By Derek Haines – Press Release

After the emotional meeting with Carlos and Abidael, the  two boys recovering following successful heart surgery in Cayman under the “Have a Heart” programme, Vico, Barry and myself spent two days with a local family at Santiago de Okola on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The lake is the highest navigable lake in the world and the time spent was to assist with altitude acclimatization.

We now turned our focus to the mountain climbing and set off on a two day trek taking us though high passes to altitudes up to 4,900m and included a 50m rock climb; an interesting experience for Barry who had never been in the mountains before. Although the treks were arduous they were necessary to complete acclimatization in readiness for our first summit attempt. The weather thus far had been glorious clear blue skies and Cayman like temperatures during the middle of the day although plummeting to -10c starting late afternoon. The Andean landscape is breathtaking and we were fortunate to see Condors wheeling majestically above the high peaks. We arrived at our base camp for  the summit attempt on Tarija. At this time our climbing guides advised there had been very little snowfall in the Andeas this year and this has led to extensive ice conditions and the formation of dangerous crevasses. As consequence our intended first summit, Pequeno Alpamayo, was deemed too risky for our team to attempt and our target shifted to the adjacent peak Tarija at 5,100m.

Due to the ice conditions our summit day started early as we had to clear the worst of the glacier before sunrise and the resulting thaw making the mountain treacherous. We were woken at 1:05am by our perky Italian friend who was met with various and suitable catcalls and we set off at 2:30am by the light of the moon, the stars and our head mounted torches arriving at the foot of the glacier at 4:00am. We donned our crampons and helmets, roped up to our local mountain guides and set off upwards with ice axes in hand.

Throughout the long slog we traversed crevasses, quickly and delicately crossed snow bridges and eventually arrived at the final steep approach to the summit at 9:30am. The sun is now with us and we were afforded superb views back to our base camp and across the Andean ranges, the sunlight highlighting our next challenge Huayna Potosi which can be seen in the photograph.

Our descent was quicker and more direct but painful on tired legs and involved crossing two deep crevasses when we could now see clearly the possible outcomes of a wrong step. We arrived back at base camp some 12 plus hours after setting off. A successful but totally exhausting day.