Lazy Guy Denied a Day on the Slopes

Chacaltaya.

Ever heard of it?

I hadn’t either until, in 2002, when climbing buddies Benny Bach, Mike Walker and I holed up in a La Paz hotel. La Paz, of course, being the city in Bolivia. We’d just spent two weeks putting up several new routes in Bolivia’s Cordillera Quimsa Cruz, a remote sub-range of the Cordillera Real. Back in La Paz after the suffer-fest (we lived under a giant boulder with the local mouse population for two weeks), Benny and Mike decided to go visit a nearby market town and shop for trinkets.

With four days left in the country, I decided to find someone to do Huayna Potosi—a nearby 6,000-meter peak—with. Climbing a 6,000-meter peak in four days sounds like a knuckleheaded thing to do, but the mountain’s accessibility to La Paz, and the starting elevation for the climb (4,700 meters!) make it a fast and easy job.

In the end, I signed up with a local guiding outfit (having been a guide myself, hiring a guide is really weird) and we drove up to the car park to begin the ascent. En route, we passed Chacaltaya. I’ll admit I have a bit of an obsession with Chacaltaya.

Chacaltaya is a 5,400-meter mountain near Huayna Potosi, but on its slopes—on a glacier by the same name—sits the world’s highest ski area. The ski area is South America’s northernmost; and, it’s the most equatorial on earth. Additionally, when the original rope tow was built (in 1939, using an automobile engine for power), it became the first in South America. And—yet another oddity about Chacaltaya—it operates in the northern hemisphere’s winter, unlike all South America’s other resorts.

What I really would have like to have done more than trudge up Potosi is do a few turns on the Chacaltaya Glacier. But that was problematic. For one thing, the lift was closed. Why? Glacial retreat.

Despite the glaciers on the mountain being more than 18,000 years old, scientists have estimated that the glacier lost 67 percent of its volume and 40 percent of its thickness between 1992 and 1998. Since 1940, scientists estimate the glacier has lost 90 percent of its mass. They expect the glacier to disappear completely sometime between 2010 and 2015, although some have predicted it’ll be gone by 2008.

The disappearance of the La Paz area’s glaciers will be much more significant for reasons other than recreation. The glaciers of Tuni Condoriri, a nearby mountain range, supply La Paz (a city of 1.3 million) and El Alto (more or less a La Paz suburb of 700,000) with an estimated 60 percent of their drinking water. Clearly, something must be done.

The head of Bolivia’s national climate change program, Oscar Paz, has stated that he thinks it is wrong for very poor countries like Bolivia to have to pay the cost of adapting to global warming when they are not to blame.

I disagree. Everyone needs to act. Rich, poor, young, old. Everyone. And everyone can. Look at me. I’m the laziest guy I know, and even I’ve been able to do something. In 2005, during a boring staff meeting at my day job (into which I sneaked my laptop), I was able to switch my household electricity to 100 percent wind with just a few clicks on my local utility’s website. If I can do something, anyone can.

Chacaltaya means “cold road” in the local Aymara language. In many ways, it’s an appropriate theme for the harsh realities places like “the peace” will soon be facing.

Cam Burns is Senior Editor in the Rocky Mountain Institute's Communications Department.