Thaddeus at the false summit Photo courtesy of Thaddeus Laird

At each switchback, the bus driver whipped the great metallic beast around like a sailboat on an erratic sea and the tires spun out over an abrupt 2000-foot drop to the valley below. Our teeth rattled around and the driver’s cheeks slapped together like a pair of elephant seals jockeying over a mate, and we all thought we were going to die The only relief from all this was to focus on the picturesque layer upon layer of 18,000-foot peaks which were rolling past our windows like Roman soldiers marching abreast into battle.

The bus was en route to a collection of ancient ruins nestled among a massive sweep of pampa grass known as central Peru. We were getting there via a torn and vicious road, high in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. After fish-tailing around a few more switchbacks, the bus passed through a small gap between the mountaintops, grinded into a lower gear and then skittered to a halt in the roadside gravel. Quite unexpectedly, the driver’s head reared back, his cheeks slid apart like stage curtains and out sprang a most ferocious roar. "GRINGOS!" A handful of catnapping tourists dumped out of their seats in terror. "LAGUNA AZUL!!!"

All the tourists instinctively rose to their feet and began forming a conga-line toward the front door. Everyone seemed eager to unload, have a pee, and then race down to the laguna for photo ops and acute mountain sickness. I had been in Peru for several weeks at this point, and had grown quite accustomed to such an event: scantily dressed tourists jogging around in a casual and unassuming manner, only to turn blue-lipped and confused as they tried, often without success, to drag back to the bus before serious edemas set in. After all, most of them had boarded this bus in Lima (zero feet) and were teleported to the high Andean lake in front of us (13,000 feet) in the span of just under 10 hours. Having just returned from a 19,850-foot ice climb in the central Cordillera Blanca a few days before, I decided to take a brisk walk up a nearby hill to review the landscape with a British climber I had met two weeks ago.

The Brit (as he commonly introduced himself as) and I were on this bus tour for two simple reasons: continued acclimatization, and to scout any undocumented alpine climbs which might be hiding in the southern reaches of this range.

We had already been to the tops of several compulsory peaks in the central Cordillera Blanca; a place often referred to as "the poor man’s Himalayas" by members of the international climbing community. Here, enormous, glacier-sharpened peaks rise to eye-bleeding heights of over 22,000 feet. Yet unlike parts of Asia, logistics in Peru are unrestricted and cheap. Simply hire a burro to carry your gear into the hills and spend several weeks attacking everything in sight. There is no expensive permit system. No foreign red tape. Expeditions to jumbo-sized mountains can be put together overnight at the local discoteca.

The obvious downfall to all this is that you find crowds of climbers bumping bellies with one another as they crampon up the frozen slopes of any given "classic." Having experienced this phenomenon for myself (queues of climbers waiting to bash up the final ice-pitches of Nevado Tocquallaju, a series of pee puddles flagging the route up Nevado Urus, piles of renegade dookies peppering base camp below Nevado Vallunaraju) I realized that it was time to give the "poor man’s Himalayas" a break. So I was headed south, with the Brit, to see what might be hiding in terms of rarely touched routes in the less-trodden Southern Cordillera.

After all, the mountains we were in barely scraped the sky at 17, or perhaps 18,000-feet: an elevation considered far too low for most climbers to put any real effort into. We assumed most of these peaks had been climbed before as warm-ups. But we questioned if any of the more aesthetic, or technical, lines had seen serious attempts. As with many of the great ranges of the world, aesthetics alone are rarely enough to draw-in the hordes of hopefuls who are hell-bent on making it to the highest point possible. But as for the Brit and I, this mentality was exactly why we were here: to scout a region most gringos don't even bother with.