THE ROUTE TOWARD THE MUMMIES
The task is arduous and painful. To arrive to the objective it is necessary to know the most accessible journeys, to know how to be preserved of the rays and of the night low temperatures, and also to have the force physics enough to carry water and foods, since it is one of the most lonely areas in the planet: there are not rivers neither thaw, and much less where to be provided of foods. And, it is also necessary to respect the laws of the puna and the high mountain. For all these reasons it was vital the contribution of the jumps us participants from the expedition to the Llullaillaco, the habitation of the mummies better conserved.
The expedition liderada for Johan Reinhard, an international authority in archaeology of height, has not maybe been possible, or so successful, without the competition of people and institutions salteñas.
Mounters, anthropology students, members of the armed forces, and of security and fundamentally the government of the county, through the grant of numerous facilitys and support of diverse nature, they made possible the expedition that I conclude with the discovery of the mummies buried in the entire world to more height.
They were fundamental part of the world scientific success, carried out in an extremely aggressive atmosphere and of impossible access without the knowledge of the climate and the land contributed by the local. Without them, maybe neither has been possible the discovery of the mummy in the volcano Quewar, carried out in February of this year. The company is not simple, Christian Vitry narrated who already in 1980 it had reached the ruins of the Llullaillaco, studied from 1956 by the Austrian Mathias Rebitsch, and that it was invited by the members of the project Sanctuaries of Height of the Andean South", leaded for Reinhard. These went who Found " Sarita ", an adolecente mummified the one that was in the Snowy of Ampato, in the Peni. The reasons of the invitation are obvious.
All person that wants to carry out an expedition of this nature should have the competition of people that they know the place that they can adapt to her rigors, and possess the technical capacity and the necessary knowledge to collaborate with delicate tasks as those dedicated to raise and to rescue remains from five hundred to more years of antiquity.
The destruction of the remains is sometimes product to the desaprensión or of the desires in the search of supposed treasures, but another is fruit of the ignorance, he narrated.
Vitry commented that they were necessary five days to arrive to the point sought by Reinhard. For but that the Llullaillaco is not a volcano of sharp hillsides he has its own laws: there is not water in Kilometers to the round one, neither position some to get foods, so that each expeditionary one should become changarín of their own provisions, and all should go and to return infinities of times, to transport the rest of the equipment.
The temperature deciende at night to the 25 degrees under zero, the rays fulminantes is the bread of every day, to ignore the places but appropriate to be preserved, or to ignore the surest roads can make fail the expedition or to retard it.
In the case of the expedition that found the three mummies passed days, three camps should be made, the first one to 4800 meters high, the second to 5800 and the last one at 6700, and alone you could arrive this way to the summit.
Vitri comments that according to carried out studies, the Inca and other towns that you/they inhabited the area and they transformed to the mountain into places of sacrifices and funerals, they used very defined, and alone roads they arrived up to where it was possible to pure walk, that is to say without the use of any genius of the modern mountaineering, like they made the expeditionary discoverers of the treasure salteñan.