Lessons Learnt on a 6088m Peak in South America’s Most Traditional Country

Our first steps into a sport are usually slow and steady, taking reserved precautions and learning skills in a controlled environment.

Reece decided to follow these rules rather loosely, taking his first steps into mountaineering on a 6000m peak, with a Spanish-speaking guide and a climbing partner he’d met the week before.

The Bolivian staple charquekán – a dish of llama jerky, plated over boiled corn-husks, and topped with boiled eggs and cheese – was probably not the best pre-expedition meal. I ate the surprisingly tasty, but incredibly dry, meal with a plastic fork, testing my Spanish listening skills by eavesdropping on the restaurant’s conversations.

Losing focus, my thoughts shifted to the coming day’s undertaking. I’d spent the day pottering around on the teleferico – the city’s cable-car system that offers views over the surrounding ranges – allowing me to directly ponder Huayna Potosi’s meaty peak and the ‘what if’s’ that accompany such a daunting figure.

Huayna Potosi (furthest left, hiding behind a lamp post), pictured from El Alto, Bolivia

The days following that risky meal would teach me things I couldn’t possibly learn in another environment.

1. Altitude Is No Joke

Being a slightly cocky, over-confident-in-his-abilities Australian who’d been at altitude for a month prior, I was pretty sure the altitude’s risks wouldn’t apply to me – that I’d prepared adequately and would be fine. 

The horror stories circulating La Paz’s hostel scene failed to shake me, and my confidence remained for the 36 hours of preparation and training between the base and high camps, where I failed to experience a single symptom. 

We ate a wafer-thin beef and spaghetti for dinner, received a pep-talk from our guide, and promptly attempted to get a few hours of sleep before our 12:30am alarms.

With three alarms set to make sure I’d wake up, I soon realised I wouldn’t need them – my heart rate was elevated and the dehydrating effect of the altitude pills meant I’d spend the evening barely able to shut off my thoughts between the frequent below-zero trips to the outhouse.

It became clear during my midnight internal discourse that this was an extreme undertaking that I’d significantly underestimated. My symptoms started to wear on my nerves as I lost more and more opportunity to sleep, and I quickly began to doubt whether I’d even be able to push myself through.

Not unlike old age, a looming final exam, or a work deadline, the effect altitude has on you often arrives slowly and without warning. Know your body, manage your symptoms, and don’t become complacent.

Some trepidation included

2. The Comfort Zone Is Malleable

Despite my brash overconfidence in my hiking abilities, I still hesitated when handing over my bolivianos for the expedition (at the time, each was worth about $0.056 AUD on the street). I’d experienced a few too many brushes with disaster on exposed mountains in the preceding years, and was still carrying scars that had induced on-trail panic attacks.

However, my ‘have-a-crack’ motto prevailed, and I let go of the bolivianos in the name of stretching my comfort zone for experience purposes.

Not long after eating my breakfast of dry cake and dulce de leche, I was trudging up a snow shelf in complete darkness, with merely half a metre of footprint and a seemingly endless drop to my left. 

Breakfast of montañeros

I was tethered to a girl I’d met a week before, and our guide, who’d ended the morning’s briefing by remarking ‘cima o muerte’ (literally translating to ‘summit or death’), pulled us along with little acknowledgment of the danger beside us.

I’m not sure whether it was the darkness or the breakfast of liquid sugar that pushed me through that section, but arriving at a slightly wider shelf to rest 15 minutes later, I realised I hadn’t craved the solace it provided. 

Despite being aware of the section’s precariousness, my confidence had grown as we walked. I’d grown more at ease and the physical salvation of the shelf wasn’t necessary, because my mental state had created its own.

Cima o muerte / Summit or death

3. Don’t Let Confidence Become Complacency

Riding summit fever and my newfound confidence, we descended hard and fast as the sun began to paint the seracs golden and La Paz woke up in the distance. Our knees stiffened, hunger and tiredness set in, and unknown to us, the sun’s heat began to rapidly compromise the descent’s safety.

With the sight of high camp promising a trade from painful rented mountaineering boots to the comfort of trail runners, our pace quickened – until we reached the crevasse.

For many, the word crevasse creates visions of a 100 metre deep abyss bridged by rickety aluminium ladders. In this case, the path we’d walked a few hours earlier had opened up a rather mild metre-wide crack, extending somewhere between three and five metres deep.

In the moment, it was simple – a small hop onto a ledge not bigger than an A2 poster, and try not to lose your balance, or there was a good chance you’d pull your climbing partners off the snowpack with you. With a line forming behind and the snow melting rapidly, there was little thought – we all jumped successfully, and continued.

It wasn’t until we reached the high camp that the reality of that situation hit.

Tiny humans ascending at dawn

Another member of our group, a two metre tall German-Polish guy who could bench press 150kg, explained that it was him who had opened the crevasse. He’d been walking comfortably, 20 minutes in front of us, when the ground cracked underneath him.

Luckily, he was able to avoid falling in, aided by his quick reaction time and that of the two people he was tethered to. He quickly brushed off the experience with the dry humour often typical of 20-something males, and changed the subject to summit photos and plans to celebrate that evening.

I, however, quickly zoned out. My fear of falling quickly returned as I contemplated the consequences had things gone just slightly differently, and I felt my newfound confidence begin to dwindle.

The morning’s experiences had helped me develop a self-assurance toward the sport, but along with it, a potentially fatal complacency. I’d lost touch with the realities of the situation and forgotten the fragility of the environment – something that could have been life-threatening.

While I was proud of my ability to conquer fears and push my comfort zone, I hopped off that mountain with a sense of respect and newfound awareness of my own perception of safety. 

I discovered how fine the line between confidence and complacency is, one to tread with caution, to ensure you don’t lose sight of it.

Snow, rapidly thawing

4. There’s a Phone Signal, Even at 5,500m

I find that when I take my first steps into a sport, skill or hobby, I tend to lovebomb it. I focus incredibly hard to learn as much as possible, creating an intense immersion that awards a presence scarcely found in the convenient modern world. It’s a sweet spot where I’m most myself, the point at which I’m most connected to my body.

At around 2am on Huayna Potosi, I felt exactly that. I trudged up a small, well-trodden path beaten into the snow, straining to remember the techniques we’d learnt the day prior and trying to minimise the number of times I caught my gaiters with my crampons. I was so present and happy to be practising something new that not another thought could push me from my state of bliss.

Until I heard the sounds of a crowd behind me. Not a crowd of other crampon-donned tourists, but a sports crowd, complete with chants and applause.

Name a better place to check the footy score

I’d been so focused on my steps that I hadn’t looked around in a while, and the trio behind had caught up with us. The sounds that broke the blissful rhythm of steps in snow came from the phone of the guide behind me, indulging in his daily scroll, at 5,500m. It seemed to him that the two paying customers behind him were no more than dead weight that he was dragging by the tether.

And so there it was – what was most likely the hardest thing the majority of the people on that mountain had ever attempted, was, for this guide, no more difficult, nor stimulating, than the slowest setting on a gym treadmill.

An experience as intense as this never fails to produce profound reflections, and in the back of the rickety van descending from base camp, thoughts swam in my head – from how close I was to falling into a crevasse, to how early it would be socially acceptable to go to bed. Fighting to stay awake, I opened my phone to see if a pair of second-hand mountaineering boots would break my backpacking budget.

All film photos shot on Portra 400. Stains and blemishes are the reality of working with a physical medium in extreme environments.

Read more: Why My Film Camera Comes on Every Adventure