The snow beneath him still stained with blood from Peru's worst climbing accident in memory, mountaineer Chris Reinegger trudged past rescuers, took a deep breath and began the same perilous ascent.
Undeterred by the deaths of eight foreign climbers just two days before on July 21, the Austrian policeman and his climbing mates could not resist the beauty -- or sheer thrill -- of the now notorious Alpamayo mountain in Peru's Andes.
"It was not a good omen ... It was not a good feeling. You just have to close your mind and climb -- fast," recalled Reinegger after climbing the mountain and making a two-day return trek back to this remote Andean hamlet, the last staging post on the climb to Alpamayo.
"I will always be prepared to take the risk because climbing is our life," the 30-year-old added. "Mont Blanc [in France] is nothing compared to this ... and the danger is a kick."
An unpredictable climate which many blame on global warming and El Nino and a steady stream of often ill-prepared climbers have led to a rash of accidents in this dramatic stretch of Andean peaks 500km north of Lima -- some of the most challenging climbing in the hemisphere.
Since June, 11 people, nearly all foreigners, have died in the stretch of peaks known as the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash. And more than a month remains in the June through September climbing season which draws about 5,000 climbers yearly.
Climate changes
The accidents are getting bigger and more frequent. In the past five years, 35 climbers have died in these mountains. Global warming is melting glaciers, making avalanches and ice wall collapses increasingly common.
Around 50 climbers died in accidents over the same period in the Nepalese Himalayas -- including nearly a dozen deaths on Mount Everest. The Himalayas are higher, making them theoretically more dangerous, and Peru's accident rate ranks high by comparison.
Guides in Peru's Andes feel they are having to take risks too and want the slopes made safe by having dangerous ice slabs pre-emptively broken off to prevent accidents.
"There shouldn't be this many people dying. The trouble is El Nino is heating up the ice and causing collapses and avalanches," said trainee mountain guide Aldo Sotomayor, who was just a few hundred meters behind the victims of July's accident on Alpamayo.
Four Germans, two Israelis, a Dutchman and an Argentine were killed in the July 21 accident when a block of ice broke away near the summit of the 5,944m-high Alpamayo and sent the group tumbling down a sheer face of ice.
They had been clinging precariously to the mountain with crampons and ice picks when a block the size of a telephone booth crashed down the narrow ice channel they were in.
Alerted by a guide higher on the mountain, police rescuers trekked through the night and part of the next day to reach the site because winds and snowfall ruled out flying in by helicopter. An Israeli woman who survived the initial fall died before they arrived and there were no other survivors.
Rescuers have recovered seven of the bodies. They have yet to find the corpse of an Israeli man who they say fell into a crevasse, which they may have to abandon there permanently.
On the nearby slopes of Huascaran mountain -- which at 6,767m is Peru's highest -- there is a vivid testament to the fatal allure of these mountains.
Experience no safeguard
An experienced South African climber who tried to open a new route there in 2000 is still dangling from the rope where he died -- his body now freeze-dried by the cold and wind.
Before heading out on the climb, he had told his family he wanted his body to be left where he fell if he were killed, rescuers said.
"The accident in Alpamayo was just bad luck," said Lieutenant Henry Paz, head of operations for the high mountain police rescue team in the nearby town of Yungay.
"But accident numbers are increasing. Many climbers don't even bother to come and register with us ..." he stopped, interrupted by an emergency call. A Mexican man had died on Huascaran after apparently failing to acclimatize properly to the altitude.
Peru is not considering any new regulations to reduce climbing accidents. Police and guides alike say many climbers refuse to turn back in bad weather because they have already come so far.
"A lot of foreigners don't think of the danger," said mule driver Gerardo Cirillo, waiting at dawn for the next group of climbers to roll in to Cashapampa and hire him for US$10 a day and his mules at US$5 a piece -- a small fortune here.
"I give them a warning, but they want to go anyway. As long as they want to keep climbing, I'll take them," he said.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS