800-4000m in 4 hours
Pretty slow if you’re an aircraft, but you can do this from Santiago by car and on foot! And thats exactly what we did one afternoon after i finished my CRE work at 12.30. The mountain is called La Parva, with an extension to El Pintor afterwards.
The road from Santiago is well known as death road. Actually, its called the road to Farrellones and has a famous 40 zig-zag curves which gets quite dizzying! This road takes you to the ski resorts of La Parva, Colorado and Valle Nevado and then, with a bit of scary high altitude gravel road driving, you can reach the top ski lift station from where you start walking. This is at a head spinning 3300m. You feel the thin air as you start walking at normal pace, quickly realising that you can’t maintain that for more than 5 minutes without a trip to hospital!
So here our pics of the climb. Unfortunately, we didn’t get our camera out quickly enough to capture a passing Andean Condor which flew past us as we reached the main ridge leading to the summit. An amazingly graceful bird with a wingspan roughly equalling the length of a car, this was a real highlight. The rest of the scenery, looking east to El Pintor and, a whole munro above that, to El Plomo (the lead mountain), and south east across the Cordillera to Argentina is absolutely incredible!
All in an afternoon’s work eh?!