March « 2009 « www.arareko.net

Gerardo, Luis Arturo and I went to Iztaccíhuatl during the weekend. Gerardo came to México to see his family and friends before departing to climb Mt. Everest the next month, of course we wanted to do some climb together to wish him luck.

We arrived to Llano Grande on Saturday morning, then drove through a couple of 4×4 roads till getting close enough to the base of El Solitario. From there we grabbed our gear and started hiking towards Iztaccíhuatl’s head. Our plan was to climb either Las Agujas or Arista de la Luz routes depending on their conditions.

We scrambled through some shortcuts to go around El Solitario and found the trail to Chalchoapan hut, where we arrived after a couple of hours. From there we opted to do a variation of the desired routes, we climbed some 4th class sections along the Southwest ledges of Las Agujas towards the “neck” and Arista de la Luz instead of the “head”.

Night caught us while reaching the base of the “neck”, where we set up our camp for doing a light and fast attack to the summit the following day. We spent a great time in the camp, eating like vikings and hydrating as much as possible. We woke up very early for the summit attack on the next day, but we had to bail very close to the summit due to fierce (~100 km/h) winds which made our progress really slow and dangerous. The route conditions are very exposed nowadays, no snow and long stretches of black ice with sections of loose & rotten rock scattered in between.

We got back to the camp happy of the decision we took, we rested there for another hour before packing things and starting the descent. We scrambled down the exhausting moraines of the Arista de la Luz route. After a couple of hours we were back to the start of Las Agujas, where we met a party of friends coming from Mexico City and Puebla. There we mounted a metal plaque in memory of Manuel Mijares Ferreiro, our friend and mentor who passed away at an accident around that area in 2007.

After mounting the plaque and having a toast of wine with them we continued our descent towards El Solitario, where another party of friends were expecting us to have a short ceremony to flag Gerardo before his departure to Mt. Everest. The ceremony was short but not without another toast of wine.

We said goodbye and thanks to friends before returning to the forest to find the truck. An hour later we were changing dirty clothes for clean ones and driving down to San Rafael. That was the moment when the true adventure began…

After a couple of miles we noticed that the truck was malfunctioning and that there was no oil left in the deposit. Then the truck shutdown completely, leaving us trapped in the middle of the forest, about 20 km away from civilization. After some quick inspection, it seemed like the day before we hit a rock or something while going up the 4×4 road without noticing it. The oil spilled all night long while we were up in the mountain and now the truck was totally empty.

After a couple of tries we were lucky enough to contact Miguel who already passed San Rafael, we told him about our situation and asked for help. After almost 2 hours he found us in the middle of the forest with the broken truck. He brought a gallon of oil, enough for doing a fast trip down the dirt road to get back to civilization and ask for a crane to tow us back home.

The crane arrived at midnight to Tlalmanalco gas station. Around 3:30 a.m. we were back at Gerardo’s place, totally exhausted but with a devilish grin in our faces. We just had a great weekend in our beloved mountain