Snowed In - At 4,800m!

We were on our way up to the Pastoruri Glacier when we spotted another Dodge van, which is super rare (think the last one we saw was in Mexico) at the side of the dirt road. A French couple had a flat and their jack didn't give sufficient lift, but fortunately ours did and an hour later we convoyed up to the Glacier parking lot. Good deed done for the day, and hopefully karma in the bank.

A few years back it would have been a short walk up to the glacier, but it's retreating around 15m every year so it took us about 45 minutes to get from the 1983 point to the 2018 one. Although we've seen a few glaciers over the past week in the stunning Cordillera Blanca range, we haven't been able to walk up to one so this was an awesome experience. Particularly as our delay meant all the tour buses had left and we had the place to ourselves, and we could skip the rope and actually creep inside some of the ice crevasses.

The delay also meant a bit of cloud came in and we didn't get the stunning views up the glacier we were hoping for, so we decided to camp the night at 4,800m - a new record for us, but we were reasonably well acclimatised. Incidentally it was also a new record high for Elvis, but it was actually a relatively easy drive up.

As we started to set off back down to camp a bit of light hail started, but we thought nothing of it as its been similar at every high point this week. What we didn't expect was when we went to cook at 6ish was that it had turned to snow and Elvis had an inch or two covering. We definitely weren't leaving now!

We weren't that nervous, although we had skipped the supermarket earlier today thinking we would be back in civilisation by the morning, we still have enough supplies in the van to easily last a week. Elvis is also super well insulated and we have a gas heater if things really got rough. Still it was a little disconcerting to think we might be stuck up here for a while! By the time we went to bed we had a good 4 or 5 inches of the white stuff, and it was still coming down pretty hard :|

After a reasonable night's sleep (surprising considering the altitude and the worry) we were pretty relieved to see it wasn't too thick and we had no real concerns about getting down, particularly as a local beat-up car had just arrived. We thought we might as well nip back up to the glacier and hope for some blue sky photos. That didn't quite happen but I was glad we went back as how often do you get to muck around on a glacier face?! At that point it started a bit more light snow so we thought we shouldn't tempt fate, and headed back to Elvis sharpish.

The drive down was fine and within a couple of hours we were back on the asphalt. Despite heading down towards Lima on the coast, we ended up climbing up through a 4,000m+ pass in horrible rainy weather, so it's probably just as well we got out of the snow zone. We couldn't make it all the way in one day, and there had been a few worrying reports about robberies on the coast north of the capital, so we stopped at a restaurant on the way down for the night. Despite advertising all sorts of tasty sounding local delicacies they only had chicken with rice or rice with chicken, so Jo rustled up something much nicer out of our supplies. This is the realistic and often unglamorous side to overlanding, but after an epic week in the mountains you can't complain too much.Read more