After Elbrus and Kilimanjaro, I knew I can’t take Aconcagua lightly. At almost 7000m it’s the highest mountain outside of Asia and thus the second highest of the Seven Summits. Working full time, the time I had available for training was very limited. This was before covid hit either, so I actually had to commute to the office too, which is about an hour one way. So what can the man do if he only has so many hours in the day and he needs some sleep too, but training has to be done for Aconcagua?
Down and out
After reaching the summit of Aconcagua at 6961m, we took two days to get back down. Naturally when we got back to camp 3 after the summit day, we were completely exhausted. However the next day wasn’t going to be any easier either: we had to descend all the way to the “normal” route base camp at Plaza de Mulas.
On the summit of Aconcagua
On Elbrus we’d enter the world of snow as soon as we “went up the mountain.” Aconcagua is very different. There is snow and ice: there are the penitentes and the route goes over glaciers on multiple occasions. But the snow and ice is mostly covered by rock and dust, so it’s much harder to be conscious of it. This year there was so little snow that we didn’t even need to take our crampons for the summit attack.
High camps
After Plaza Argentina base camp, we kept doing the same load carrying routine: carry up some team gear, go back down, maybe rest and then move to the higher camp. We had a total of three high camps: camp 1 at 4950m, camp 2 at 5570m and camp Colera at 5870m. While we were climbing Aconcagua the “Polish traverse” route, Colera is also the highest camp of the “normal” route.
The first few days
The route up to almost 7000m altitude on Aconcagua is a long one. I’ll write about the “world below” (Mendoza and the area) later. Our route, the “Polish traverse” goes up the Vacas valley to the base camp at Plaza Argentina. On the way we had lunch at some roadside restaurant where we met another team (of two + guide) who were going up the “normal route.”
Tanigawa-dake
If you’ve watched Yama no Susume, then you’ve heard of Mt Tanigawa. It’s the goal of a major arc of the story and an important memory to the characters. I went there in a different season though (in the snow), but didn’t climb the main summit. For no particular reason other than I didn’t realize the summit I was at wasn’t the highest point. Whoops.
2019 in review
This year was quite thick in events so I decided to write a year retrospect for a change. I read somewhere that people tend to do wild things when they’re nearing a “round” age like 30, except I read about this after I planned most of the stuff listed below… It definitely did turn into a very eventful 30th.
ArgoCD bootstrap cluster
I wish it could be completely automated… But for now I’ve just automated as much as possible (and convenient). The ingredients:
- Helm
- Sealed Secrets
- Argo CD and Argo Rollouts
- traefik
- Prometheus and Grafana
I have a repository for the purposes of playing around with Kubernetes tooling like this – and hopefully turn it into an actual application eventually. I have big plans and lots of stuff I want to try out, but time is limited. All the code examples in this post use the namespaces and naming choices in the repository. The folder structure (relevant to this bit) is like…
system
├┬ apps
│└─ (bootstrapped Argo CD app manifests)
├┬ argo
│└─ the local "umbrella chart" for Argo CD and Argo Rollouts
├┬ bootstrap
│└─ boilerplate project and application manifests
└┬ manifests
└─ manifests I didn't bother turning into a Helm chart
referenced by the raw-manifests.yaml application
Collapse of the docker0 bridge
We’ve got a printer in the office. I’m not sure how the network is organized, but it’s on a different IP range than the rest of the dev network. And for some reason I couldn’t get it to work.
Mitake & Otake
Mitake with its ropeway is probably “the” hiking destination in Tokyo. It’s accessible, not particularly high and you still get beautiful views. Oh, and crowds. Of course crowds.
