Huaraz and the 3 Cordilleras

Huaraz was a taste of real Peru. A town set on the frontiers of many massive mountain ranges, the push and pull of gravity is palpable. It felt great to get out of the city and up into some air clean and thin enough for a quick and easy case of the soroche, or altitude sickness. We took many beautiful day hikes up to passes and hanging lakes that are as high as the summits of peaks back home. The weather was predictable as the rainy season sets in, with rain pretty much every afternoon.

The three main mountain ranges are the Cordilleras Blanca, Huayhuash, and Negra. We spent several days with our good buddy Dave at a refugio in a rock forest called Hatun Machay. Sport climbs have been put up there and it felt great to finally break out the gear we´ve been carrying and get down to business, leading out at 14,000 feet. We hiked to a summit of a larger foothill of the Cordillera Negra, where one can supposedly see the Pacific on a clear day.

The climbing was really fun and the rock was beautiful, but the real imprint that the place had on us was through the people we met. We met a campesino woman and her two daughters who had been sheparding through the hills for the past few days. She was very sweet but she had little beyond what she could carry bound up in a colorful bundle on her back. We offered her some of our food and listened to our first exposure to quechua, with some castellano sprinkled in. Seeing the way they spend their days was a gift. Another woman drove her herd to a small summit with her dogs and rested looking out over the mountains, pastures, and down toward the distant sea. Her red skirt had beautiful shimmering beads in a sparse decorative pattern. The contrasts of colors and nature here are stark.