Huaraz, te quiero x100pre!

x100pre, my students taught me, means para siempre.

School




I ask, how many teachers do you know whose students ask them if they can come to class half an hour early to start working?  Well, now you know at least one ;-)  Our students kiss us every day when they arrive and when they leave.  They wrote their first poems today.  I messed up the link to our website.. it should be http://escribachica.tumblr.com/.  Angie will be updating it today with some of the girls' new work.  

The girls are funny and sometimes write about things I wouldn't write about.  One thirteen-year-old wrote a love poem: "te quitaron tu piel de mi piel" -- they took your skin off my skin.  Angie and I later discovered that was a line from a pop song.




Churup, "Difficult +", 5493m (18,022 ft)

If I could have a super power, it would be to attract mountain guides.  I met some Romanian boys in the plaza, one a mountain guide, and they invited me to climb Churup (5493m, 18,022ft) with them.  I said yes, and committed to what would've been one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, if it wasn't for the fact that coca leaves kept me calm in the face of steep ice faces.  My confidence is building with every step, but as I climb harder mountains, so grows my awareness that there is not always an easy way out.  Before we started climbing, Mihnea said to me "I'm counting on you to do this, because I don't know if we can bail."  Ultimately, we didn't summit -- the snow was too loose in some parts and we would've pulled down big rocks.  We were able to rappel down.  

I became familiar with the term "dry-tooling" just before doing it for the first time.  Dry-tooling is when you use your ice axes to climb rocks -- you hook it on to a small crimp and pull.  Churup is a mixed climb, meaning you are climbing both vertical ice and rock.  It is one of the more technical mountains in the Cordillera Blanca, rated "D+" (difficult plus) on the mountaineering scale. I am told that now that I've climbed on Churup, Alpamayo would be a walk in the park, and so would be almost anything else here. The route goes straight up from the base to the peak through the couloir (see the line in the picture).

Curious about the mountaineering scale? Here's the run-down:

F: facile (easy). Straightforward, possibly a glacial approach, snow and ice will often be at an easy angle.

• PD: peu difficile (not very difficult). Routes may be longer at altitude, with snow and ice slopes up to 45 degrees. Glaciers are more complex, scrambling is harder, descent may involve rappelling. More objective hazards.
• AD: assez difficile (fairly difficult). Fairly hard, snow and ice at an angle of 45-65 degrees, rock climbing up to UIAA grade III, but not sustained, belayed climbing in addition to a large amount of exposed but easier terrain. Significant objective hazard.
• D: difficile (difficult). Hard, more serious with rock climbing at IV and V, snow and ice slopes at 50-70 degrees. Routes may be long and sustained or harder but shorter. Serious objective hazards.
• TD: très difficile (very difficult). Very hard, routes at this grades are serious undertakings with high level of objective danger. Sustained snow and ice at an angle of 65-80 degrees, rock climbing at grade V and VI with possible aid, very long sections of hard climbing.
• ED1/2/3/4: extrêmement difficile (extremely difficult). Extremely hard, exceptional objective danger, vertical ice slopes and rock climbing up to VI to VIII, with possible aid pitches.
• ABO: Abominablement difficile (abominable) Extremely difficult as well as being dangerous - self explanatory.

Mihnea and Claudiu gave me a small Romanian flag – they say that so few Romanians have been in the Cordillera Blanca that almost any mountain I climb would be a first Romanian summit. Churup would have been.

I also learned Romanian climbing terms – instead of “off-belay,” “belay-on” etc. They just make a loud “Piu” sound. Once for off-belay, twice for on-belay, and three times for “something's gone wrong.” At popular crags, it sounds like a bird's nest.

Tid-bits:


I like to eat at a vegetarian diner in the market, where you get a huge meal for a dollar and a half.  Lupe, the 5 year old waitress, mixes up Spanish and Quechua and says some funny things "Yo me baño calatita. ¿Tu como te bañas?" -- I bathe naked, how do you bathe?