We are three days into a five-day hike out of Huaraz, Peru, the Santa Cruz to Huaripampa to Llanganuco route. Right now it is raining again. Our tent leaks very badly.
We rented that tent in town for six dollars a day. Three season, the man told us, with his hand on it like he was swearing on a Bible. It would handle the rain just fine. What he did not mention, and what we had not quite done the math on ourselves, is that we have walked straight into the beginning of the rainy season. The weather here is a crap shoot. For the last day and a half it has been the crap part of the shoot.
The plan was sensible enough. We wanted this trek to get us acclimatized and into shape before the Inca Trail outside of Cusco. Huaraz sits at about 10,000 feet. If we go over the pass tomorrow we will top out somewhere around 15,400. The guidebook says to spend a few days or more acclimatizing in town before attempting the trek. We read that. We nodded. Then we ignored it completely.
What we did instead was arrive on a night bus, spend one day sorting ourselves out, and buy food. This is a narrower project than it sounds. The lightweight just-add-hot-water selection in Huaraz, filtered for vegetarians, comes down to vegetable risotto and muesli. That is the entire menu. Risotto, muesli, risotto, muesli, for five days. We bought a lot of both. We rented the tent, a stove, a pot, and a headlamp, because I still have not replaced the one I lost in a panic in the cave. We did an acclimatization walk and hiked up to 12,000 feet the next day, felt fine about it, and called ourselves ready.
The start of the Santa Cruz Trail
Then we set off for five days and four nights of abuse.
The first day kicked our asses. Two thousand feet of climbing in just a few miles, starting from around 9,500. Altitude does not feel like being out of shape. Being out of shape is a straightforward transaction where your legs complain and your lungs keep up their end. This was different. My legs were fine. It was my head that went strange, light and slightly far away, and my breath that would not come no matter how much of it I took. We would stop, and I would stand there with my hands on my knees breathing hard at nothing in particular, and then we would walk another ten minutes and do it again. We made about half the distance we had planned. Truthfully I do not think I have ever been out backpacking this long before. Let me say clearly and for the record that Advil has been very, very good to me.
So here we are on day three, camped where we thought we would be on day two.
The pack deserves its own paragraph.
When I first shouldered it back in town I thought, Wow, this isn't so bad. I can do this no problem. It was damn heavy on day one. Still damn heavy on day two. On day three it is just a touch less than damn heavy, which I am choosing to interpret as progress. A good portion of that weight is the tent, which is a complete pig. It is a three-man tent for two people. We knew it was overkill. There was nothing lighter to be had in the whole town.
The first night it rained a little in the small hours and a little more in the morning. No problem for said tent. Last night was a different animal.
It started coming down at about 4:30 in the afternoon, right as we were setting up. By six the water had soaked clean through the rain fly and was dripping off the inside of the tent onto us. Cindy lost at rock, paper, scissors and went out into it to dig a trench along the uphill side. She did a beautiful job. I could hear her out there working, and every so often a comment I will not reproduce here. It made no difference at all. There was simply more water than any trench was going to redirect, and before long it was running under the tent as well as through it.
Somewhere in the middle of this, with the floor thoroughly soaked, one of us thought of the ponchos. They are the square kind, the sort that doubles as a tarp. We laid them down as a false bottom, put the therma-rests on top of that (yes, Jonathan, we have needed them), and the sleeping bags on top of that. And it worked. Water moved underneath us all night and we stayed dry as a bone, or dry as a bone from the waist down at least, which at that point felt like a considerable victory. We lay there listening to it hammer the fly and I remember thinking that this was, by any reasonable measure, a miserable situation, and that I was having a wonderful time.
Being true Portlanders, we took it all in stride.
The rain kept up on and off until seven this morning. By ten we had everything dried out and were back on the trail, at which point it promptly started raining again. We are smarter tonight. Ponchos on the floor and trenches dug before the weather arrived, like people who have learned something.
We keep looking at each other and laughing about what a great time we are having. The food is good, which is a low bar but a real one, and honestly better than most of what we have been eating for months. The altitude is loosening its grip a little every day. We are getting stronger. The cloud sits down on the valley most of the time and what we get is the near view: wet grass, the trail, rock going up into gray. But it lifts, sometimes, and it gives us things.
Yesterday it gave us a lake. We came around a shoulder of the trail and there it was below us, a mountain lake sitting in its own basin, and in the pasture above it a band of wild horses grazing loose with nobody anywhere near them. They lifted their heads and looked at us and went back to eating. We stopped walking. We did not say anything for a while. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and it was free, and we had done nothing to deserve it except be wet and tired in the right place at the right time.
And there was the pear.
Everyone else out here is with a group. You can spot them at the campsites, the guides and the arrieros and the burros, the tents going up in a tidy row while somebody else cooks. We are, as usual, doing this on our own, which is mostly how we like it and occasionally makes us look like exactly what we are: two people with a rented pig of a tent and forty servings of risotto.
Somebody camped near us took pity. They came over and handed us a piece of fruit. It was a pear. I have eaten a lot of pears in my life and I want to be clear that this one was not in the same category as the others. We split it sitting outside the tent and neither of us hurried.
Tomorrow we decide whether to tackle the pass or head back down the valley.
We went up.
The next morning started out beautiful and clear. We flipped a coin about the summit. I had reservations. The coin does not lie.
The campground had filled overnight with guided groups. You know the type. The ones smart enough not to carry all their own gear up the side of a mountain, and the ones whose tents probably do not leak.
The trail went straight up the mountain and then got worse. We were tired almost immediately and had covered no ground worth mentioning. Cindy was not at her best that morning and was running on considerably less than she had. I toyed with the idea of turning back. Cindy would have none of it, which settled that.
So we went up. And up. Every switchback delivered us to another switchback and no sign of anything resembling a top. Three hours of that and we finally crested the pass, in snow and mud, in cloud so thick we could barely make out the path going down the other side. Our shoes are lightweight hikers, not waterproof, and were soaked through. But we were standing higher than either of us had ever been without the assistance of chemicals, and for a minute that was enough.
Then the weather turned evil and began to hail. I said that at least hail is better than rain. Cindy did not believe me. I am not sure I believed me.
The way down was slipping and sliding over a wet, hail-covered rocky moraine, which was uneventful in the sense that nothing happened that we could not walk away from. It improved when we reached the valley floor and could follow the trail, though calling it a trail is generous. It was a river. Did I mention our shoes are not waterproof? The footing was a mixture of mud, rain, donkey, and cow shit. Falling into it was simply not an option. We did not fall. I consider this the single greatest athletic achievement of my life.
Lunch was more vegetable risotto. Then three more hours of walking until we had had enough. Tent up, ponchos down, ditches dug. It was a good day, or at least it is a good day now, with the rose colored glasses on.
That night, lying there listening, there was a swishing against the side of the tent. I assumed it was Cindy. Cindy assumed it was me. We put our heads out and found Betsy standing there in the dark, chewing her cud with great contentment and lining herself up to crap directly at our front door. We were, somehow, completely happy.
We knew the last day ended on an uphill somewhere down the valley. What we did not know was that the uphill was another thousand to fifteen hundred feet, straight up off the valley floor, right at the end.
At the top of it we found every hiker on the route sitting there waiting for a bus that had not come. Some of them had been waiting three hours. When a minibus finally appeared, we crammed the prerequisite twenty people into a vehicle designed for twelve and started for home.
Then the road. It was barely a road at all, narrow and winding and cut into the mountainside, and the driver took it fast. There was always some part of the van out over the edge. Not near the edge. Over it. You would look out the window and there would be no ground at all, just air and then the valley floor a very long way below, and then the wheel would find the road again and he would take the next curve at the same speed.
Nobody said much. There is a particular quiet that comes over a vehicle full of strangers all doing the same arithmetic. It held for a while. Then a girl in the back reached the end of what she could take and bolted, straight over the top of all of us, climbing across laps and packs and shoulders, clawing for the door.
I understood completely. I just did not have anywhere better to go.