Huascaran History: The First Ascents, Annie Peck, and the 1970 Disaster

Huascaran Sur, at 6,768 m (22,205 ft), is the highest point in Peru, the highest in all of Earth’s tropics, the highest in the Andes north of Lake Titicaca, and the fourth-highest mountain in South America. Its slightly lower twin, Huascaran Norte, reaches 6,655 m. The two are separated by the saddle known as the Garganta (“the throat”). The mountain stands inside Huascaran National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, at the heart of the most concentrated cluster of beautiful 6,000 m peaks in the Americas.

In the Ancash Quechua language, the mountain is Mataraju, from mata (twin) and raju (snow peak) – a plain description of its two white summits. Local legend tells it differently: Huascaran was a young nobleman and Huandoy, the great peak across the valley, a woman he loved in secret. When their families forbade the match, the gods turned the pair to stone, leaving them facing each other across the Llanganuco valley forever. The Spanish-influenced spelling “Huascaran” was standardised by early mapmakers in the 19th and early 20th centuries and has stuck since.

Annie Smith Peck (1850-1935) was a Latin and archaeology teacher, a lecturer, and a committed suffragist. She had studied Greek and classical languages, taught at Purdue and Smith College, and became the first woman admitted to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. It was the sight of the Matterhorn, on a journey through Europe, that turned her toward mountaineering in middle age. She climbed the Matterhorn herself in 1895, helped found the American Alpine Club in 1902, and then set her sights on something no one had done: a true first ascent of a great mountain.

After failed attempts on Bolivia’s Sorata and several exhausting, underfunded tries on Huascaran itself, Peck finally succeeded on 2 September 1908, aged 58, reaching the north summit with the Swiss guides Rudolf Taugwalder and Gabriel Zumtaugwald and porters from Yungay. It was the first recorded high-altitude ascent anywhere in the Cordillera Blanca, made in brutal cold on a descent partly completed in the dark after one of the guides lost her specially made snowsuit.

On 20 July 1932, a joint German-Austrian expedition led by Philipp Borchers made the first ascent of Huascaran Sur, the 6,768 m true summit. The summit team included Erwin Schneider, Hermann Hoerlin, Erwin Hein and Franz Bernard. They climbed via the Garganta col between the two summits, the route that would become the standard line still followed today. Their success, after decades of failed attempts on the higher peak, cemented Huascaran’s reputation as a serious Andean objective and opened the Cordillera Blanca to a wave of exploration.

On 3 August 1953, a Peruvian team including Felix Mautino, the brothers Guido, Pedro and Apolonio Yanac, and Macario Angeles reached the south summit – the first ascent of Huascaran by Peruvian climbers. The same group went on to climb Aconcagua the following year, marking the arrival of Peruvian mountaineering as a force in the Andes. Local guides from the Callejon de Huaylas have led on the mountain ever since.

On 10 January 1962, a mass of ice broke from the north peak and swept down onto the town of Ranrahirca, killing an estimated 4,000 people. It was a devastating disaster in its own right, and a warning that few could act on.

Eight years later came the catastrophe. On 31 May 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake off the Ancash coast shook loose an enormous slab of rock and glacial ice from Huascaran’s north face. The debris avalanche – tens of millions of cubic metres of ice, mud, and boulders – raced roughly 18 km down the valley at an estimated 280 to 335 km/h, overtopped a protective ridge, and buried the town of Yungay and part of Ranrahirca almost instantly. Around 20,000 people died at Yungay alone, part of some 70,000 killed across Peru in what remains the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s history and one of the deadliest single avalanche events ever recorded.

Despite everything, Huascaran remains the classic high-altitude climb of the Cordillera Blanca and a benchmark 6,000 m peak, reached over 5 to 7 days from Musho via the Garganta, at a moderate PD to AD grade whose real dangers are crevasses and serac fall rather than technical difficulty. The mountain has also become a scientific archive: researchers led by Lonnie Thompson drilled ice cores from the col in 1993 and again in 2019, recovering climate records reaching back more than 19,000 years. In a lighter moment, a group of British climbers held what the Guinness Book of Records recognised as the “world’s highest dinner party” on the summit in 1989. And in 2024, the mountain gave up one of its own: the body of an American climber lost in an avalanche in 2002 emerged from the melting glacier 22 years later, a stark marker of how fast Huascaran’s ice is now retreating.