El Morado

On Saturday I did my first solo guide with Santiago Adventures to the base of El Morado, a peak in the Andes that is just over 16,600 ft. To put it into context, the highest peak in the lower 48 is Mt. Whitney at 14,490. It’s a great hike though a big beautiful glacial valley of waterfalls and cliff bands and when the snow level goes down you can see the hanging glacier San Francisco and a lake appears. Its early summer here though, after an especially big winter, so we did a lot of snowfield traversing. One of my favorite things about living in Sanitago is how easy it is to leave the city behind. In an hour and 15 minutes you can reach the ocean or the mountains depending on which direction you head. We left the city center full of screeching cars and speeding micros (deathbuses) at about 8am and by 9am we were careening around one lane mountain roads in our little truck, passing goats and men on horseback and wooden shacks selling homemade honey, cheese, bread, and empanadas.

My clients were pretty hilarious, a brother, sister, and dad from the US who were up for anything. The brother just graduated from Williams, the sister is in Chile as an exchange student, and the dad competes in century bike races and recently returned from a stint in the Peruvian jungle. After we finished lunch I packed up and was ready to head back down the trail right on schedule. They three of them looked at me the dad said ‘Can we keep going? What about trying to climb that?’ as he pointed to a ridge about 1000 feet above us. Uh…. Yeah!! So we set off at a fast pace, fording the river that was pounding from the spring melt and started the bushwhack scramble straight up the steep slope, yelling “rock!!” as small boulders tumbled down. We had been climbing for about 40 minutes when dark clouds began to roll in so I figured it was time to reign in their adventurous spirit. We jumped onto the snowfield we had been following and took the fast way down, them on their butts with their rain shells and me glissading on foot. Fantastic. As you can see from the photo, they were pretty psyched :)

Oh! A little update - I didn’t go to Siete Tazas this weekend with the other company I was planning to work for because I went to meet with the lead guide and the trip organizer on Wednesday and got a super bad feeling. So I followed my instincts and bailed. Turned out to be a great decision - so chalk another one up for following the gut.

Tomorrow starts my second week at NESsT, its been really intense and really good. My first week was training with Matt, a cool guy who has been in the NESsTER position for a year on a Rotary Scholarship. Funnily enough he went to Stanford, lived in Jackson for a winter, and actually met a couple of my girlfriends (and ended up dating one) at a bar in DC when Anne and I were there for a long weekend two Octobers ago. I decided not to go out that night so I didnt meet him until I arrived in Santiago and the coincidences came together. Small world isnt it sometimes????!!
I have to do a proper entry for NESsT next time because there's a lot to tell. I figured I'd entertain you with the mountain pictures for tonight.