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Outside Magazine June 2001

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Down Time -- cont.


	Chris Trimble scales Huandoy

IF YOU'RE LYING in bed in Huaraz on a June morning, acclimatizing (the city sits a heady 10,200 feet above sea level) or just recovering from a night at the Tambo, the nightclub where climbers, tourists, and locals mix, here are some of the sounds you might hear: A rooster with a throat infection. Distant tuba bands playing dirges. Pickup-truck-mounted megaphones blaring political slogans. And, without fail, the metallic jouncing of rebar being carted to construction sites. In Huaraz, rebar is serious business, a legacy of the terrible earthquake of May 31, 1970, which leveled the city's unreinforced adobe buildings and killed 20,000 people, half the population. (All told, the death toll in northwestern Peru came to 70,000, making the quake the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of the western hemisphere.) A tragedy like that could haunt a place for generations, but Huaraz today is a vibrant boomtown of 100,000-plus whose prosperity is due to two new nearby Canadian-owned copper and precious-metal mines—and to adventure tourism. With easy access to climbing and trekking in both the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Huayhuash, the city has become a mandatory stop on the Gringo Trail, a sort of Andean Chamonix. In the two years since Erickson and Saari last visited, the place had changed dramatically. Internet cabinas had sprung up everywhere, a half-dozen new cash machines had gone in around the Plaza de Armas, and there were even seafood restaurants. Yet the two had gotten their biggest shock when we checked in at La Casa de Zarela, the little hillside hostel run by Erickson's friend Zarela Zamora Lopez. Erickson and Saari expected to find the usual crowd of penny-wise climbers on the back terrace, one of the pension's prime attractions. What they weren't prepared for was the half-dozen skiers and snowboarders hanging there, too. One of them, a rawboned Scotsman, had just reprised Vallençant's classic descent of the west face of Yerupajá, in the Huayhuash. Next to him, two longhaired French snowboarders lounged in the sun, rolling joints and waiting for their photographer to recover from a bout of "gastro." As soon as he did, they were going to ride Huascarán Norte. Saari shook his head in disbelief. "Two years ago people would see our skis and just say, 'What are you doing?'" he muttered. "Now it seems like everybody's down here." "Maybe it's time to stop making movies," Trimble said. He had a point. Even as Saari lamented the ski bum's rush on Huaraz, he knew that he and Erickson had had a hand in kicking it off. Make an over-the-top video like the one they filmed on Artesonraju, and you're going to draw a host of imitators. On the other hand, what choice did aspiring backcountry careerists have? Ski mountaineering isn't pro golf, and the only way to make it pay is to go bigger, get higher, publish more articles, and make more movies.

Even so, Erickson and Saari insisted that this trip was to be casual and relaxing—a vacation. The previous fall the two had been witnesses to the avalanche on Tibet's Shishapangma that killed alpinist Alex Lowe, 40, and cameraman Dave Bridges, 29, and neither felt ready to attempt something of that magnitude again, much less return to the Himalayas. All he and Saari wanted, Erickson said, was to kick back and show their friends Peru.

But was it really possible for these guys to chill? In a month, Erickson, Saari, Patridge, and Koch—all of whom worked for Exum Mountain Guides—were due in Jackson Hole for the summer climbing season, a two-month slogfest in which they might clear $12,000 each. The stake would carry them through the rest of the year, but during the season they'd have next to no free time. As such, this "vacation" represented their best chance to stay on the radar of potential sponsors. What's more, this was their last opportunity to secure summerlong bragging rights within their fraternity of climbers and guides. As they all well knew, reputations are made in the off-season. If they didn't come back from Peru with some spectacular first descent, someone else would.

Beyond all that, I suspected, there was something else—a simple, burning need to take things one step further. Sitting there on Zarela's terrace, I suggested as much to Erickson.

He shook his head. "We don't go out there to up the ante every single time," he said. "We're out there because it's what really fuels us, gives us the drive to do everything else we do. It's not to outdo anybody. It's the camaraderie, the bond between us, the excitement."

Whatever the motive, I replied, the effect is the same: Your next expedition winds up being heavier than the thing you did before. Erickson laughed.

"That is true," he said.

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