Winter camping... on the 4TH OF JULY!

On the 4th of July, we decided to take a 3 day camping trip as a family.  It was my first day of winter vacation at The Center, and with Collin and Matias getting ready for their trip to the States, it was one of our last weekends to get out in the mountains.  Since our car had been mostly working for a couple days, we decided to chance a drive into the remote mountains.

As luck would have it, the 4th turned out to be the only day of the year that it snowed.  Everywhere (everywhere above 11,000ft, that is).  And HARD.  We drove up into the mountains in a blizzard.

As we went up and up, I prayed our new tires would give us enough traction to come back down if we couldn't go further and it kept snowing.  Our Land Cruiser did well with our semi-snow tires (the only kind of light truck tires we could find!), but when we reached the pass and the road started to go down, we decided not to push it.

Collin carefully turned the car around so we were facing downhill back towards where we came from, in case it continued to snow through the night.  Also because our car doesn't always start in the morning before running out the battery...  We anticipated push starting it down the snow covered hill in the morning.

It continued to snow, with the wind picking up and the snow coming down harder for at least an hour as we sat in the car (which is not waterproof, nor windproof) and ate the rest of our lunch. As the snow started to lift a bit, we ventured out of the car and were met with a stunning view!  When we first arrived, all we could see were clouds and a slightly flat expanse of snow.  The clouds suddenly lifted, and we were surrounded by snowy cliffs and the road ahead plunged down the steep mountain into the jungle below, surrounded by white peaks.

Plants from the jungle climate just on the other side of the pass had been unexpectedly covered in a cold blanket and the contrast was striking.

We walked back towards our car and set about putting up the tent as the wind ripped over the pass, yanking the tent-turned-sail from our hands.  It was challenging enough to set up camp in the snow, but even more challenging to keep a three-year-old warm and dry, wrapped up in so much heavy blanket that he was almost impossible to hold for long.

By the time we got camp set up, it was almost dark and time for hot chocolate and cold empanadas.  As we prepared dinner, a family in their brand new car pulled up and started playing with the snow, making snow angels, throwing snowballs, and getting wet and cold.  We watched, wishing we had a warm car with heating to climb in after getting wet setting up camp.  They eventually all piled back in and drove down the mountain, leaving us in the silence of the dark mountaintop.

view out our tent window the next morn

Collin and Matias slept well and warm.  I didn't figure out how to optimize my layers and sleeping arrangement until the wee hours.  I guess after years of no winter camping, I was out of practice!  Hot chocolate again for breakfast and warm oatmeal helped change my perspective on the cold.  By the time the warm sun hit our tent, it was well into the morning and we finally emerged to start breaking camp.

Not too much later, a van stuffed to the gills with a whole family pulled up and parked right outside our tent.  The kids piled out and repeated the activities of the family the night before.  Collin decided it was a good time to try and push start the car, so if we needed help, we could enlist the family to push.  With Matias strapped into his car seat, we both started pushing, fighting the traction from the tires and the snow we'd enjoyed so much the day before.  An 1/8 of a mile later and running out of hill, we still hadn't managed to push start the car.  By that point, the family had finished playing and had driven up behind us.  The dad, mom and several kids helped push, and after several tries, the motor finally puttered to life.  Collin was able to turn the car around and we decided to head down towards the jungle to spend our second night.

Before we left the snow behind, we wanted to give Matias plenty of opportunities to enjoy his first snow experience.  We built a snowman, complete with a carrot nose we'd happened to bring along for dinner that night, and were even able to sled with the plastic sheet I keep in the car for emergencies.

He had a blast.

Then we headed down into the jungle, although we only made it as far as the alpine tundra around treeline.  The road turned out to be for a hydro-electric plant on the jungle side, and short of muscling the car over a man made barrier of large rocks and gravel, we couldn't go past the plant along the road that skirted the mountain and the jungle below.

It was amazing the temperature difference a couple thousand feet made.  We stripped off layers and sat on the tundra moss to eat a late lunch.  Matias was pretty excited to ride his strider bike up and down the tundra road and to throw rocks in the nearby stream with his dad.  I went to purify water with my Steripen, acutely aware of how important clean water was after my bout with typhoid a month before.

It was nice to pitch our tent on solid ground, even though it was really fun to camp on snow...  I looked forward to sleeping on ground that didn't seep cold into my bones as I slept.

I also enjoyed all the alpine flora, including neon red lichen covering the rocks like spray paint and the delicate alpine flowers not so different from the Colorado tundra.

We crawled into the tent that night, our bellies full of chicken alphabet soup and more hot chocolate.  Matias was so excited to be in the tent for a second night that it took a lot of coaxing to get him to settle down enough to sleep.

The next morning, I think we were all ready to head home, especially convinced by the grey, overcast skies we woke up to.  We were actually able to start the car without pushing it that morning and made it home without too many more adventures (aside from some alarming lurches from the car on the way up the final pass headed home).  As we drove back into the rural communities at the base of the mountains, an elderly Quechua woman headed to visit a sick relative in the hospital in Cochabamba flagged us down.  It made for a lot of silence on the drive home as we wracked our brains for how to say what we wanted in Quechua over the loud motor of the car, but seemed a fitting end to our trip.