After more than three weeks of living and working in the city of Arequipa, Peru, I wanted to do something really memorable before jetting off to my next Peruvian home base. I had already traveled to nearby Colca Canyon, so the next logical thing was to spend three days climbing Arequipa’s nearby volcano – El Misti.

On the 20th of January I left my temporary apartment in Arequipa and took a taxi to the south-east side of the volcano. This was a surpise to me, because I was expecting the taxi driver to drop me off on the west side. That’s another story, but the taxi driver dropped me off in a small remote farming village and pointed me in the direction of the giant cloud-covered volcano.

At first I tried to stick to established trails and roads, but that quickly proved a failing strategy. When the Peruvian farmers and miners in the area saw me roaming through their vicinity, they called me over and greeted me warmly, usually asking me where the rest of the members of my climbing party were. But again and again I explained to the locals that I was tackling their local volcano alone.

When I finally realized that there was no trail that led directly up to the top of the volcano, I knew that the only way I was ever going to get there was if I simply navigated my way through the brush, cactus, and prickers until I finally got myself to the top. So that’s exactly what I did.

I pointed myself straight toward the top of the volcano, which at this point in time I could still kind of see, and bushwhacked it into the wilderness.

Now, normally I love doing this sort of thing. And the truth is, I loved breaking my own trail during this expedition as well. But making my own trail at the base of El Misti meant hundreds of painful encounters with sharp and pointy plants like the ones you see below.

The cactus were the worst, however, because I’d step on them, then they’d lodge themselves in the back of my legs, and one time a cactus flew off the back of my shoe and went directly into my neck! It hurt like crazy pulling that thing out.

After crossing a small river, climbing up and down several small canyon walls, and constantly going uphill, the landscaped changed from the sharp and prickly bushes you see above to the soft and vast sand-dunes you see below.

Once I reached the dunes, climbing became a whole lot more difficult. With each step I took, I’d fall a half-step backwards. With the tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat and 8 liters of water that I was carrying, the uphill climb was certainly a good workout.

It was around this time that I turned on my iPod and started listening to music and my “Speak Spanish” podcasts – in an attempt to make myself forget just how difficult climbing the steep and slippery slopes of El Misti really was.

I walked for nearly 8 hours during my first day on the volcano. But when I finally reached a flat spot on the side of the steep mountainside, I called it quits and set up camp. And that’s when the mist began to move in.

The image above is my tent, set up on one of the few flat spots in the area. And below is the view down the mountainside, back in the direction I had come earlier that day. No more than 5 minutes after I had my tent set up, it started to rain and hail, so I jumped in my tent and quickly fell asleep.

When I awoke the next morning I was exhausted, but I knew that I had another full day of climbing ahead of me. The only problem was: The mist had moved in overnight and the visibility had dropped considerably.

At best I could see only 100 feet in any direction. At worst (pictured below) I could only make out the rocks and bushes in my immediate area and everything else as a complete and utter mystery.

I don’t have many photos from my second day on El Misti because there wasn’t really a whole lot to see. I basically just put my head down and marched up the side of the volcano for hours and hours and hours.

There were two things that made this trek so difficult.

The first was obviously the fact that I couldn’t see. Not being able to see meant that I wasn’t able to navigate. Or in other words, I had no way of telling which way I was supposed to go… or which way would be the best direction to  head in order to reach the top. If I could have seen the mountain up ahead of me, I would have been able to tell that going to the right meant a steep drop-off and going to the left was a long and gradual ascent to the top. But because I couldn’t see a thing, and because I didn’t have a map, and because I wasn’t on a trail of any kind, I just pointed myself straight up the mountain (as best as I could) and crossed my fingers that I would eventually reach the top.

The other thing that made climbing El Misti somewhat frightening was that after my first day of climbing the 19,000+ foot volcano, I realized that if I was going to make it to the top, I needed to get rid of some of the weight that I was carrying. So, on the morning of day two I left my tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat and half of my water back at the campsite where I had spent the previous evening, and climbed to the top of El Misti with nothing but a bottle of water, my backpack, and my two cameras.

This was frightening because half-way up the mountainside I realized that I was going to have to navigate back down the volcano in the mist, almost completely blind, and find my tent, sleeping bag, water and other important items. And if I failed to do this – if I were unable to retrace my steps and navigate my way through the fog – I could be caught at high elevation, in the dark, in the cold and have no shelter or warmth of any kind. So every step up the mountainside had me worried. Every once and a while I’d look back at the route I had just taken and think to myself, “I have no idea where I am or which direction I just came from” And that scared the hell out of me!

So after hours and hours of climbing, and after somehow wedging myself on the steepest part of the entire volcano, and still unable to tell how much further I had to go before reaching the top, I decided to call it quits.

By this time my hands and arms were covered in ice, the wind was blowing, visibility had dropped to about 20 feet, and I had no idea how much further I had to go. It could have been only 50 more feet… or it could have been 5,000. At that point I simply had no way of telling. I was tired, alone, and a little unsure if I was going to be able to climb back down the hillside and find the gear I had stashed away earlier that morning.

So, I didn’t quite make it to the top of El Misti, but after doing a little research on the web and looking at satellite photos, I know that I was extremely close. I probably only had about 300 more feet to go.

I didn’t really care about making it to the top, however. For me, the experience was what I was really after. I had had a great day climbing in the fog. The entire day it was dead silent on the side of the volcano and I was clearly the only person to have climbed up this route in a very long time. In other words, I had had a blast!

I thought the trip down to my base-camp would be a short one. But I was surprised at just how long it took me. I had hiked an impressive distance on day two and retracing my footprints in the sand was a slow and painstaking process.

Numerous times on the trip down the volcano I would get lost and have to climb back up a short distance before getting back on track and heading in the right direction. Finally, after about two hours, I made it back to the camp where I had stashed my tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and my precious water.

By this time it was about 5 PM and I still had a good hour or more of light left, so instead of spending two nights camped out in the same location, I decided to pack up all my gear and head down the volcano and go back in the direction of Arequipa. I knew I wouldn’t make it all the way back to Arequipa that night, and I didn’t even want to, but I did want to get a bit closer to the city if possible, so that the hike out the following day would not be nearly so long.

After loading up my backpack, I took off. Instead of going back the way I came, however, I headed west and walked across the Arequipa side of the massive volcano. I followed some animal tracks for a while, climbed across several steep gorges, navigated my way up and over some steep canyon walls and finally fell into a creek bed.

As it began to get dark I knew I needed to start looking for a flat spot on which to pitch my tent for the evening, but this proved difficult. In fact, I started to become really worried about finding an appropriate place to sleep because it was getting dark, it was still incredibly misty, and I was trapped at the bottom of small river with nothing but steep canyon walls to my side.

But then, just as I was about to have a nervous breakdown, I found a ledge that I could climb out of the canyon on and there, just at the top of that ledge, was a flat area on which to pitch my tent.

So, as night began to fall, I quickly set up my camp, gathered a few nearby stones in order to make a campfire ring, and ran around as fast as I possibly could while collecting branches, grass and wood for a campfire.

For four hours I sat by the fire and listened to my Spanish podcasts. Other than the sounds of the wood snapping in the campfire, it was dead silent. I had the entire volcano to myself.

The following morning I woke around 11 AM (I was extremely tired and my legs were incredibly sore), packed up my tent, and headed down the mountain. It didn’t take more than 30 minutes before I found a trail. It was the first trail I had seen on my entire adventure and I nearly slapped myself when I saw it.

“Why hadn’t the taxi driver dropped me off at the entrance to this trail?” I thought to myself. ” Why did he drop me off in an area where there wasn’t a trail of any kind to follow? Surely I could have made it to the top of El Misti if I had simply been on a trail! Even in the mist I could have easily made it to the top of the volcano on a trail.”

I was somewhat pissed, but also somewhat pleased that I had climbed as far as I had without a trail of any kind.

So I jumped on the trail and headed downhill. On the way down I passed a small group of people hiking up the mountain with heavy loaded packs – the first group of hikers I had seen on the entire trip. After three days on the mountain I looked tried, sore and dirty. But the hikers in this group had been driven half-way up the mountain in a 4×4 and had just started their uphill climb. They looked clean and fresh. I smiled as they passed me by… and not a single one said a word to me.

After a couple miles the trail turned to road. And for miles I followed the dirt road through the desert that separates El Misti from the people of Arequipa.

Eventually, the dirt road hit pavement and I followed the paved road for several more miles, downhill and in the direction of Arequipa.

After passing through what appeared to be Arequipa’s city dump, I continued walking, straight through the poorer neighborhoods I had been advised not to visit, and walked myself all the way back to downtown Arequipa.

I may have not made it all the way to the top of Arequipa, Peru’s El Misti volcano, but my three-day adventure was certainly the best thing I have done in Peru thus far.

The image below shows the general route that I took while climbing the volcano. I started at the bottom end of the image, climbed nearly to the top of the volcano, and then ended my adventure in downtown Arequipa.