Crown of the Caribbean: The 1939 First Ascent of Pico Cristóbal Colón

The Island of Ice in the Tropical Sea

Nowhere else on planet Earth does a high-altitude alpine world rise so dramatically from tropical shores as in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia. Rising in absolute isolation from the Caribbean coastal plains, this triangular granitic pyramid rockets from sea level to perpetual snows in just forty-two kilometres. Its supreme summit—Pico Cristóbal Colón (5,730 m)—is the fifth most topographically prominent mountain in the world, with over 5,500 metres of prominence.

To the ancestral indigenous nations who inhabited its flanks—the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa, and Kankuamo—the glaciated massif was known as Gonawindúa: the sacred heart of the universe and the spiritual elder brother of humanity. For centuries, the mountain’s dense jungle approaches, deadly tropical fevers, and sacred isolation protected its icy peaks from foreign intrusion.

In January 1939, an ambitious American expedition led by Walter A. Wood Jr. and Anderson Bakewell arrived in Colombia under the sponsorship of the American Alpine Club. Recognizing that success depended on Colombian expertise, Wood recruited thirty-three-year-old Erwin Kraus—a brilliant Bogotá-born artist, mountaineer, and photographer whose mastery of high cordilleras was unparalleled in the country.

“We moved from stifling tropical rainforests into bamboo jungles, then alpine meadows, and finally stepped onto glaciers gleaming in the Caribbean sky.” — Erwin Kraus, Travesías de la Sierra Nevada

The Jungle Approach and Sacred Paramos

The journey to the mountain was an epic expedition in itself. Loading supplies onto pack mules and hiring local guides, the climbers spent nearly two weeks hacking through dense cloud forests, wading roaring rivers, and ascending steep mountain trails drenched in torrential rains.

Entering the high paramo above 4,000 metres, they met indigenous Arhuaco elders. With respectful diplomacy, Kraus assured the leaders that their expedition sought only to study the peaks with humility and reverence. Permitted to pass, the climbers established Base Camp beside the sacred waters of Laguna Naboba (4,400 m), an ethereal alpine tarn surrounded by vertical granite walls.

Moving higher, they established an assault bivy on moraine gravel at 4,800 metres at the foot of the North Glacier. Temperatures plummeted well below freezing, and biting coastal winds whipped the canvas tent through the night.

Summiting the Monarch of Colombia

Before dawn on February 2, 1939, Wood, Bakewell, and Kraus roped together and stepped onto the glacier. The lower ice slopes rose at 40 to 45 degrees, requiring steady cramponing and careful navigation around gaping bergschrunds.

Reaching the high col between Cristóbal Colón and its twin summit Pico Simón Bolívar at 5,500 metres, the climbers faced an exposed, wind-blasted granitic arête. Scrambling along fractured rock ribs with hundreds of metres of sheer drop beneath their boots, they pushed through the thin equatorial air.

At 1:30 PM on February 2, 1939, Walter Wood, Anderson Bakewell, and Erwin Kraus stepped onto the true summit of Pico Cristóbal Colón at 5,730 metres. The view was unlike anything known in world mountaineering: turning toward the north, they could gaze past the jagged snow peaks, across the emerald jungle canopy, directly to the azure waters of the Caribbean Sea forty miles away.

Kraus spent over an hour taking panoramic photographs and recording scientific notes. The 1939 expedition completed the first ascent of Colombia’s highest mountain and cemented Erwin Kraus’s legendary reputation as the founding father of Colombian mountaineering.