The 20,000-foot Bolivian Budget Climb
By Holly French
Halfway up a peak in the Bolivian Andes, I lay awake in a small mountain hut perched at 17,000 feet. At midnight, the alarms of my 17 climbing partners rang in unison with my own. We emerged from our bunk beds as if it were morning, while our guides, a crew of nine Bolivian men, blasted techno on a portable speaker. To my dismay, the music appeared to have greatly influenced my assigned guide, who was drinking from a silver flask. I briefly considered bailing on the climb, since he appeared tipsy at best, drunk at worst, and I was all too aware that a lot can go wrong between a hut and the summit.
But he then approached from across the hut, expressing grave concern at the fit of my helmet, which apparently wasn’t quite right. “A drunk guide wouldn’t care about helmet fit,” I told myself. So began our summit bid.
In December 2022, I quit my investment banking job in New York to travel alone for one year, arriving in Santiago on a one-way ticket. In the months that followed, I roamed south through Chile and then back north through Argentina and into Bolivia. I mostly lived in hostels, where my evenings were spent swapping stories with fellow long-term travelers. I was often told a similar variation of one particular story: the ascent of Huayna Potosí (19,974ft), a relatively serious mountaineering objective described in decidedly non-serious terms.
First, they outlined their acclimatization regime, spending a few days in an infamous La Paz hostel and a few nights in its adjacent Irish pub, and then declared themselves acclimatized for the summit. They also reported a $120 price tag for the three-day climb, inclusive of climbing gear and paid for in cash one day prior to departure.
Their tales were bewildering, since my sole mountaineering experience had been on Mt. Rainier (14,411ft) a considerably lower peak, for which I’d paid a $2,500 guide fee six months in advance, carefully assembled my own gear, and trained with a weighted pack. I was also aware of U.S. guide companies that climb Huayna Potosí only after 10 days of tailored acclimatization and many months of suggested advance training.
How were these travelers nonchalantly climbing it on a whim? I would soon find out.
Above the clouds of Huayna Potosí (19,974ft).
My journey up Huayna Potosí began on a dusty road in the Argentinean border town of La Quiaca. Foreigners are a rarity in La Quiaca, and they tend to fit a particular archetype: long-term budget travelers with large backpacks and an affinity for overland travel. I planned to spend a mere hour in the town, but while walking from the bus station to the Bolivian border I was intercepted by a French traveler named James who delivered some bad news: the Bolivians were protesting and the border was closed.
We formulated a Plan B, and spent the day at a picnic table in the town park, playing chess and drinking beers, and the night in a rundown hotel, accompanied by three other stranded travelers. Like me, James had quit his job and had no real plan beyond heading north. That night we decided that when we reached La Paz, we’d climb Huayna Potosí together.
Our climbing plan was nearly jeopardized the next day, when I erroneously assumed that “visa-on-arrival” meant I could turn up at the border and buy a Bolivian visa with no advance planning. Wrong.
I needed a visa-on-arrival packet, which included things like printed bank statements, printed headshots, and scans of my passport. The border office (and practically all of La Quiaca for that matter) had no printer, scanner, internet, or English speakers. For a while I sat alone in the back room of the border office, trying to communicate with the agents through Google Translate while wishing I had paid attention during my Spanish school in Chile. Then something bizarre and wonderful happened: a woman showed up, and the agents motioned for me to follow her into Bolivia. She led me to a corner store with a printer and internet, and for $15 she gathered my visa-on-arrival packet.
Clearly, I was not the first oblivious traveler to turn up at the La Quiaca border.
Looking down from the summit of Potosí.
With my newly acquired packet I crossed into Bolivia, promptly got food poisoning, and wound up in the hospital in La Paz. Through Google Translate I tried to get the nurses to elaborate on my condition, again reprimanding myself for my efforts (or lack thereof) at the Spanish school in Chile. A few days later I was well enough to walk around La Paz, and the climb was back on. James and I reconvened at the office of a company specializing in guiding long-term budget travelers up Bolivian mountains (a peculiar niche in the world of mountain guiding). We scheduled a departure for the next day, a process that entailed writing our names on a paper sheet and paying $120 cash, and notably did not entail any sort of liability form.
The next morning we boarded a van alongside 16 climbing partners, all of whom were fellow solo travelers on multi-month trips. Like us, they had arranged the climb on short notice, after hearing of the guide service from other travelers or seeing the advertisements in every Bolivian hostel.
The van made one key stop en-route to the mountain: a warehouse stocked with mountaineering boots. I found a pair that was only one size off, so I tossed them in my pack with the rest of the gear we’d each been given (matching neon-green jackets unfortunately included), and declared myself ready to climb.
From the warehouse, we drove to base camp, a hut at 15,500 feet, where the guides tried to compensate for our collective lack of experience with a crash course in all things mountaineering. The next day we hiked to a higher camp at 17,100 feet, from which we’d depart for the summit later that night. We’d climb to the summit in teams of three, with two climbers per guide. Many of the guides didn’t speak English, while some climbers did speak Spanish, so we were tasked with arranging the climbing teams accordingly. (By happenstance, one of my classmates at the language school in Chile was a fellow Huayna Potosí climber, and neither of us were deemed a suitable candidate for a Spanish-speaking guide. I’m not sure if that reflects more on the school or on us.)
The hut consisted of a single room with bunk beds, and at 7:00 p.m. we crawled into our adjoining bunks and set our alarms for midnight. Climbing is safest at night, since the sun can cause avalanches or portions of the route to collapse. Five hours later we emerged from our beds to blasting techno music, put on our gear, split into our climbing teams, and departed for the summit.
Until that point, the climb had been a comically nonchalant experience. No one had trained, my boots didn’t fit, and my guide was probably drunk. But the moment we emerged from the hut that night, the severity of our undertaking set in. The route began as a standard hike over a large scree field, and the guides set a group pace that each climber had to match.
At just over 17,000 feet, one thing was immediately apparent: this was really hard.
I employed a strategy that I’ve used many times in the mountains and elsewhere, telling myself I’d continue for just one more hour, at which point I’d decide to either turn back or go on. While I’ve never chosen to turn back at these arbitrary decision points, this has always helped me manage sustained challenges.
Eventually, the scree turned to snow, and I roped up with James and our guide. We had nearly reached 19,000 feet, and while both of us could barely breathe, we were otherwise faring surprisingly well. As the sun started to rise, we took a short break and our guide laid out two options. We could either proceed to the right, and climb a narrow ridge to the summit (“If you’re not afraid,” he told us), or proceed to the left, and climb a gentler, safer, path. After very little consideration, we headed to the right.
The summit ridge on Huayna Potosí is a two-foot wide path with thousand-foot vertical drops on either side. James, myself, and our guide were roped to one another, but not to the mountain, so a fall by any one of us could easily have been deadly for all three. I took one look at the ridge and immediately announced that I was too scared to continue, to which James replied, “Me too but let’s do it anyway.” He had a point. Fear didn’t have to be a limiting factor.
The author (left) and her friend James on the summit.
I agreed to continue, and we hiked the final 30 minutes to the summit. The weather was perfect and the views were otherworldly. I felt surprisingly strong and healthy at nearly 20,000 feet, and shared the moment with James and all 16 of our climbing partners. It was the highlight of the year I spent traveling.
The outcome of my Mt. Rainier expedition a year prior had been much less favorable. Despite meticulous training and expensive gear and guides, high winds had turned my group around well before the summit. We had done everything right, but it wasn’t in the cards. On Huayna Potosí, we had done absolutely nothing right, but it was in the cards.
I learned that in good weather and health, most fit and motivated people are capable of climbing many of the common commercial peaks. But no amount of preparation can compensate for bad weather or a bout of altitude sickness. Luck is a major variable in the mountains.
From the summit of Huayna Potosí we descended directly to base camp. With proper training, we would likely have been in a much better state at the end of the climb. James had atrocious altitude sickness and my feet hurt so badly I could barely walk. The guides offered to carry our backpacks for a small fee.
This was an even better investment than my $15 visa-on-arrival packet.
Holly French is a New York-based finance professional who enjoys hiking, cycling, mountaineering, and running. She became interested in writing after keeping a blog while traveling through South America, Pakistan, and Nepal for one year.
