Laguna 69

This was a long hike. What a day.

We learned the night before that the pickup for this day trip was at 5:00AM. So we got some snacks and went to bed early.

The bus ride was mostly uneventful. We stopped for breakfast at some sort of roadside establishment. We just got some coca tea to go and ate our snacks. There were lots of chickens running around, and one medium sized black dog we both fell in love with. We couldn’t bring her with us.

The next stop was the Llanganuco valley lagoons. It was a quick photo-op location. The views of the lagoons and mountains behind them were impressive. So was the amount of quick Instagram posing occurring here. I guess get the photo before you’ve sweated off all of your makeup. I don’t know.

Laguna 69
14km, 874m elevation
4 hours, 22 minutes
4,612m max elevation

This hike starts slowly. We arrived at the entry national park fee booth early on. It’s a long shallow incline along a small river after that. We slowly climbed to the top edge of the valley, where multiple waterfalls from different bowls all cascaded together. Switchback season then started up for us about an hour in.

Cam, for whatever reason, decided she was going to speed run the hike. I don’t know what got into her, neither did she, but she was flying. We started on a pace of over 4km/h uphill for the first hour and a half. This included the switchbacks.

After the first two ascents, we escaped the starting valley over a pass into a large flat pastureland valley. Cows, of course, were here. A small lagoon welcomed us in to this hidden arable land. We followed around the edge of the pasture, taking note of the extension hike to another lagoon to our right. It was now time for the final kilometer. A straight switchback shot up to the lagoon. Well, as straight as switchbacks can get. The fast start was starting to tire us, but we powered through to the top.

It was a good thing we moved quick early. This hike is a very popular day trip from Huaraz. Multiple buses full of excited tourists come every day to see the lagoon. Being the first bus there, and some of the quickest up, we got a few minutes with the lagoon mostly to ourselves. It was a serene lagoon, with a small waterfall to our right feeding it directly from the glacier. We had our snacks, and a rest at the top.

We were starting to feel the altitude, after the fast pace up, so we were (we think) the first to leave the lagoon. On the way down, we met many ragged tourists on their final ascents to the top in worse shape than us. It’s nice giving the 5 minutes away pep talk at the top of the final climb. It’s not fun shattering the dreams of the exhausted tourist that still has 30 minutes of uphill ahead. But we did that a couple times. They carried on, troopers.

Our pace down was much slower than our pace up. We were exhausted. A blessed man was at the national park entrance camp and sold us some Inca Cola and crackers for us to munch on the bus. The good luck with weather continued this hike as well, as it only started to rain as soon as we arrived to the bus. Graham fell asleep quick.

This hike was much harder than Laguna Churup, which we had completed the day before. It was just longer and higher, though not as steep.

We arrived back to our hostel near 6:00PM, and talked to our tour agent. You see, we inquired a couple days before about a massive eight day hike that we wanted to do. We were in! And it leaves in 10 hours, better get ready!

Oh. Okay. Lets find a restaurant and get ourselves organized. Big journey ahead. Please enjoy some more photos of our hike in the meantime before we depart on that magnificent adventure.