Black Ice on the West Face: Alain Mesili on Huayna Potosí

For fifty years after Rudolf Dienst and Adolf Schulze made the first ascent of Huayna Potosí in 1919, mountaineers climbed the peak almost exclusively via its gentle eastern glacier ramps from Paso Zongo. But on the opposite side of the mountain lay a vertical world of shadow and ice that few dared even approach: the 1,000-metre (3,300-foot) West Face.

Plunging sheer into the tropical valley of Zongo toward the Amazonian lowlands, the West Face of Huayna Potosí was an intimidating wall of bullet-hard black ice, vertical quartzite headwalls, and hanging seracs that fractured without warning.

The Frenchman of the Andes

In the late 1960s, a young French alpinist from Chamonix arrived in Bolivia: Alain Mesili. Trained on the granite spires and ice couloirs of the Mont Blanc massif, Mesili brought with him the latest European techniques: rigid front-point crampons, curved technical ice axes, and lightweight alpine-style tactics.

Mesili looked at the Cordillera Real not as a collection of trekking routes, but as a vast, untouched playground for extreme technical mountaineering. The West Face of Huayna Potosí was his primary obsession.

In July 1970, during the dry austral winter when high Andean ice is at its most stable, Mesili packed lightweight bivouac gear and departed with a small team toward the base of the western precipice.

Climbing into the Vertical Icefall

Crossing the bergschrund at first light on July 14, 1970, Mesili found himself on a wall of pure verticality. The lower 400 metres consisted of steep 65-to-75-degree water ice, striated with dark sediment and so hard that standard ice axes bounced off the surface with dull thuds.

Leading pitch after pitch, Mesili placed tubular steel ice screws and hammered chrome-moly pitons into hairline fractures in the flanking quartzite. Spindrift avalanches hissed down the wall like cold waterfalls, coating the climbers in powdered snow.

Above the ice apron lay the mixed crux: a band of loose, rotten quartzite topped by an overhanging bulge of rotten rime ice. Balancing precariously on tiny crampon points, Mesili delicately hooked his ice pick into fragile fissures, pulling himself over the overhang in an audacious display of modern extreme climbing.

A New Era in the Cordillera Real

Late in the afternoon, having conquered 1,000 metres of sustained technical climbing, Mesili hauled himself over the final summit cornice and collapsed on the 6,088-metre north summit of Huayna Potosí.

Looking down at the vertical drop he had just climbed, Mesili realized that Bolivian mountaineering would never be the same. His direct ascent of the West Face proved that the great walls of the Cordillera Real could be tackled in pure alpine style, ushering in the modern era of extreme technical alpinism in the heart of South America.