Littered Majesty : Andes Peak: Popularity Is Contempt

“Of course we’ll make it to the summit; that’s why we’re here,” David Staeheli, a climber from Anchorage, Alaska, said. Then he pulled at his beard, smiled and added, “But if we were 100% certain of making it, we wouldn’t have come--would we?”

Back home in Monterrey, Mexico, Gonzalo Alvarez, who is fat and 50, is a no-nonsense chemical engineer. Here in the high Andes, astride a sturdy pony, he is more poet than chemist.

“A mountain respects a man in the same measure that the man respects the mountain,” Alvarez said. “Mountains are sometimes conquered but never defeated. Everyone has his own particular personality. This mountain, she is the most mountain of them all.”

Before Alvarez lay the snow-mantled slopes of Mt. Aconcagua, queen of the Andes. For Aconcagua, these are boom times.

At 22,834 feet, Aconcagua is not only the Western Hemisphere’s tallest peak but, in these bright days of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, it is an irresistible magnet for the international fraternity of climbers. A record number of them on Aconcagua this season have brought with them elaborate gear and a contagious international esprit de corps--and have left behind tons of litter.

Need for Protection

While the climber seeks to conquer the mountain, the Argentines who live with Aconcagua are belatedly discovering the need to preserve it from the ravages of its popularity.

Like the continent-cleaving range that it dominates, Aconcagua is beautiful and capricious. It is cruel, or kind, or both, to those who come to prod its shanks and taste its majesty.

Aconcagua is easy to climb--but it can also be hard to climb, depending on the route and the winds and snows.

And Aconcagua hides secrets: Not long ago, Argentine climbers reported finding a frozen, partly mummified body in what appeared to be an Inca shrine near the summit.

“The mountain,” Felix Fellinger, president of an Argentine climbing club, said recently, “is full of bodies--Incas, missing climbers, old-time gold hunters, modern-day herders. They are all up there.”

Death on the Mountain

Counting an Austrian and an Argentine who died last year, Aconcagua has claimed 42 climbers since 1926, when Austrian Juan Stepaneck died on its northern slope. Most, like Stepaneck and Newell Bent, who in 1936 became Aconcagua’s first U.S. victim, succumbed to oxygen starvation and exposure.

Stepaneck’s body was not recovered for 20 years. Now, he, Bent and about two dozen other victims of Aconcagua rest at a climbers’ cemetery here.

After all its slumbering centuries--it was not scaled until 1907--Aconcagua is paying the price of discovery. It is getting dirty. Without meaning to, climbers from four continents are defiling their temple.

By summer’s end in March, about 600 climbers will have accepted the mountain’s challenge this season. The 1983-84 season saw what was then a record 92 expeditions and 350 climbers, according to Diego Dominguez, who issues the climbing permits. About 90% of those who make the attempt are foreigners--principally Americans, Japanese, Italians, Germans, French and British.

Dominguez estimates that perhaps 60% of this year’s climbers will reach the summit, particularly those who choose the northern route, which involves gritty, lung-burning, high-altitude climbing. At the peak, if conditions are right, they may see the Pacific shimmering off to the west--or they may see nothing at all for their pains.

Ulises Vitale, 48, an Argentine who has been climbing mountains from the Andes to the Himalayas since he was in his teens, reached the peak of Aconcagua on Jan. 9, in his fourth successful assault.

“There was a terrible snowstorm,” he recalled. “Lightning broke all around. I could taste the ozone and feel the electricity in my alpenstock. We could see nothing.”

Garbage-Strewn Gateway

Vitale recalled with distaste the scene at Plaza de Mulas, a 13,000-foot base camp. About 25 miles by horseback from this precarious Andean village, the camp is the gateway to Aconcagua.

“Most expeditions acclimate at Plaza de Mulas,” Vitale said. “Between those going up and those going down, I guess about 100 people sleep there in tents every night. Their garbage and that which has been accumulating over the years just lies there. There must be tons of it. I came away embittered.”

In the Andean foothills city of Mendoza southeast of Aconcagua, provincial authorities with responsibility for the mountain share the concern of Vitale and other local climbers who have known it in its more pristine state.

“We are doing what we can, but as usual, there is no money,” said province Economics Minister Luis Horacio Bobillo, who also deals with environmental matters.

Recent legislation establishes a schedule of fees for support services to climbers on Aconcagua, the keystone of the new provincial park system.

“We hope,” Bobillo said, “to build a ranger station at Puente del Inca, to staff it and to find a way to burn the refuse or carry it down on mules. We’re looking for the money.”

Here at Puente del Inca, veteran Argentine climber Fernando Grajales, 60, rents pack mules and horses to climbers at $18 a day. He also supervises horseback trips around Aconcagua’s base for out-of-shape, would-be climbers like Mexican engineer Alvarez.

‘Served on a Plate’

“There’s a mountain of garbage up there,” Grajales complained. “It is disgraceful. People who come from all over the world to climb here are not poor. Why can’t we charge them a fee to help us maintain the mountain?”

The same thought occurred to members of an American expedition now on the moderately difficult Polish Glacier route to the peak.

“Everywhere else I have climbed, there has been a fee and for good reason,” said Scott Gilman, a vacationing Los Angeles native who serves as a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria. “We were surprised that there is none here.”

For climbers, even the long flight to Argentina and a day or two by horseback to the base make Aconcagua a very accessible mountain compared to most others of its class.

“The mountain is served on a plate to the climber,” said Jorge A. Perone, a Mendoza city commerce official. “It’s easy to get to, and once there, you can pick a route--from easy to extremely difficult, like choosing from a menu.”

Except on the daunting south face, Aconcagua does not demand major climbing skills. Still, it is a serious mountain.

“The ascent is not difficult technically, but the mountain can be treacherous because it is so easy to go so high so fast,” said Glenn Randall, a veteran climber from Boulder, Colo. He reckons that at the summit, Aconcagua offers only 41% of the oxygen available at sea level.

Local climbers tend to be less scientific but just as respectful.

“Sometimes she can be very sweet,” said Grajales, who made his first ascent in 1952. “Then the weather changes in a flash, and it is hellish. Aconcagua seems higher at the same altitude than other mountains I have climbed because the humidity is so low. Sometimes experienced climbers who have been successful in the Alps or on McKinley get sick just getting to the base camp here.”

Altitude sickness is the climber’s worst enemy on Aconcagua, leaving him disoriented and lethargic. It is often a prelude to frostbite, physical collapse and death.

A mild dose of altitude sickness can be helpful, though, in encounters with Aconcagua’s resident spirit. Surprisingly, he is not an Inca, but an Ichabod Crane-like Englishman known as “El Futre,” which in Chilean slang means an elegant dresser.

Elegant Paymaster

It seems that when the British were building the trans-Andean railroad from Mendoza to Santiago, Chile, in the early days of the century, their paymaster was a tall, thin Englishman who wore a black hat, black suit, black shoes and a black tie on a gleaming white shirt--no matter what the altitude or the weather.

The Chilean workers were always glad to see El Futre, because he paid in cash. One night, bandits murdered him in his bed. And ever since, it is said, on nights when the moon is just so, El Futre--his suit neatly pressed, his eyes burning like coals--has accosted mountain travelers with a mixture of broken Spanish and impeccable English to demand return of the stolen payroll.

More verifiable, but already on their way to legend, are Aconcagua’s canine climbers. Fifi, breed unrecorded, accompanied three Germans and the French mistress of one of them to the summit in 1944. All four humans died on the way down and are buried here. The mountain still holds Fifi’s frozen body.

Siegfried von Columbia and Prince, German shepherds, won great respect as summit-climbers in the 1960s. Their spiritual heir is a dog of monumental undistinction adopted by some Basque climbers a couple of seasons ago and named “Belche”--Blacky. Belche went to the summit with the Basques and made friends with the mountain. She has been back four times since as mascot of other expeditions.

Now Belche watches the Aconcagua moon from her post at the entrance of the only hotel in Puente del Inca. She is not climbing this season, preferring instead to nurse a litter of puppies.

In the rush to Puente del Inca to stalk the Andean queen, Belche alone seems content to be earthbound this summer.MP, Argentina, DON CLEMENT / Los Angeles Times