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GETTING HIGH IN THE ANDES

By
Everett Holum as told to Bar News Staff

Having barely survived a trip to Mt. Kilimanjara several summers ago, I decided to try my luck in the South American Andes and trek to Machu Picchu, the site of Inca ruins. The locals will tell you there are no ruins there, only ruined trekkers.

On this trip my friends and I decided to include family members. My son Matthew, daughter Juli and her husband Fraser were all included in the adventure, probably at the insistence of my wife who instructed them to make sure I safely got home this time. Guide for the trip was Jason Edwards, owner and operator of Mountain Experience LLC, who, when he's not taking people into the Andes, sometimes organizes trips up Mt. Everest.

We knew that good conditioning is necessary if we were to survive or at least enjoy the experience. There was not a lot of technical mountaineering involved, just elevation issues. I prepared by running 3-4 times per week and hiking with my family at Mt. Si, Tiger Mountain and Camp Muir. In addition to the training, we experimented with the drug Diamox to prevent high altitude sickness. My friend Bill (suffered severe headaches) and son Matthew (experienced tingling in his toes) decided to go native and chew coca leaves and drink coca tea instead. Chewing on coca leaves is legal in Peru but not in the States. One of our young trekkers was required to take a drug test for employment purposes on returning home - luckily the Bar does not do random drug testing for folks with low bar numbers.
On August 10, 2003, we flew to Lima and transferred to LanPeru airlines to Cuzco, in South Central Peru. Cuzco was the capital of the Inca Empire and is the gateway to Machu Picchu. It's elevation is 11,000 feet and has a population of 380,000. We planned on spending 3 days in Cuzco to acclimate to the altitude. However, there was general unrest in the outlying areas of Peru about taxes and lack of revenue sharing and a strike was called for the third day we were to be in Cuzco. We decided to leave the city a day early. This foresight was fortunate as many of the roads between Cuzco and the trailhead were blocked with boulders placed there by disgruntled Peruvians.

On the way to the trailhead, we visited archaeological sites and river rafted on the Vilcantoa River. The trailhead of the Inca Trail begins at a location simply known as Kilometer 82. The government has greatly restricted hiking on the Inca Trail to preserve the trail and prevent having to provide medical and rescue efforts to untrained hikers. The hike itself was a four-day trek covering 30 miles, much of which is steep. In order to enforce restriction on hiking, the government has established 3 checkpoints where you have to register and provide identification (passports). The second and third days of the trip included steep inclines, many of which were built of high stone steps. On the second day our seven-mile hike virtually went straight up to the highest point of the hike at 14,000 feet. That's 400 feet short of the summit of Rainier for you flatlanders.

The Inca Trail is wondrous both for the engineering sophistication of the Incas and God's own scenery. The trail itself protected Machu Picchu from the invasion of the Spaniards as it was so well hidden they couldn't find it. Or maybe the Spanish were mesmerized by the sight of the sunrise at 12,000 feet. I know I was.

We arrived at the sun gate overlooking Machu Picchu on the morning of the fourth day of our trek. Machu Picchu was rediscovered by archeologists in 1908. We quickly learned not to call the archeological sites a "ruin". Pepe, our cultural guide, was emphatic about the term "ruin" being a misnomer. Machu Picchu has been considered for many years to be a spiritual retreat for the Inca hierarchy. More recent articles question whether the retreat was actually spiritual and maybe was a vacation spa for the Inca bigwigs.

Machu Picchu lies nestled among mountains between eight and nine thousand feet. Many of the buildings and walls have at least part of the original structures that were built by pre-Incas and Incas. The rest has been reconstructed using modern equipment. The original stones were carved to fit together so exactly that no mortar was necessary. Visitors are amazed when tour guides attempt to insert knife blades between the stones. Many of the stones used in construction are huge (two to three times the height of an adult human). As there was no quarry nearby, the stones were somehow transported, which might have taken some engineering, as the Incas had not yet invented the wheel.
Machu Picchu was a fully contained city built into steep elevation with finely carved stone steps to assist movement about the city. The steps separate terraces used for growing food products to support the local population, which was estimated to be about 400 persons in number. Most interesting was a carved stone sculpture approximately 25 feet wide and 15 feet high that was in the shape of the mountain in the background.

Health wise, all but one of the 20's and 30's age group became very ill with a fever and the associated symptoms not to be described in a publication as elegant as the Bar News. The older members of our group were not affected. We also found that a train runs to Machu Picchu and that we didn't have to walk there in the first place. I will speak to our tour guide Jason about this later.
I considered my adventure a success. It was a great family vacation - a lot better than packing the kids into the back of the station wagon and heading for Disneyland. And being gone in the latter part of August I did not have to suffer through the demise of the Mariners.