What a day! I woke to snow on the ground, a wet sleeping bag and wet shoes. I had gotten up in the middle of the night and had not properly zipped the rain fly letting moisture into the tent eating my bag. At the same time I left my shoes put in the open. Oh well I am pretty sure that I learned my lesson.
We walked in snow and fog (or rather we were part of the cloud itself I think). We scared a couple of Andean Geese in the way. Ricardo told us because it was cold and the insects didn’t come out, the geese forage through frozen plants to find them. We also saw another viscocho (rabbit squirrel animal).
The going was discouraging because there were no views. Towards the top the cloud thinned and we had views of the Tropecio glacier and the surrounding mountains.
We then made our final push up to the pass. It was cold, windy and the trail was sometimes icy. Tropecio Pass was howling with wind and there were no views. The altitude was 16300 ft. The descent was slippery. I was beginning to question my sanity when an array of beautiful lakes opened up in front of me. They have no names because they are new due to glacial melting. They were all different colors of blue. Some of the lakes were surrounded by jagged red mountains.
We took air of photos but the windy was still pretty intense. We walked down and saw one more lake before descending the valley to our campsite. We are camped in a wide valley below a mountain with a hanging glacier.
It was sunny when we arrive but an intermittent storm blew in later. We saw vicuña (a relative of the llama and alpaca in the far distance )
No comments:
Post a Comment