A weekend in the Andes

From here you can see, more or less, the route we took to make it up Cerro Provincia, cross to Cerro San Ramon, and then drop back into Santiago. I've got to thank Andrew for the annotated photos, it makes this whole narrative thing much easier.

From the top of Cerro Provincia we got our first 180 degree view of the Andes. The other 180 degrees were looking over Santiago towards the coast. This was equally impressive but in a more disgusting, polluted, "damn this country is thin" sort of way. In the lower left corner of the photo you can see one of the cairns that we were following at various parts of the trip. Its a rounded rock with a red stick-figure painted on it, supported by a short mound of rocks. On our way down we were following them for several hours down a ridge, assuming we were being led over the snow until we arrived at a path. How wrong we were...

The ridge got more and more dodgy until we reached a point where we were butt-sliding down a narrow break in the rock with the next little red man no where in sight. It was at this point where I cursed all of the little red men on the mountain and we abandoned them to make our own trail, and walked down the snow field on our left. It was most certainly the right decision.

We woke up on sunday morning to a beautiful view of the Andes and a vestibule full of snow and ice. It was the first time I had gone winter camping. You can see the ice axe and poles in the foreground which we used to dig out a spot for our tent from the meter of snow that had piled up on the ridge. We had forgotten the shovel and ended up using our cooking pot to bale the snow that we broke up with the axe. It was exhausting at the time, and pretty fun and hilarious in hindsight.

Here I am walking down the ridge between Provincia and San Ramon. If you lok closely on the right side of the snow drift in the background you can see a set of tracks. After some fact-bargaining we arrived at the a concensus and declared them to be Puma. We saw them the whole distance between the two mountains and were often frustrated by the shortcuts that damn cat was able to take. Three gringos with packs didn't prove to be as agile.

Here's Chris and I on top of San Ramon. We had a beautiful day on Sunday that made it even sweeter to have had left Santiago and gone camping.

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