La Paz is surrounded by some splendid mountains. Mount Illimani towers off to the south at 22000 feet, and Cerro Calvario to the north, above 16000 feet. Tuni-Condoriri National Park, about an hour's drive north of the metropolitan area, is stuffed with snow-covered peaks. All of this is seemingly readily accessible and nearby, though it's surprisingly quite a lot of travel rigamarole to get into them. For starters, it takes a solid hour to drive from the center of La Paz to the outskirts the city, what with all the switchbacks and the traffic thereon.
I didn't plan my time in Bolivia carefully--it was really a last-minute decision to visit this country. If I had been more careful and done more research, I would definitely have built in time to do one of the major multi-day Andes treks out of La Paz, in the national park. But because I waltzed into La Paz with my head all the way up my butt and without a single clue what I was doing, I ended up with time only for a single day-hike, so I decided to climb Pico Austria, which is in Tuni-Condoriri.
(Oh, man, I was thinking at the bottom of this thing...)
And holy crap. Far from being an effortless jaunt, this relatively short adventure kicked my ass. To my surprise, Pico Austria has surged past Ala-Kul in Kyrgystan to claim its title as the hardest freaking hike of my life. It was only about 8 miles out-and-back, most of those miles up a dizzyingly steep slope. The trailhead sits at about 16000 feet in elevation and the trail goes up from there to some distance over 18000 feet. The trail itself is covered with loose shale that slides underfoot. More than once I contemplated turning back, but I doggedly kept at it, moving as through molasses, and hit the summit in about 2 hours and 15 or so minutes, but I am telling you that I felt no triumph getting to that peak. I felt only relief and a humiliated sense of my own weakness. Neither my previous summit of Cerro Toco (which is a higher elevation!) nor my daily runs in La Paz's 12000-ft elevation prepared my body for the rigors of Pico Austria.
(Pathetic summiteer, with blue Lake Titicaca on the distant horizon)
Maybe it's for the best that I didn't preserve time for a big multi-day adventure? Maybe I wouldn't survive it! I guess I need to start training now for the next time I'm in Bolivia (though it's hard to imagine how I might train more than I have been training, if accidentally).
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