up time up there. So, I said okay thanks for letting us know, but asked him if I could refill my water bottle. He said yeah, so I got out of the tent and went to go meet him at their little kitchen dome. And the wind during the walk over was so powerful, it stole my breath away. When it gusted in my face, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And any exposed skin felt like it was burning. Think they said the next day that the wind chills were like -30C or some shit like that. It was fuckin miserable. So glad I could crawl back into my tent and go back to bed after that. But anyway, the following night was much calmer. And here I am at 3am on that night getting ready to head up to the summit.
Low-lying moon
Sunrise was pretty spectacular. Couldn’t keep my eyes off the gentle morning light hitting the pure white snow on these mountaintops
Think we were almost three hours into the hike at this point
Looking back on the traverse that we’d just…traversed. Very hard to see, but in the path cut into the snow near the bottom center of the photo is another group of hikers.
Over the heads of the guys in the front of our group, you can see a bunch of little specks on the crest up there – that’s another group coming down from the summit. At this point, it’s three in the afternoon. We’ve been walking for over 11 hours and have only eaten a few snacks here and there. Even though it’s cold and snowy, the sun up there was so powerful that we all felt overheated in our expedition parkas and thick mittens. I felt like I was sleeping as I was walking. Nothing seemed real. I became paranoid that I was going to get serious brain damage and would end up a retarded vegetable that my family would have to take care of for the rest of my life. I suddenly didn’t want to finish. I wanted to turn back. I wanted to go back down the mountain. I wanted to go home. At the next break we took during which we all parked our asses in the snow on the side of the path, in Spanish I asked Juan the assistant guide how I would know if I what I was feeling were potentially dangerous effects of being at such a high altitude or if I was just being a pussy. He said I probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with him or be able to keep walking at the steady pace I’d been keeping if I truly was seriously ill. He said I was probably just scared and that we were really close to the top. I decided to set my fears aside and finish what I’d started.
Of our group of eight, four of us made it to the summit (6960m – the highest point in the Americas), not including our two main guides and one assistant guide. Two decided they didn’t want to try to summit, one started and soon decided to return to Camp 3, and another put in a good 7 hours of climbing before getting exhausted, beginning to lose her balance, falling on her face and ultimately being sent back to Camp 3 with one of the assistant guides. As soon as we got up here, I laid down and took a nap for half-an-hour until it was time to begin the long descent back to Camp 3.
When we got back to camp at 8pm, after 16 hours of walking, this is what my tent looked like. I brushed the snow away from the door, unzipped it and climbed halfway in, leaving my feet on the outside. I sat up and began trying to remove my crampons, but the straps were frozen and I couldn’t get them to budge. I was too tired to deal with the situation at the moment and decided to lie back and take a nap with my feet out in the snow. About twenty minutes later, I mustered enough energy to try again. I figured I needed to resolve this situation before my roommate came back from the food dome where he was eating some post-summit soup that I did not want anything to do with. So, with some perseverance, I was able to pop those frozen straps loose, get the crampons off, get my boots off, get into my sleeping bag and pass the fuck out.
Down and Out
The day after the summit, we slept in. Didn’t get camp packed up and start heading down until probably like 11
Our goal for today was to head from Camp 3 (5970m) down to Plaza de Mulas base camp on the normal route (4350m, pictured down below at the bottom of the valley)
On our way down to Plaza de Mulas, we passed many different groups of hikers who’d all been heading up the mountain. I felt bad for ‘em. They really had a long way to go. I didn’t envy ‘em at all.
After one night at Plaza de Mulas, we continued heading down. This day was supposed to entail something like ten hours of walking followed by a 3-hour ride back to Mendoza.
I liked the rock patterns in this mountainside near Confluencia camp (3400m) where we stopped sometime in the afternoon for a snack break
The guides said that they used this area of Aconcagua to film some scenes from that one Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet
I was pretty happy to get back to civilization. I was thinking about what I was gonna eat for dinner that night when I got back into town. Sure, it would’ve been 10pm, but that’s a pretty normal dinner time for Argentina. Yeah, I was pretty pumped. But nature had something else in store for us…
Turns out there was some shitty weather earlier in the day and a landslide was now blocking the highway back into town. Since we used up both our contingency days, some of the group members had flights the next morning that they were worried they were going to miss. It turned out to be not such a big deal. We were stuck at a standstill for a couple hours at the affected part of the highway before the police let us through. Traffic was down to one lane – it was allowed to flow into the city, but not out as bulldozers worked to continue plowing all the rubble off the road. We got back to the hotel around midnight. I was too tired for dinner, took a quick shower and went to bed by 1.
The next morning at 8:30 we had one final group breakfast together at the hotel. Those of us who summited were awarded these certificates. After the meal, everyone said their goodbyes. I went to the store to return my rental equipment and then came back to my room where I had brief nap and packed my bags for my return trip to Chicago that afternoon.
