When the sickness came, it came hard. After Vallunraju I had a couple days where I felt good. Ambition probably got the better of me and I headed out with Andy and Richard to attempt the French Army Route of Taulliraju. Taulliraju is probably the least climbed difficult peak in the Cordillera Blanca. Needless to say, I really wanted to climb it. I felt healthy and strong until about four hours before the alarm for our climb. Whatever I had forced me to sprint to the bathroom almost ten times in just a few hours. My stomach was in knots and I couldn't get food down without needing to stop. It didn't help that we vastly underestimated the length of the approach. We thought it would take three hours to reach the base of the climb; it took eight. We carried far too much gear too. The followers packs probably weighed fifty pounds. The climb was doomed from the beginning.
We started up a bit of the first pitch before deciding we needed to bivy and try again the following day. We walked back down to the moraine, set up the tent, and waited. The GI bug was really doing a number on me, I couldn't get anything in my body without immediately evacuating it. Added to that I had what I can only estimate as an asthma attack which left me head between knees in the tent worried about my next breath. That ended the first Taulliraju misadventure.
This pretty much sums up the next two weeks...
The base camp diet. Take one part dysentary/parasite add altitude and explosive bm's. It's hard to be sick when Taulliraju is at your doorstep.
This is taken from near our first highpoint. Notice Andy's enormous backpack.
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