The next morning, we woke casually, made water, and slowly headed up Wila Llojeta. In the Southern Hemisphere, the directions are flipped. Since we were skiing a southwestern face, we were not worried about warming as it is the equivalent of a northwestern face for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The day was beautiful, and our bodies did pretty well, all things considered. We skied one at a time through the simple crevasses largely filled in with strong snow bridges and clambered down the talus back to camp, avoiding the ever-present and occasionally aggressive llamas grazing the scrubby shrubbery near the glacial lake. The next day, we decided to rest in the morning instead of epicing up Janco Huyo. Weekend warrior permission to value experiences over objectives: check!

Yet it is hard for me to turn down the churn of go, go, go. I call this part of myself the "honey badger." She has served me well by pushing me into the compelling edges of possibility through hard work, from climbing mountains to running my business. However, as I am coming to understand, she has also led me to nearly die a few times, get pneumonia, over-train, and stay in relationships too long. This trip was all about engaging with the other part of myself, the "golden retriever." She is psyched on adventures and snacks. The golden gives joyful exuberance as a useful counter to the honey badger’s gnarly grit. Fin blessedly brings out the golden retriever in me. While any anxiety I may feel activates me to do more, more, more, Fin is naturally inclined toward rest when feeling stressed. I have learned and grown a lot from his reassurance and counterweight in such moments.

That afternoon, Fredi picked us up and whisked us a bit south to the trailhead for Pequeño Alpamayo. On the way, we passed lakes filled with… flamingos? In Spanish, Fredi assured me the birds were, in fact, flamingos, and he seemed amused to learn that there were other pinker flamingos that lived in the tropics. “No…” he protested when I told him this. “¿En serio? Todos los flamingos viven con altura.” Until that day, I was convinced all flamingos lived with no altitude. It is tough not having access to Google.

Arriving at the late afternoon low light, Fin and I loaded our packs and walked on the two-mile 500 vertical foot trail to basecamp in a little over an hour. We set camp, guarded our food from the mice, and settled in for a short, windy sleep before an alpine start the next day. I love alpine starts beneath big, beautiful peaks that you can only see in the dim silhouettes of a moonless night. The golden retriever in me was vibing. Fin and I cruised to the toe of the glacier, roped up, and efficiently passed a few guided parties. We navigated really fun ridge scrambling in crampons alternating between ice, rock, and snow. The honey badger and golden retriever within me were holding paws as I played with downclimbing mixed fourth class in the dark with tons of exposure. “This,” I thought, “is what being a weekend warrior is all about. I can’t believe I’ll be at work tomorrow. What freedom.”

Pequeño Alpamayo is stunning. Dawn was just hinting at its arrival on the far horizon as we cramponed our way up the most incredible neve to the final rock band before the summit. Standing on top in the light of the new day, Fin and I shared a joyful moment before I realized the food poisoning had not quite finished its retribution with me. Emergency pooping is a specialty of mine since I live with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and my dear friends have often looked the other way while I have remembered the limitations of being human while roped to them. Lucky for Fin, this time, we were not roped. After I had scrambled beneath the upper rock band to take the 18,000 ft emergency poop, it was time to ski.

The snow was edgeable and firm at an angle in the upper 40s. Falling would have been fatal with no possibility of arrest down the steep crevassed faced off the ridge. Fin, saner and more conservative than I, opted to down climb the initial snow pitch and take pictures of me from below. Feeling my edges adequately and being more afraid of downclimbing, I dropped in on my skis. This was my first time steep skiing at altitude since falling near Camp 3, as I lost vision on Gasherbrum II in Pakistan the summer before. Confidence is a funny thing. Sometimes, you genuinely know. Sometimes, it is forced. Here, I knew I wanted to ski this pitch, and I knew that I could. Enter the honey badger. A few hop turns later, I was next to Fin, and we skied, scrambled, and skied some more on our descent down the glaciers to the trail. The rest of the skiing was mellow and fun: Super G conditions with crevasses setting the course. We giggled in the thin air, glad to be alive. Seven hours, 6.5 miles, and 2,400 vertical feet after we left the tent, we returned.

After another work week in La Paz, we turned our weekend warrior sights on Huayna Potosí (19,974ft; 6,088m). Climbing this mountain without a guide had been a dream goal since climbing Illimani in 2019 with local Aymara guide Cecilio Daza. First seeing Huayna on an acclimatization hike with my then-wife, I stared up longingly at the glacier and the most obvious line up the proud face, La Via de Los Franceses (AD+). At the time, I had little experience on crampons and no experience at altitude. Thus, when Fin and I returned four years later, the line seemed like a very compelling nod to how much I had grown. If conditions were right, it would also make for a helluva ski descent. Being dropped off once again by taxi from La Paz, Fin and I hoofed up the trail to the refugios littering the edge of the high glacier. Bougie indeed.

We settled into the hut, amusing the Bolivian cook staff who wanted to know what weird food the weird independent team of Americans were cooking for themselves. We befriended a group of tourists who all independently fell prey to the common guide shop marketing slogan, “Climb the easiest 6000m peak! No gear or experience necessary!” The perks of befriending this group in the hut were laughter, speaking English, and eating their leftovers. A handsome Italian guide who lived and worked out of the little-known ex-pat climbing hamlet of Peñas told us that our face skied best in April but that we might be able to ski it now in early June. However, he had a doubtful look to accompany that polite encouragement. I love that oddly demure dynamic about being foreigners with strange ideas. The “you might be totally crazy, but I’m not going to be the one to burst your bubble” ethic of noncommittal statements bordering on encouragement.

The next morning, Fin and I roped up 30 feet from our front door and began questing toward the French Route, which splits off left from the much easier Normal Route low on the glacier. I am most often a normal route kind of gal. I pride myself on being competent and equal to the task of the normal routes I choose, but I do not consider myself a particularly gifted climber or alpinist. Rather, I am patient and work hard with an enduringly good attitude. The French Route would, therefore, be a diversion from my normal route preference, adding extra challenge and stress to the responsibility of leading it. However, we made good time winding up through the crevasses, hitting the face just below the bergschrund at first light, just in time for first poop. My stomach takes weeks to recover from something offensive like a parasite or food poisoning, and I thanked my spirit guides for the pre-‘schrund bowel send while Fin patiently waited.

Poop finished, I led out over the ‘schrund to find the snow tenuous and deteriorating. Before I knew it, woosh! I was upside down and backward, self-arresting with the trained instinct I hate using in real life. I stopped myself before Fin caught me on the rope and tried again. This time, my foothold held, and I swung my awkward body, pack, and skis up and over to the other side. I plugged a screw and belayed Fin. For most of the 1200 feet of climbing, we found a mix of snice (a gnarly mixture of snow and ice) and bulletproof ice beneath 6 to 12 inches of rotten snow. The penitentes were beginning to grow in the week since the last storm. Crevasses dotted the face but were not a huge issue as the 60* steepness often caused the ice to mostly bridge them well. As I led upward, simul-climbing the majority of the face, I knew skiing it would be “deathy.” At one of the rare belays to reclaim gear from Fin, it was clear that he shared the same sentiment, saying something profound to the effect of “Dude, my calves are f-ing killing me. There’s no way to ski this s***.” The decision to bail after climbing the route to a saddle on the other side and rejoin the normal route via skis eased any tension I felt. I dropped into the rhythmic deliberate movement of not killing myself or my partner while slowly moving through the thin air toward the knife ridge. Looking down between my feet, all of the world spread out beneath us: glacier lakes I had hiked years before, the city of La Paz, Illimani on the horizon, the great vast plain of El Alto dusty and brown as far as the eye could see. Pakistan and the traumas seemed so far away. Here I was on a great face on a tall mountain with one of my best buddies suspended in time above the entirety of it all.

But, as all good things go, we still had to get down. Cowboy straddling the knife ridge while belaying Fin up on a picket, I looked at the task before us. “Gross.” The descent traversed the north face, which had baked in the sun all morning, replete with sagging snow bridges and total mush in between. After that unsavory task was finished, we reached the saddle where, once again, my spirit guides had allowed my bowels to wait for a relatively safe place for an emergency evacuation. That finished and sunscreen reapplied, we encountered another unsavory task of downclimbing rotten snice, bulletproof ice (how can these co-exist?!), and loose rock to the glacier where we would pick our way through the maze of crevasses rejoining the normal route. Fin led the downclimb, for which I was immensely grateful, and we skied unroped over the icy, barely edgeable snow on the edge of the trodden trench of the normal route. Pointing it through little sections of booters over snow bridges and chattering to a stop before the next crevasse, Fin and I played the game of chutes and ladders with serious consequences. The honey badger worked her survival magic, while the golden retriever was nowhere to be found as this game was decidedly un-fun. We only belayed one crossing, however, and rolled into the refugio in time to grab our gear and head down the trail to our waiting taxi all the while frequently stopping to answer questions about the skis and snowboard strapped to our packs. On the ride “home” (aka our rented apartment), we mentally switched out of weekend warrior mindsets back to desk jockey mode as we contemplated the Monday to-do list waiting on the morrow.

Our final weekend was a standard summit of Sajama (6,542m; 21,463ft) with no skis. After the heinous descent of Huayna, we correctly deduced that the penitentes on the much farther west and much higher Sajama would be brutal. We were right. Walking down them on crampons was mind-blowingly bad. Skiing would have been impossible. Once again, we loaded into a taxi for a five-hour drive into the national park, where we would hike to camp one, climb to camp two, summit, and descend back to the road. Highlights of this adventure were seeing vicuñas (I had been earnestly looking for them over seven different trips to the Andes), efficiently passing a bunch of guides who were climbing the peak for fun without clients, and scrambling up the tenuous varied mixed rock and ice onto the ridge leading to the capping glacier. Fin, in his chill equanimity, was patient with me on the descent, agreeing to camp at the 4x4 road instead of walking another four miles to try to hitch into the tiny town at 9 PM. I was tired and thirsty, our gas gone, and our water filter destroyed by glacial silt. We ended the adventure by soaking the next morning in some hot springs across the little valley, where a very well-to-do Bolivian family on holiday from La Paz whisked us to town in their fancy Limited F150 crew cab truck. Extra bougie.

Back in La Paz, we had a few days left before Fin and his mummified pig fetus were set to return to the States while I would finish the work week and head to Cartagena. Our run of weekend warrior mini-expeditions had drawn to a successful conclusion. We laughed a lot, relaxed into our host culture, and each healed a bit from previous mountain traumas accrued in other great ranges. Today, I am still working on helping the honey badger and golden retriever become better roommates in my psyche, but Bolivia was a major step forward. I am so grateful for the ability to pursue my vocation and avocation from the beautiful Wasatch Range of my home to the other great ranges of the world. With a dose of creativity, a good gear spreadsheet, and a yes (hu)man, remote work has made the world our backyard, my fellow weekend warriors! Cheers to you on your next adventure!

Jess

Jess Shade is a queer cis woman and high-altitude ski mountaineer. She is also a licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor in Salt Lake City, UT. Jess works in private practice with individuals, couples, and organizations such as the Utah Avalanche Center, American Alpine Club, and the LGBTQ+ Affirmative Psychotherapist Guild of Utah. Feel free to reach out via email: jess@alturacc.com, website: www.alturacc.com, or Instagram: @shade_jess