Although we did not climb the actual summit (only the one really fit guy from our 4-person team did that, me and my wife made only a 6375 meter hump on the shoulder of the mountain and the last guy turned around in some 6150), we can definitely call Expedition Cerro Bonete Chico 2016 a success. Jirka, the guy who summitted the main peak at 6759 meters made probably either the first or second Czech summit of the peak and together with a Brazillian team of 4 he was second in this season (after an Austrian hutkeeper who sumitted a day earlier; btw. the fact that three teams met in the high camp was probably a historical first for Bonete, which almost nobody climbs). Additionally he summited also Nevado Quewar at 6140 (where we made it to some 5800) and some lesser peaks before for acclimatization.
Moving up above 6000 meters is hard as hell, but apart from that, the thing went amazingly smoothly. We made it all the way to the base of the mountain in a normal car (Corsa) despite everyone telling us it's impossible, saving $1000 for overpriced 4x4 transport and then we just run up in three days and down in one, spending two rather harsh nights in 5900 meters. This all worked thanks to unbelievable weather luck and two weeks of dedicated acclimatization (that included the other six-thousander in Quewar).
It will take some time to produce more photos, as they are mostly in the form of multi-shot panoramas (we took only the 24mm STM lens with us to save weight), but I promise they will be awesome - the landscape of Argentine altiplano is not possible to describe in words! It is probably one of the most underappreciated places on the whole planet - but the fact that we had the mountains mostly all for ourselves really added a lot to the experience.
Oh, wow. I'm not sure how difficult of a climb it was, elevation aside, but I thought I was up pretty high last week at 13,000 feet, and you blew my trip out of the water (also, I rode a chairlift up lol). Congrats on the accomplishment.
Bonete is the (maybe second, after nearby Pissis, but accounts of that vary) highest place on Earth that you can just walk up - there is absolutely no technical difficulty to the ascent and we did not have a single piece of climbing equipment with us, no rope, nothing. The whole challenge comes from the height and the cold - the later we mostly avoided due to luck, but the height was really felt. The effects depend on your overall and current physical condition and on your acclimatization. In general, everything just feels harder in the altitude, it's hard to pinpoint the exact issue, but you get exhausted from just getting water from a creek or packing your stuff into the backpack, even if you are somewhat used to a given altitude. As you climb above the level that your body has "agreed" to, things go sour pretty quickly.
Breathing per se is not harder in 6000 when acclimatized and when you are not moving, you feel pretty normal. But during the final ascent to the 6375 peak, we were not able to move steadily for more than a couple of meters and then we had to stop to breathe, you just run out of breath incredibly fast. This is something you need to watch out for, if you overstretch yourself even by a couple of seconds that you should not have kept walking, you need a couple of minutes of rest to be able to breathe calmly again and that's both painful and time-consuming. But it is very individual and dependent on the acclimatization status - Jirka, the summit guy, was able to walk pretty much normally there, but he reported having this kind of trouble on a 5900 peak he climbed before our arrival, where he was very poorly acclimatized.
Overall, I find it really astonishing that the acclimatization works. It's an invisible thing, you do not see any physical changes in you (and you don't see that the air around you is thinner), but the changes are palpable. I have on several occasion before "jumped" to 4000 meters without any prior slow ascent and it was always a very unpleasant experience, with dizzyness, stomach issues, light-headedness etc... on this trip, we did a very controlled process of getting up (as we had a car and plenty of roads at different elevations to pick from) and when I finally started moving around in 4000 meters, I felt almost no effects. The first night in the 5100 camp on Quewar was a harsh experience as I was hallucinating most of the night and did not get much of proper sleep; the C1 in 5300 on Bonete a week later felt completely normal ... (it went back south in 5900 though). I believe that if I had more time to get used to altitude, I could maybe have gotten higher - but it's hard to tell because at some point, I just get more and more tired and the improvements are not very big...
WCS![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4sVdjhU.jpg)
