Previous Post: Day 6 – The Kelluani Valley To the Upper Chachakumani Valley

The Chachakumani campsite is a well-used spot since it also serves as a mountaineer’s basecamp for summit attempts on Nevado Chachakumani.  The local community has even installed a deep pit toilet on the upper perimeter of the site.

As it did at each of our campsites,  our trek crew also set up a toilet tent nearby. It was a roofless chest-high four-sided screen with a two-foot-deep hole in the middle.

The Chachakumani Valley – our campsite and Nevado Chachakumani (6074 m)

[See here for a Google satellite view that you can zoom in or out on for more detail.]

An excellent Wordpress site dedicated to various mountaineering objectives in Bolivia, Bolivian Climbing Info, has an image of Chachakumani on which various routes up to the top are indicated.  The routes all focus on the South Face or the Southeast Ridge and are graded from  AD (Assez Difficile) to D (difficile).

image from Bolivian Climbing Info – see here for the web page

Here is a brief description of the various grades of difficulty using the French alpine system:

• F: Facile/easy. Rock scrambling or easy snow slopes; some glacier travel; often climbed ropeless except on glaciers.
• PD: Peu Difficile/a little difficult. Some technical climbing and complicated glaciers.
• AD: Assez Difficile/fairly hard. Steep climbing or long snow/ice slopes above 50º; for experienced alpine climbers only.
• D: Difficile/difficult. Sustained hard rock and/or ice or snow; fairly serious stuff.
• TD: Très Difficile/very difficult. Long, serious, remote, and highly technical.
• ED: Extremement Difficile/extremely difficult. The most serious climbs with the most continuous difficulties. Increasing levels of difficulty indicated by ED1, ED2, etc.

Source of info – Alpinist Magazine web page – see it here

I’ve only done climbs rated a lower grade of P.D.  and one A.D. climb in the Bugaboos, a magical climbing area in British Columbia, Canada where I felt pushed to my limit.  I’ll leave the above routes to those with a skill set and fitness level beyond mine!

“Assez Difficile”: Climbing The Granite Spire of the Bugaboos

Update: There is an easy way up Chachakumani!  See the end of this post.

my tent on a wet “rest” day at Chachakumani

After six straight days of sunshine and clear skies, it snowed and rained on our rest day!  As the pix will show, however, the light cover of snow did not stay for long and by late afternoon it was mostly all gone. I did get a bit restless and spent a couple of hours walking up-valley, where I met some horses belonging to the Chachakumani community about eight kilometers at the other end of the valley.

As for some views of the mountains, we would have to wait until the next morning for things to clear up a bit.  If nothing else, the daily clouds coming over the Cordillera from the east was a reminder that there is a very different world – warmer and much more humid – within a few kilometers of the stark and fairly desolate alpine terrain we were traversing.

looking up the Chachakumani Valley on a wet day

horses running down the Chachakumani Valley

Chachakumani Camp – Rest Day afternoon

Chachakumani Reading Club in session

rest day afternoon in the Chachakumani Valley

Update: On my return home, I visited the Mountain Kingdoms website and an interesting new offering for 2016 popped up.

What is on offer is the first six days of the Cordillera Real Trek that this series of posts describes plus an ascent of Nevado Chachakumani.  (See here for the details.) It is billed as a trekking peak and is described this way –

From our base camp on the Chachacomani River we have four days to make the ascent of Chachacomani Peak, traversing glaciers and climbing ice and snow slopes.

The Mountain Kingdoms itinerary (again, handled by Andean Summits in La Paz) is using the “Facile route” not included in the A.D./D routes illustrated in the Chachakumani route map. As noted above, Facile is described in this way –

• F: Facile/easy. Rock scrambling or easy snow slopes; some glacier travel; often climbed ropeless except on glaciers.

I’ve indicated the approximate route of the Mountain Kingdom route on the satellite image of the Chachakumani area below.  It is a ten-kilometer walk from the base camp to the summit.  It is likely that on Day 1 the team would climb to a high camp at the edge of the glacier; Day 2 would see an early wake-up and walk across the glacier to the top and then a mid-morning descent back to the high camp and on down to base camp.

from base camp 4460m to high camp 5250m to summit 6074m

When I plotted out the approximate route from the base camp on the banks of the river, the altitude-gain profile looked like this –

If you have more info on the Facile ( easy) route that would add some detail to my description or correct any wrong assumptions I’ve made, please send me a comment!

Next Post: Day 8 – Chachakumani Valley To Rio Jayllahuaya Valley