All photos: a song under the sugar sugar
As Hal finds out, not all questions get answered on the $10 tour.
The two tassels of my llama-wool hat are blowing wildly across my face, caught in the wind as it whips at us here on the exposed western slopes of Chacaltaya, Bolivia.
Juan, our guide, is darting up and down the line, ensuring both the speeders and the stragglers get to hear his fact-filled script about the glacier that runs upslope parallel to our rocky trail.
“It’s one of the highest in the world,” he points, patiently waiting for me to throw a glance in the direction of the glacier before he zips off to the next hiker.
Sure, puffing foggy breath at 17,700 feet, gazing down the snowy spine of the Cordillera Real, is exhilarating. But I’ve come to see the glacier.
I stumble, missing a step. A little lightheadedness is all. Maybe I should’ve eaten more for breakfast. And there’s the elevation, of course. I shake my tassels to clear my head. That’s better.
Mild dizziness aside, summiting is a cakewalk. Miners do it—the upper plateaus are littered with ore buckets and little lake-lets are stained blood-red from iron and green from copper.
Die-hard skiers do it. Chacaltaya has held the record of world’s highest ski resort since 1939, when Club Andino Boliviano built an access road, small lodge, and rope-tow lift up the glacier.
And tourists do it. They come in secondhand Asian minibuses that puff black smoke almost as thick as the dust kicked up on the dirt road leading from El Alto. The tour is part of the standard fare hawked in the La Paz traveler’s ghetto of Calle Sagárnaga.
“An easy way to bag a high peak,” reads Lonely Planet’s description. Buses shuttle you to the lodge at 17,300 ft. It’s a simple 30-minute walk from there to the summit.
“Bagging peaks” isn’t why I’m here, though. Sure, puffing foggy breath at 17,700, gazing down the snowy spine of the Cordillera Real and the tops of the clouds covering the rainforest, is exhilarating. But I’ve come to see the glacier.
It’s not what you’d expect—no frozen river winding through a wide mountain pass. Only a thin tongue of powder, long enough maybe for four or five tight turns on your K2s.
Fact is, Chacaltaya is dying. By some accounts, it’s already dead. Like most of the world’s rare tropical glaciers, its growth has failed to keep pace with global climate change.
It’s easy to find accounts of the loss of the world’s highest ski run. People now only come to carve in February, and even then just to say they’ve done it. The rope tow—or what’s left of it—hasn’t worked in a few years. The lodge gives off a Shining vibe.
But what you won’t hear as much about is that Chacaltaya’s glacier is vital to the roughly 1 million inhabitants of El Alto—none of which, I’d reckon, has ever clicked into a ski.
“It’s their only source of water,” Juan tells me as I stand shivering at the summit, taking in the smoggy sprawl of El Alto on the Altiplano far below.
La Paz’s satellite city is growing faster than the glacier is shrinking, coughing up more and more red-brick and adobe huts as campesinos flood in from the countryside, lured by the promise of employment and cheap housing.
“So…when the glacier’s gone, what happens to El Alto?”
I don’t get a straight answer. He tells me about government efforts to promote conservation and responsible use. Seems too late for that, I refrain from saying.
I look across to the peak-perfect form of Wayna Potosí, one of the Cordillera’s most recognizable mountains. Its flanks are thick with snowpack for a good 3,000 feet down from the top.
Is that what Chacaltaya looked like just 60 years ago? Will it look like Chacaltaya in another 30?
These are questions that don’t get answered on the $10 tour.
“Two more minutes, then back to the bus,” he shouts to us over the wind. My tassels nod in acknowledgment.
Community Connection:
For more on the world’s vanishing glaciers, be sure to check out this photo essay on Matador Change.
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13 Comments... join the discussion!
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Thanks Tim!
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It’s amazing how little attention the global drinkable water shortage gets in the news media, considering the incredibly large area of impact (especially in the new 30 years or so).
But then, the current state of that media is largely reactionary, so unless Al Gore makes a movie about it, I doubt we’ll be hearing about the problem until people start dehydrating at home from lack of drinking water (in New York).
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Totally, Colin. Even Hollywood is paying more attention to this issue (e.g., the latest James Bond flick) than our news media.
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Loved this Hal, had bits of everything I thought. It’s so sad. That LP quote about bagging peaks…that just makes me so…well…I just can’t stand when all it’s about is ticking off a box on the to-do list.
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Yeah, I wouldn’t have ticked the box even if that’s why I went. It wasn’t so much a hike as a drive and a stroll. Did not earn that altitude.
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Post is just one data point in South America. See below for a link to a US government website that tracks the over all sea ice present on earth. Note, they have data only since 1979 because that is when we finally had the technology to make such calculations. Also note, that while in 2007 and 2008 we did see a steep drop in global sea ice,(which made the headlines all over the world) since then its made a major come back. It is now above normal compared to the average between 1979 and 2000. The website also tracks sea ice for just the northern and southern hemisphere. There is much more to the debate than meets the eye. Final comment, droughts, weather change have been consistent throughout the earths history
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
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True that this is just an isolated look at one South American glacier. There are many, many glaciers on the continent, some advancing, more retreating. I believe in terms of tropical glaciers, though, the vast majority–quite possibly all–are retreating, and many have already disappeared. What this signifies in the bigger picture…I’ll leave that to the scientists (though from what I’ve read, a solid consensus is pointing to human-caused global climate change).
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It’s true that throughout Earth’s history the climate has had it’s ups and downs…however, I think there is enough evidence that we have had a significant part in this current warming. I don’t believe that our rapid advances and activities over the past hundred or so years just coincided with a natural warming.
We know we are contributing to it — that’s fact as far as I’m concerned.
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Thanks Hal! I enjoyed the tale and the brevity of it. Concise and thought-provoking. Safe travels!
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Thanks Cameron, appreciate it
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recently, there has been some massive flooding in the Philippines and Vietnam which i think is also due to Climate Change. the tropical storms in asia are somewhat getting stronger stronger each year.
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- Climate Change made the typhoons in the south pacific very destructive. Typhoon Ketsana made a lot of mess in Philippines and Vietnam
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