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Peak(s): |
Ojos Del Salado - 22600
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Date Posted: |
12/19/2016 |
Modified: |
06/22/2018 |
Date Climbed: |
12/17/2016 |
Author: |
mikefromcraig |
Ojos in under 96 hours |
just a brief summary:
I hate base camps. I can think of a million things I�d rather do than spend time sitting around in one.
That mindset lead to two mistakes on my Ojos trip:
1. Signing up for the only guide service that offers an 8 day package (25% success rate) when all the others are 12 days.
2. Deciding that, since this is going to be the highest summit of my life, I needed to make it special and, while bored to death at basecamp, decided to try and summit in less than 96 hours from when I arrived at the first camp: 12,500� Santa Rosa.
NOTE: My guide service was adventurismo. I did the private service which was well worth a little extra money. My guide was Mario. I was impressed when I found out he had summitted over 15 times and even more impressed when I found out I misunderstood and he had summitted over 50 times! I had other guides telling me I had the best guide for the mountain! His English was not the best but compared to the prices of the English speaking guides it was a no-brainer.
Day 1: Arrived at Santa Rosa around 3pm December 13th. They were finishing up building a nice refugio with running water but it is going to cost $100 US a night and it�s a bunkhouse. Seems a little steep. The older refugio that I got to use as part of my guide package had an indoor toilette but no running water. Well, you had to fill up a bucket with water before using it and then pour the water in afterwards to wash down your waste. I honestly thought I was misunderstanding them when they explained it to me. I thought pouring water on top of a turd in a broken toilet would just leave you with a more full toilette with a turd on the bottom but sure enough, it caused it to flush down!
Santa Rosa has a nice lake with lots of flamingos. I also saw some large foxes walking around at night.
Day 2: At Santa Rosa a lot of the groups would climb up a close mountain (I think around 15,000�) but I thought it much smarter to drive a couple miles away to a pass at about 13,500�and climb up from there. I think some people confuse acclimatizing for getting in shape. By the time you get to camp it�s too late to try and get in shape, you just need to acclimatize.
We then drove to Laguna Verde at 14,500�. Although higher, this place was a little warmer at night on average than Santa Rosa. Also drier.
Day 3: drive to Atacama refugio at 17,000�and then hike to Trejos refugio at 19,000� then back to Atacama then spend the night at Atacama. Again, most groups were doing fairly strenuous hikes from Laguna Verde. They would come back all exhausted. I�m biased but really think my way is superior. Your goal is to get high and acclimatize, not hike far or hard. On some mountains there�s no difference between the two options but on Ojos there is.
The hike from Atacama to Trejos was very easy. I thought we were taking it slow but we made it in 1:45 which is fast based on the reports I�ve read. Again, we just wanted to get higher, not to exert ourselves more than necessary (it was impossible to drive higher than Atacama while I was there). There was a couple at Tejos when we went up there who had been there two days and planning on summitting the next day (bad idea!))
Day 4: stay at Atacama until after lunch (we were the only ones there the whole time!) then drive back down to Laguna Verde and spend the night there.
Day 5: Eat breakfast at 4AM, then drive up to Atacama and start by 6:15. I was feeling great until about 20,000�. We made the summit in just under 8 hours total which is slightly above average based on starting at Atacama. This totally blew my mind based on how slow I was going above 20k.
I would strongly discourage anyone from trying the sub 96 hour plan but my comments on acclimatization should be considered.
This Chillean keyboard is driving me crazy!!!I�ll put up the pictures when I get back into the states. I�m going to go ahead and post this and update it later.
Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
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