A three-person team has pulled off a new route on Chacraraju West, the 6,108m peak widely considered the toughest and steepest 6,000er in the Andes. Raymond Eckland, Jon Zerain and Josue Sanchez spent six days on the mountain's south face in Peru's Cordillera Blanca, topping out on September 11. Their 850m line, graded WI4+ M5 90°, ED VI, carries the Quechua name Shumaq Warmi.
It was no fast-and-light affair. Two days of bad weather pinned them in the tents before they broke trail through fresh snow, crevasses and sketchy ice bridges to reach the base of the wall. From a 4am start on day four, they climbed a wet 80° bergschrund, delicate M5 mixed ground, and a couloir strewn with rockfall, then hit the crux: a 70m wall of WI4+ ice. The night that followed was grim — two hours spent hunting a bivy spot, then sleeping upright in soaked boots and soggy bags under thermal blankets. The climbers called it one of the worst nights of their lives.
Another 4am push on day five brought them onto the summit shoulder at 10:15am, with the true top reached 90 minutes later. The route was relentless throughout: 60-70° snow and ice, heavily exposed mixed sections, and two pitches of near-vertical 90° ice. Getting down took 13 rappels plus downclimbing and a descent of loose rock to Laguna 69, where a friend waited — they finished at midnight.
Chacraraju's reputation makes this all the more striking. In the 1950s the peak's fluted ice walls and huge, unstable summit cornices were judged unclimbable; American climber John C. Oberlin wrote in a 1955 Alpine Journal report that its summit would need "siege or suicide, or perhaps both". Lionel Terray's French team finally proved otherwise on July 31, 1956, needing 11 days of siege tactics for the last 800m of the west peak — and Terray, no stranger to hard climbs, ranked it among the most arduous of his life. Chacraraju East fell in August 1962, closing out the last unclimbed 6,000m summit in the Cordillera Blanca.
Even now, the easiest lines on the mountain are graded ED or ED+, and many teams skip the corniced true summits entirely. For ordinary travellers, Chacraraju is less a climbing target than a spectacular backdrop: the Huaraz area offers treks past Laguna 69 and turquoise lakes under 6,000m walls. But for experienced alpinists, this new route is a reminder that Peru's big mountains still hold serious objectives — and that the country's hardest peak keeps testing anyone who steps onto it.
