His High-Altitude Climbs Yield Clues to Ancient Mysteries
Johan Reinhard’s parents urged him to be practical. Find a good job before following your dreams, they said. But Reinhard wouldn’t listen. He wanted to explore the world, climb mountains and solve mysteries. He was willing to give up security and decent wages to do it.
Today he’s the world’s leading high-altitude archeologist and a pioneer in the anthropological specialty known as sacred geography--the study of sites deemed spiritual by native peoples. He’s also the discoverer of the Ice Maiden, the first frozen Inca female mummy found intact.
“I’d studied cultural anthropology, then got into mountaineering and climbing,” said Reinhard, an Illinois native. “At first, I didn’t think of putting them together.”
His early quests for adventure and knowledge led him through the jungles of Ecuador, the hidden valleys of Nepal and Antarctica’s icy wilderness and atop Mexico’s volcano summits. He built a reputation as an indefatigable anthropologist, explorer and archeologist. Mountaintops became his preferred work sites.
His peers praise Reinhard for his discipline, determination and intellectual curiosity. They especially marvel at the 57-year-old’s physical stamina. In the last two decades, he’s made more than 100 ascents above 17,000 feet in the Andes, where he’s excavated more than 40 Inca ritual sites. From 1996 to 1999, he discovered 14 human sacrifices above 18,000 feet.
“For the understanding of the Incas, few people have done as much as Johan,” said Joseph W. Bastien, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas in Arlington, who’s known Reinhard for 17 years.
The American Alpine Club cites Reinhard as having scaled more peaks over 20,000 feet than any other person. But this man, who’s often called “the real-life Indiana Jones,” doesn’t climb mountains to get in record books. He remains on their freezing slopes, at oxygen-thin altitudes, to dig through ice and earth for evidence of ancient civilizations.
His goal is to protect and preserve the archeological finds, he said. Through his efforts, he hopes scientists and historians can learn more about ancient cultures. But Reinhard’s high-altitude projects are grueling.
“You truly get out of breath,” Bastien said. “The work takes double the effort. I’ve spent [weeks] at 15,000 feet, but Johan will be up there using a pick at 22,000 feet for months. It’s unbearable.”
What’s also impressive about Reinhard’s archeological undertakings is that he’s accomplished them as a maverick freelancer sans academic affiliation. For decades he’s hustled grants, persuaded academics to join him on quests and, until recently, lived on less than $11,000 annually. Still, he’s never gone more than three months between expeditions.
“It’d be hard for me to do anything else,” Reinhard said. “It’s certainly not a money machine. You have to believe that you’re doing something worthwhile.”
Reinhard carries on because atop the highest Andes peaks, amid frigid conditions, are hidden some of the world’s best-preserved mummies and relics.
Five hundred years ago, Incan priests performed ritual sacrifices four miles up on the peaks to appease their mountain gods, Reinhard said.
The Incas believed the mountains bestowed abundant water on their villages for crops and livestock. But these gods, if displeased, might curse them with droughts, eruptions, avalanches, lightning and blizzards.
Spanish priests in Peru at the time noted that the Incas sacrificed children, the purest souls, to win the gods’ favor. Incan parents also bound their offspring’s heads to shape them like mountains, which they believed were their ancestors.
In September 1995, Reinhard traveled to Peru’s Mt. Ampato with climbing partner Miguel Zarate to explore the peak after nearby active volcanoes had unsettled the ice layers on its slopes. Just 200 feet below Ampato’s summit--at an altitude higher than Mt. McKinley’s 20,320 feet--Reinhard and Zarate made a startling discovery.
There lay the mummy of a young Incan woman who had been sacrificed to the gods. Her 500-year resting place had been disturbed by the volcanic activities. Now she lay with her face partly exposed to the air, though her body remained frozen within the mountain’s ice-and-rock permafrost. This Ice Maiden, as she was later called, had long black hair, a graceful neck and muscular arms. She was clad in multicolored garments of alpaca wool. Surrounding her were figurines of gold, silver and rare spondylus shell.
She had not died gently. Diagnosticians at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore would later determine she’d been killed by a powerful blow to her right temple above her eye socket. This caused a brain hemorrhage “typical of someone who has been hit by a baseball bat,” one diagnostician reported.
As darkness fell on that September afternoon, Reinhard was focused only on getting her down the mountain to Catholic University in Arequipa, where she could be preserved in a climate-controlled freezer. Wrapping her in sleeping bag insulation, he tied her to his expedition pack and began a two-day descent. She weighed more than 80 pounds.
Reinhard, who’d been battling diarrhea during the climb, hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. Lacking crampons on his boots, he stumbled down 45-degree gradients over ice and gravel. Only his headlamp lit the way.
“I was falling, slipping,” he recalled. “At that altitude, with that weight, it just knocks the wind out of you.”
Zarate begged him to leave the mummy, for he feared that if Reinhard buckled under the heavy load, they’d both be swept down the mountain. But Reinhard kept up his strength. They descended unharmed.
The travails were far from over though. Next came a 13-hour walk, with the Ice Maiden hauled by burro, to the little town of Cabanaconde. After that was a seven-hour bus ride to Arequipa. Reinhard stored the mummy in the bus’ luggage compartment. He held his breath when the bus stopped at a police checkpoint.
“I was thinking, ‘Next thing, they’ve got the mummy, and you’re in jail and it melts,’ ” Reinhard said.
Fortunately, he and the still-frozen Ice Maiden arrived safely at Catholic University, where she was immediately transferred to a freezer.
Weeks later, Reinhard returned to Ampato. At 19,200 feet, his team discovered a second sacrificial burial site bearing the remains of two Incan children. Almost immediately, Reinhard found himself thrust in the spotlight, lauded for his finds.
“The madness around the Ice Maiden discovery, it was something to see,” he said.
The attention was both positive and negative. Grants came more easily. But controversy clouded his discoveries. A small but vocal minority condemned him for disturbing the burial sites. One man called him a robber.
Reinhard admits that the criticism upset him. He believes that only through meticulous preservation can the mummies and artifacts be saved for posterity. In recent years, he said, looters have climbed the Andes peaks, dynamiting burial sites in search of gold. Last year, at Argentina’s Nevado Quehuar, treasure hunters blasted a grave, “blowing a mummy’s head off” and scattering bones, he said.
“All they want is the gold,” Reinhard said. “I feel that as long as I can do scientific work to make sure these things aren’t destroyed, I will. But there have been times I’ve said, ‘The hell with it all.’ Some people have their minds set that what you’re doing is wrong. You just have to live with it.”
He’s determined to continue his studies and conservation efforts. Two years ago, on the summit of Argentina’s Mt. Llullaillaco (Yu-yai-YA-ko), the world’s highest archeological site, he made another historic find: three frozen Incan children, ages 8 to 15, on sacrificial grounds.
The bodies were remarkably preserved--much more so than the Ice Maiden. Scientists may learn much by evaluating their DNA and internal organs.
Reinhard’s favorite pastime of late, outside of exploring, is sharing his knowledge and archeological adventures with children.
“It’s the biggest thing that affects my life,” he said. “I never knew how much I’d enjoy the reactions of the kids--they’re fascinated by mummies. I just love it when you can affect people, and this is just reaching millions. It’s not the fame; nobody knows my name. It’s the Ice Maiden they know about.”
Reinhard has also been kept busy with other work: He’s a National Geographic explorer-in-residence; a senior research fellow at the Mountain Institute in Franklin, W. Va.; and a visiting professor at Catholic University.
On a more humorous note, People magazine last year named him one of its 100 most eligible bachelors. But for Reinhard, work comes before all.
“I have nothing but admiration for him,” University of Texas professor Bastien said. “My only regret is that I can’t be more like him. He’s the one bringing the stuff down from the mountains, and we in academia are talking about it.”
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Susan Vaughn can be reached at windjammer@mindspring.com.
