I first got interested in climbing Illampu when I read about it in "The Andes, A Guide For Climbers" by John Biggar. A very good book, by the way. Not long after that, I became addicted to Summitpost, and this, and its parent Illampu, is one of the pages I kept coming back to.
Finally, using all the information on SP, I decided to give it a go, with the help of a local guide. Apart from the fact that I needed someone knowledgeable on the other end of my rope, that also helped a lot with the route finding. Therefore, SP was instrumental in deciding whether I could tackle Illampu, but the guide really knew the mountain.
A few remarks about my experiences (in 2009) that might be usefull for other climbers.
In 2009, there was a new road to the last village before Huila Khota. Must have been Lakhathia. On the way down from Aguas Caliente, we called a taxi from Sorata and drove down. That saved a lot of time, eventually we were back in La Paz before dinner time!
We used porters to get our gear from Aguas Caliente to high camp. For that reason, we made our high camp right before going onto the glacier, which is a bit low. Consequently, we had to negotiate the icefall, which had loads of crevasses, at night. That added two hours to the climb compared to having a high camp just below the steep face as you advise, but it saved us dragging all our gear through the ice fall. If I had to climb it again, I would still camp at the same spot.
Although we started the summit climb at midnight, in hindsight we should have started even earlier, as early as 10 pm perhaps, because by the time we were coming down the steep headwall, the sun had come around the mountain and some loose rocks started tumbling down.
We ascended on the very left hand side of the high face, because we had heard that the bergschrund on the right hand side was really big. In darkness, we couldn't see that, but later, when rappelling down the center of the face, we certainly did. I had to stop to avoid ending up in it, like you warned about! After a short traverse we crossed it and were back on (relatively) safe ground.
Damien Gildea - Aug 3, 2007 10:31 pm - Voted 9/10
Very GoodThis is one of the best descriptions of this route that I have seen - better than the guidebook ! Well done.
D
rgg - Oct 8, 2010 7:44 pm - Voted 10/10
Thanks for a very informative page!I first got interested in climbing Illampu when I read about it in "The Andes, A Guide For Climbers" by John Biggar. A very good book, by the way. Not long after that, I became addicted to Summitpost, and this, and its parent Illampu, is one of the pages I kept coming back to.
Finally, using all the information on SP, I decided to give it a go, with the help of a local guide. Apart from the fact that I needed someone knowledgeable on the other end of my rope, that also helped a lot with the route finding. Therefore, SP was instrumental in deciding whether I could tackle Illampu, but the guide really knew the mountain.
A few remarks about my experiences (in 2009) that might be usefull for other climbers.
In 2009, there was a new road to the last village before Huila Khota. Must have been Lakhathia. On the way down from Aguas Caliente, we called a taxi from Sorata and drove down. That saved a lot of time, eventually we were back in La Paz before dinner time!
We used porters to get our gear from Aguas Caliente to high camp. For that reason, we made our high camp right before going onto the glacier, which is a bit low. Consequently, we had to negotiate the icefall, which had loads of crevasses, at night. That added two hours to the climb compared to having a high camp just below the steep face as you advise, but it saved us dragging all our gear through the ice fall. If I had to climb it again, I would still camp at the same spot.
Although we started the summit climb at midnight, in hindsight we should have started even earlier, as early as 10 pm perhaps, because by the time we were coming down the steep headwall, the sun had come around the mountain and some loose rocks started tumbling down.
We ascended on the very left hand side of the high face, because we had heard that the bergschrund on the right hand side was really big. In darkness, we couldn't see that, but later, when rappelling down the center of the face, we certainly did. I had to stop to avoid ending up in it, like you warned about! After a short traverse we crossed it and were back on (relatively) safe ground.