Ascending the Sky - The Review.

Ascending the Sky - Alain Denis

Rating: ****

Ascending the Sky is an article about Writer/Climber Alain Denis as he enters Bolivia on his 90,000km trip from Canada to the tip of South America.

The article is about how Alain Denis enters Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. While in Bolivia he encounters scamming policemen, cautious street vendors, cheap hostels and the culture in and around lake Titicaca. Alain meets up with his friend James to scale the mountain Huayna Potasi, a simple climb that many use as their “first actual climb”. As they talk to guides about the climb they’re quick to find out that the guides don’t know where Canada is and that climbing thing like frozen waterfalls is very much a possibility. They’re forced to use Alain’s bike because local cabs don’t like driving out to base camp, and they figured that having the possibility of not being picked up was good enough to bring their own means of transportation. They climb the mountain to find at the top an amazing 360 view of rain forests and lakes from an icy summit.

I find that this article is really interesting, not just because of the climb but all the difficulties Alain faced in just getting through the border and to the city of La Paz. All of these amazing places that you can go are surrounded by poverty and corruption. It’s unfortunate how much society effects adventures and trips. You could also look at it from another side of the coin and see how fortunate we are to be able to admire the natural world and explore it without having to be constantly working a low paying job in order to feed our families.

Great article, worthy of a read by anyone interested in visiting south america or climbing, it’s also interesting reading about Alain Denis’s trip from canada to the tip of south america.

Denis, Alain. Ascending the Sky. www.LetsbeWild.com. Dec 19th 2011