Once upon a time, the easiest way for a visitor to touch ice  in Peru was to climb the tourist trail to Pastoruri Glacier, a flat-topped glacier 70 km south of Huaraz. Roads from the highway made the glacier easily accessible to daytrippers, and even though its peak is a staggering 5,200 meters above sea level, the trek upward is relatively gentle, as far as glaciers go. If things got really rough, you could always rent a burro or a horse in the parking lot and haul yourself up that way.

Not now. No longer.

There are no burros for hire at Pastoruri because the glacier is officially off-limits to tourists and nearly everyone else, except for glaciologists and the lone film crew or two. The glacier has receded so dramatically over the last 25 years, it’s on a death watch. Glaciologists like Marco Zapata (below) won’t say exactly when Pastoruri will bite the dust, but the glacier’s demise is around the corner. 

The numbers tell the story. Between 1980 and 1990, Pastoruri was receding at a rate of 12.7 meters per year, says Zapata. The following decade, that rate almost doubled to 22 to 23 meters per year.  The glacier has dwindled so much, it thinned into two tiny ice masses in 2007 and has been formally downgraded to an “ice cap.”  It’s a sad fate for what was formerly once of the most visited sites in the Cordillera Blanca mountain chain.  Within our lifetime, we will probably see Pastoruri become a puddle.

I took these photos last week while assisting a production team from NBC Nightly News, including environmental correspondent Anne Thompson, who were in Peru to report on Peru’s melting glaciers and the downstream effects. My role was to scout out locations and interviewees and to help the team get from point A to point B efficiently and safely.

Visiting Pastoruri was at the top of Thompson’s list, and once we got the permission to film from Huascaran National Park (where Pastoruri is located), I was looking forward to seeing the glacier for myself. Once there, however, the barrenness of the dying glacier overwhelmed me. The ice is fleeing up the mountain, leaving behind churned-up moraine of small black shards and messy, melting ice chunks. Stand next to the glacier, and you can see the water dripping nonstop, like the ice in a freezer whose door has been left open in July.

Around noon we were hit by hail and an electric storm, neither of which stopped the crew from filming. (They’d paid a lot for their one-day permit and weren’t about to leave the mountaintop empty-handed.) Anne Thompson interviewed Zapata and glaciologist Thomas Condom and the Mountain Institute’s Jorge Recharte there on the shifting ice, with hard hail pellets whipping everyone in the face.  The show must go on.

There was something sad and compelling about the abandoned buildings (above) where vendors used to sell snacks and rent donkeys to out-of-shape tourists.

And it reminded me of things to come, not just in Peru but in the rest of the world.

Once the ice is gone from most of the world’s tropical glaciers, the communities around them will have to change as well. Without ice, without water, who will want to visit a black mountain? Who will want to live there?

Who will be able to?

–Barbara Drake

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We camped out for three nights (June 6-9) in the valley below receding Qolqepunku Glacier. That dark mountain on the right used to be covered with snow and ice. Once upon a twentieth century…

I look at this photo, and what strikes me is how pleasant and cozy the scene appears. Warm sunlight, plenty of space between campsites.

That’s anything but the truth. Climbing out of that tent in the frigidly cold morning was torture. I got dizzy bending over in the high altitude and sort of collapsed onto this chair just minutes before El Fotografo snapped this shot. There is an 11-year-old child inside the zippered tent, refusing to come out after a sleepless night of listening to the nonstop drumming and loudspeaker announcements.

The day this photo was taken pilgrims began swarming the site. Tents were pitched all around us. We fenced off our area with wooden poles and rope, but one comparsa insisted that this spot was theirs, and they attempted to bully us into relocating to another space.

I stood up and faced them, folding my arms: “No! No es aceptable.” My voice was low and firm, like the tone I use to train Lola in the park. “No!”

The men in the comparsa (I swear they were the same comparsa who had tried the same thing with us last year) stared down at their feet. Bossy gringa, they were thinking (or worse). 

I was not budging. El Fotografo had set up the camp himself the prior night in the dark, an effort so massive at that altitude that he passed out, face down onto a mat, for 30 seconds. People do die at Qoyllur Rit’i — from cold, altitude sickness, over exertion. I wasn’t going to risk that scenario again.

My tone of voice must have convinced them. They backed off and started setting up a tent one foot from ours. A small victory.

By mid-afternoon that day, the valley was crammed with tents and people sleeping under tarps. Groups of dancers were stomping in rhythm to bass drums, passing within inches of our tent as they made their way to the glacier. When you lay down in the tent, you could feel the moss-covered ground trembling beneath you.  

By 4 p.m. the sun had disappeared behind the mountain peaks, and breathing in the cold air was like gulping ice cubes. Then to nightfall.

Camping at Qoyllur Rit’i.

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1. “All Hail the Glacier Gods”: El Fotografo’s MSNBC Pix of Qoyllur Rit’i Back in December, msnbc.com published a photo story on Qoyllur Rit’i...

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Doing the Yawar Mayu dance with a dancer from Cusco

El Fotografo and I were making friend with our camping neighbors — a comparsa from Cusco — at the Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage last weekend, when suddenly one of the young dancers snatched me by the arm.

“Come on, dance,” she said.

No, I said, several times — No to the satin skirt being pinned around my (enormous) down jacket, No to the elaborate flat hat (montera) being strapped on my head, No to the leather whip being thrust in my gloved hand.

No, because this gringa didn’t want to risk having a heart attack by foolishly dancing the “Yawar Mayu” (River of Blood) ritual whipping dance at 15,500 feet above sea level.

Not even El Fotografo took my objections seriously: “Look, if you want to get your interviews with them, you have to dance.” He pushed me into the circle of comparsa members that were looking on.

Disconcertingly I noticed a few turistas running over with cameras in hand. I was fair game for all.

So I went along with it: The violin and drum music started up, and the dancer and I swung our whips in the air, circling one another, as we closed in to whip each other’s ankles.

The poor girl had nothing on her legs but thin pantyhose. I gave a few lame cracks.

“Harder! Harder!” the onlookers yelled.

I staggered around in my preposterous outfit — with a fully loaded backpack on my shoulders — and prayed that I wouldn’t faint. The girl wasn’t hitting my legs that hard but my heart began to pound erratically and I was reminded of the arrogant French alpinist who had died at Qoyllur Rit’i in 2007. He tried to run up the mountain and his heart exploded.

Boom. C’est la vie.

The dance ended, and the girl and I hugged, and then, yes, I did get my interview.

I still maintain that I would have gotten it without going through the whipping dance, but EF insists not.

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Cover photo from The Potato, Treasure of the Andes

 Extreme weather shifts caused by global warming are interrupting millenia-old agricultural cyles in the high Andes, reports Barclay for the Miami Herald. That turmoil is having a devastating effect on crops of native Peruvian potatoes, which grow at altitudes of 3,000+ meters above sea level.

Barclay notes in “Peru’s Potato Farmers Adapt to Climate Change” (Sept. 11, 2008):

For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed to a rhythm that dictated the survival of his grandparents and ancestors for thousands of years. He waited for the rains to fall on his small parcel of land in this village at 11,000 feet in the Cordillera Blanca, or White Range, of the Andes in central Peru, and planted native varieties of potatoes as well as cereal crops like quinoa. When the crops ripened, Huanuco, 45, harvested what he needed and sold what he didn’t in the city of Huaraz several hundred feet below in the valley.

Climatologists say global warming’s impact was first documented in the Peruvian Andes in 1970, but 1990 is the year Huanuco says he began to notice disruptions, first in small, bizarre, anomalous forms: a battering hailstorm, two months without rain, a warm winter. Then the quirky weather became more consistent and other oddities began to appear: rats nibbling away at his cereal crops and a fungus, known as late blight, blanketing his potatoes.

LAND ONCE FERTILE

”Before, we planted all year long, any month we wanted to,” Huanuco said, dubiously eyeing his tiny plot, recently sown with potato seed. “Now we only get water a few times a year and so we cannot plant as much, and the pests and diseases keep coming.”

Click here to read the entire article.

This news is devastating for Peru because 95 percent of its potato crop is consumed nationally — only 5 percent is exported. People who live in the high sierra especially depend on these native potatoes (which differ from the white potatoes sold in US stores) because they are among the few crops that can grow at very high altitudes.

Without a good supply of potatoes, the people in the puno will starve — and they are growing more and more hungry each year.

The title of Barclay’s article suggests that Peruvian farmers have figured out how to adapt to climate change, but her story reveals that they don’t yet understand how to solve the problem. 

NGOs and government organizations are beginning to search for solutions, and some excellent pilot programs are underway. Time is critical, though — farmers have been battling drought and pests since 1990. It will be too late for some.

I think of the farmer/herders I met in Ausangate this September and how vulnerable their crops are to shifts in the weather.  “Our lands are producing less and less,” they told me. “We are very sad.”

“We are hungry,” they added. They said it in the simple, matter-of-fact way that people do when they have grown accustomed to no one caring about them.

This year, 2008, has been dubbed the International Year of the Potato. Well-orchestrated publicity campaigns educated people worldwide on the benefits of potatoes, in general, and on the remarkable attributes of Peru’s 3,000 varieties of native potatoes. I don’t think the world has ever had such potato consciousness. I hope that this awareness translates into useful, well-funded programs to save the native potato before it and the people of the high Andes become casualties of climate change.

–Barbara R. Drake

For more information on native Peruvian potatoes and efforts to rescue this ancient crop, visit the International Potato Center, In Lima. Peru.

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A new book (March 2008) co-edited by a UC Davis professor of environmental science and policy looks at the world’s glaciers from all sides, scientific, social and economic.

“Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science and Society” (Univ. Cal. Press) brings together researchers from five continents to discuss how scientists study glaciers, how climate change is altering glaciers’ size and distribution, and what effects these changes are having on human life.

The book’s co-editor, Ben Orlove, is a specialist in the human dimensions of climate variability, and his work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the Andes because he’s spent decades studying the region. He also is the author of Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca.

Orlove has investigated how Andean people predict drought cycles using what he calls “indigenous knowledge.” He’s also very interested in El Nino patterns and how local populations understand climate change.

Check out Orlove’s short blog, Darkening Peaks, for his urgent and moving essay, “Peruvian Herders Feeling the Heat.”

In that essay he traces his April 2008 journey to the Peruvian Andes to see how local communities are responding to the tragic loss of their glaciers.

Among the information Orlove uncovers:

* Meltwater levels from glaciers in Phinaya have fallen to half of what they were in the 1960s;

* Pastures in high altitudes are drying up, and once-flowing glacial streams are turning to stagnant, disease-breeding pools;

* Locals say that on August 1, the day when the apus speak to one another, the mountain lords no longer talk — “they weep.”

I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Darkening Peaks, which, or course, isn’t available in Peru. I encourage anyone who’s read the book to leave comments on this blog.

BTW: Jared Diamond, the guy who wrote the remarkable book Guns, Germs and Steel, loves Darkening Peaks, calling it a “rich, broadly ranging” and “exciting” volume.

Links: Ben Orlove’s blog Darkening Peaks

Publisher’s online ordering page  (the book is on sale now for $26.95 hardcover, down from the original price of $45.00)

Amazon also sells Darkening Peaks.

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1. “All Hail the Glacier Gods”: El Fotografo’s MSNBC Pix of Qoyllur Rit’i Back in December, msnbc.com published a photo story on Qoyllur Rit’i...
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