Hi mates!

Anybody climbed Illampu in Cordillera Real/Bolivia during the last seasons? I only got some vague descriptions out of a Bolivian guidebook. I am interested in the Normal route.

Thanx for help.
Flo.

I climbed almost to the summit in mid-July 1999. Too long ago ?

It's a nice mountain, a good route. Great views of Ancohuma and Lake Titicaca. The Yossi Brain guidebook description of the approach is quite confusing re: Aguas Calientes. Walking from Sorata, you go through the villages, up the valley and camp near the river in sight of the pass, but still on the west side. Next day up over the pass and down the other side, not hard, to a small creek, some ponds - we believe this is Agua Calients and the normal BC when coming this way. From there you sidle up over a rocky cliff-thing and around above the moraine. There are some cairns, or at least there were, but not many. You walk across big slabby things, then down and on to the true left (your right) of the glacial moraine. Continue along a rock and scree ridge that runs alongside the moraine, above it. This chokes down with a rocky cliff on the right and the ice of the glacier on the left, so go down onto the ice and make your way up through an easy icefall, keeping right, until you come up into the upper basin. There are a few crevasses here.

Go before mid-July, before the face melts. We put a high camp in the basin, maybe 5600m or so, like it says in the book. Crevasses here not a problem. Got up 2am and did the face in the dark, up to the col for dawn. Mostly it was just easy 50 degrees snow/ice, all done unroped, but there was an occasional steeper bit down low, over on the right in a messy looking area, where we went to get around the lower bergschrund, which was quite big at the time (coming down over it was OK).

Above the col the ridge is quite narrow but OK. We were 4 people and the two most in front came to a blue-ice wall about 5m high, way up on the summit ridge about 6300m. They could see no way around, the weather was turning bad, very windy, with a summit cloud cap, so they retreated, meeting us back along the ridge and we all agreed to go down.

Later we found out a French guy a week later had traversed around down to the right (east) and back up on to the summit ridge then to the summit. We were still a fair horizontal distance from the summit, but vertically almost there. But not.

D

thanx for the info. the snow/ice face itself is not the problem, right? we will go there and have a look ourselves (if the face has not melted away till then).
gracias.