Hightest Skiing Gets Lowest Ratings In Chacaltaya, Bolivia, Skiers Quickly Discover There Is More To The Sport Then A Schuss Down The Hill

Aspen may be the most pretentious ski resort in the world, and France’s Val d’Isere may be one of the biggest, but Bolivia’s Chacaltaya can safely lay claim to being the most absurd.

At 17,229 feet, this resort’s summit is the world’s highest; a breathtaking experience, to say the least. As an avid skier, I figured a day on the slopes here would be not so much a challenge as a high-altitude experiment, perhaps one that should be tested on lab rats first.

Club Andino, the only ski club in La Paz, owns the resort and runs most of the transportation to the mountain. I waited with a few other curious skiers - three Americans, three Swiss, two Germans and on Israeli (who had only seen snow twice in his life) - for Club Andino’s off-road vehicle to show up. It was an hour late. Furthermore, it was not an off-road vehicle at all but an Isuzu mini-van, which hardly looked like it could conquer a speed bump without assistance.

The ski resort was located a bit more than an hour out of La Paz on a dirt road. En route, Mike, a traveler from Seattle, sat in the front seat next to the driver and did most of the talking. However, the driver didn’t speak English. The Swiss were speaking Swiss-German with each other. The rest of us, including the German, who was a dead ringer for Ozzy Osborne, had our eyes closed and were trying to get some sleep. I couldn’t quite figure out who Mike was talking to.

Once we started going up Mount Chacaltaya, the scenery was impossible to ignore - for fear that we might soon become part of it. We were on a cliff-side road the width of a queen-size mattress and quickly realized we had to lean toward the mountain when passing over bumps to keep the narrow-based, top-heavy mini-van from tipping over and bouncing down the slope. We also had to get out and push the van up the steeper parts of the road, which were the only times I actually felt safe.

Miraculously, we arrived at the world’s hightest ski lodge (over 16,000 feet up) after just two hours. The lodge was not the sort I was accustomed to. It had decaying wood, broken windows and looked like it might have formerly belonged to the Addams Family but had since fallen into disrepair. I thought it curious that the lodge wasn’t located at bottom of the hill like at most resorts I’ve visited, but half way up it. (Which isn’t saying much since the run - and there was only one run at this resort - was 450 meters long.)

Anders, a middle-aged man with a white baseball cap, was running the show. Equipment rental was $14, including a lift ticket. The conditions: no refunds, no ski patrol, no first aid and no lawsuits. But Anders did allow sharing. He told everyone to find a partner with a common shoe size, figuring (correctly) that we wouldn’t be able to ski very long without oxygen. This was the first time I’d ever sought someone out based only on the size of their feet.

“Hey, who has a 10-1/2?”

There was a bit of confusion translating European sizes to American sizes but we worked it out.

I ended up sharing my skis, boots, poles and lift ticket with Rolfe, A Swiss guy with stinky feet.

The equipment wasn’t as bad as I’d expected - manufactured in this millennium, anyway - and it was certainly better than my ski outfit. I was wearing khakis with long underwear and a knitted hat and mittens that cost me $1 at a local Bolivian market. Not the sort of thing you’d see anyone sporting on the slopes of Aspen without risk of a fashion citation from the ski patrol.

I knew I’d made the right decision to share my gear when I began hyperventilating while trying to tighten the ski boots. To fill my lungs with enough air to ski, I wondered if I would have to open my mouth wide and point my skis straight downhill.

The trick to breathing at such high altitude, according to Anders, was coca leaves. He suggested we all gnaw on huge wads of them (which we’d been instructed to bring with us from La Paz, where they are sold legally in giant buckets on many street corners and are remarkably cheap). This sounded like a very Bolivian thing to do, so we all jumped at the idea. Unlike their chemically altered white powder cousin, coca leaves don’t have any mind-altering effects.

Supposedly, the drug in the leaves just opens your air passages a bit, but I couldn’t really feel any difference other than my tongue going a bit numb. It tasted like I had pulled a handful of leaves off the nearest tree and shoved them into my mouth. More than anything, the exercise made me want to gag.

Before I hit the slopes, Anders gave me a 4-foot rope with a metal hook attached to one end and a rolling-pin-sized piece of wood to the other. This was for grabbing the rope tow, which was not a rope at all but a cable that, Anders claimed, would immediately tear my hands to shreds if I tried to grab it. What a great ski resort! The idea, he said, was to place the hook on the moving metal cable, put the wooden bar between your legs, and go. He demonstrated on a piece of garden hose until we all nodded our heads in - what he thought was - understanding.

The run had no official difficulty rating but I figured it was intermediate, or advanced-intermediate, considering the conditions were an inch of crusty snow covering the icy glacier and lousy visibility due to the cloud that had parked itself on the mountain.

Surprisingly, I skied down to the bottom without much difficulty, except nearly choking on my wad of coca leaves. The real trick was getting back up. The slope might have been intermediate, but the rope tow was experts-only.

It was like lassoing a freight train with a bent sewing needle. I spent 10 minutes trying to get the metal hook to catch on the cable. When I finally did, it pulled me along for about 10 meters before the cable surged and bounced my hook off, sending me sliding backward down the hill to where I started. After another 10 freezing and frustrating minutes, I got the hang of it. Sort of.

I got a good grip with the hook and ascended five meters before the cable stopped. I waited several minutes perfectly poised in my newfound towing position, which looked remarkably like the uncomfortably awkward position I needed to assume in college to get reception out of my antique black-and-white television.

After several minutes of cramped, twitching muscles, I began to stand erect. The tow operator noticed this and started the cable back up with a jerk. I fell over and got dragged up the hill until I managed to shake the hook loose. Eventually, I hooked in again. The cable stopped, started, stopped, went backward for 10 meters, then started pulling me up the hill.

The tow operator was having a field day with me. In theory, the cable was supposed to rest chest-high on periodically placed metal spinning wheels but it had fallen off two of them, so the cable was now half buried in the snow and I had to crouch over in fetal position to stay attached.

When I came to the first wheel, I was a bit nervous because Anders had told us that the day before a tourist had gotten his arm painfully pinned between the wheel and the cable. I tried to steer a few feet away and the result was, I pulled the cable off the wheel and it sort of fell on me and ripped my pants. The cable stopped.

My fingers were going numb. My legs were wet and freezing. And I was gagging on my coagulated wad of coca leaves. I decided to quit before things could get any worse. I had made it two-thirds of the way up the slope. I took off my skis and trudged over the hill to the lodge.

My experience was about average for our group. Sean, a highly persistent American from Woodstock, N.Y., held the record with six runs. The Israeli carried his skis at least twice as far as he skied on them. And Ozzy Osborne took one look at us on the slope and decided he’d had enough.

I guess we all could have skied more but it wasn’t worth the effort. We were spoiled. I’ve always thought going up the hill was the time to relax. At Chacaltaya, it’s when the work begins.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO “High Altitude: Illness and Wellness.” Houston, Charles S. ICS Books. 1993. “This Place is High.” Cobb, Vicki. Walker. 1989. “Bolivia: A Travel Survival Kit-2nd ed.” Swaney, Deanna and Strauss, Robert. Lonely Planet Publications. $16.95 “South American Handbook.” Box, Ben. Passport Books. 1995.