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The expedition had a single man training trip to Peru in early May. It was slightly off season in Cordillera Blanca but what can you do if the time for your summer vacation has already been set. The high season would have been from June to August. Anyhow, it was such great feeling to arrive at familiar Huaraz village. There was still deep snow on the mountains and some more was snowing every another day. Otherwise conditions looked perfect. After four days of acclimatization I headed to Vallunraju, relatively easy 5685 meter peak. I spent few days up there for better acclimatization.

Now it was time to find out who would be my partner on Ranrapalca (6162m) SW face. It wasn't too difficult to find someone to climb with but hiking towards bottom of the route was quite exhausting; The pathless route uphill, through the jungle, while weather was desperately hot.

Finally we reached the high camp after second day and used the third day for planning a route. We needed to hike around a little bit to see how we could find a route up.  So, shortly after midnight we started to follow our plan to climb first on the face until we would hit the ridge which would lead us to the top and decent on other side of the Ranrapalca.

Weather was really good but very deep snow made sure that we were ascending slowly. The face was awesome to climb. On the left hand side there were the lights of Huaraz and Palcaraju stood on our right in the moon light.
At the altitude of 5800 meters we reached the summit ridge after several hours of climbing. Unfortunately we were facing a huge snow mushrooms on the ridge which continued all the way up to the summit. Here we decided to turn back down because of deep snow we were much too late from the schedule and those mushrooms would have been very time consuming to climb over.

Absolutely a very great route and of course I'm a bit disappointed I wasn't able to summit but let's leave that for the coming spring on Himalaya!

Tomi