My 35th Birthday

As the Pacific Plate makes its inexorable journey to the east at the speed that fingernails grow, it meets South America and dives beneath it. The ragged edge of the continent bends and compresses unnoticed until the stress is no longer sustainable. Snapping back to equilibrium from time to time, the shudder becomes an earthquake that levels cities and drowns coastlines. Meanwhile, ocean sediment and rock are scraped off and plastered against the continent while the plate plunges under it and melts. Liquid rock effervescing with gas finds its way to the surface along the western edge, and burps up violent superheated explosions of ash and rock that become andesitic cones for 4,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to Columbia. This string of volcanoes is the Andean Cordillera – or simply, the Andes – and the world’s tallest mountains outside of Asia. Topping out at 22,837 feet at Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina, 20,000-footers can be found all along its length. One of them drew me in and became an obsession.

The glistening heights of the massive cordillera are as dramatic in La Paz, Bolivia as anywhere along the range, and they dominate the horizon as completely as the altiplano and Lake Titicaca spread out below them. A passenger flying in from Miami only need glance out the window to spot behemoth volcanoes – some perfect cones, others wildly deformed – with names like Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in Ecuador, Huascaran and Ausangate in Peru, and Illampu, Condoriri, and Illimani in Bolivia.

From the moment my jet settled onto the long runway at El Alto International Airport, I found myself gaping at a silent, brooding mass of ice and rock that stared back at me passively above the airport. Brilliant and gleaming white against a deep cobalt sky, it was higher than I could imagine – 6500 feet higher, in fact, than this highest international airport in the world. Part of Bolivia’s Cordillera Real, at 19,974 feet, Huayna Potosí (wy-nah poh-toh-SEE) is stunning. Taller than the benign-looking Mururata further south, and not quite so much as Illimani which frames the city of La Paz in the distance, it is nevertheless, forbidding, rugged, and dripping with ice falls and glaciers.

The name comes from Quechua – one of the indigenous tongues of the Andes: “huayna” meaning youthfulness, and “potosí” likely taken from a “deafening noise” in the same language and eponymous with Potosí in Bolivia’s south – one of the highest cities in the world, and because of its silver, once the richest and most populous.

I have climbed my share of mountains in my life, but I don’t claim to be a mountaineer. According to some sources, Huayna Potosí ranks 237th on the list of highest peaks in the world and is considered a “beginner” climb – less technical than most with only 1500 meters of climbing between trailhead and summit. It took me several years of admiration and training to finally reach the top and was an act of closure for me as I completed a three-year teaching commitment at an international school in La Paz, and incidentally, on my 35th birthday.