🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
The Cordillera Huayhuash is one of the most spectacular and compact mountain ranges in the world: in barely 30 kilometers it packs a crown of peaks above 6,000 meters, headed by Yerupajá (6,617 m), the second highest summit in Peru, alongside a string of turquoise lakes, hanging glaciers and high-altitude campsites. Located southeast of Huaraz, between Áncash, Huánuco and Lima, it is the setting for one of the great treks on the planet.
The full Huayhuash circuit, of about 8 to 12 days, is a challenge for experienced mountain walkers: it means crossing several abras (mountain passes) above 4,700 and 5,000 meters, camping at altitude and facing the isolation of an area with no villages and no services. In exchange, it delivers an unbroken succession of overwhelming landscapes. There are also shorter versions (4 to 6 days) and options with muleteers and mules to carry the gear.
This guide runs through how to organize the Huayhuash trek, the usual starting points (such as Llámac or Quartelhuain), the difficulty and the acclimatization you need, the community fees charged by the communities you pass through and the safety precautions. The Huayhuash is genuine high mountain terrain: it demands preparation, but it rewards you with one of the most imposing settings in the Andes.
The Cordillera Huayhuash shot to world fame through the survival epic of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates on Siula Grande in 1985, told in the book and film Touching the Void. The range, ancestral home to high-altitude peasant communities, was declared a Reserved Zone in 2002 to protect its exceptional natural heritage, and today its circuit is considered one of the best treks in the world.
Read the full history ↓The region of the snow-capped summits: between the Cordillera Blanca —the highest in the tropics— and the Callejón de Huaylas, home to Huascarán, to the temple of Chavín, to the avalanche that buried Yungay and to turquoise lakes.
Read the history of Áncash →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Cordillera Huayhuash is one of the most impressive and compact mountain ranges in the Andes. In barely 30 kilometers it packs a crown of summits above 6,000 meters, headed by Yerupajá (6,617 m), the second highest mountain in Peru after Huascarán, and joined by giants such as Siula Grande, Jirishanca, Rondoy and Sarapo. This concentration of six-thousanders in so little space, together with its hanging glaciers and turquoise lakes, is what makes it an exceptional setting.
Geographically, the Huayhuash lies southeast of the larger Cordillera Blanca, where the departments of Áncash, Huánuco and Lima meet. It is part of the tropical Andes and, like the whole region, it is subject to the retreat of its glaciers from global warming. Its meltwater feeds high-altitude lakes and gives rise to rivers running down toward different watersheds, making it a crucial water reserve for the communities of the area.
The name 'Huayhuash' comes from Quechua and has been associated with the idea of something twisted or winding, perhaps in reference to the sinuous shape of the range or to the Andean weasel ('huayhuash'). For centuries the range has been the territory of high-altitude peasant communities, who graze livestock and maintain a deep relationship with these mountains, revered as protective apus in Andean tradition.
Long before the Huayhuash was a mountaineering destination, its valleys and high punas were already crossed by Andean hunter-gatherers and, later, by camelid herders. Archaeological remains scattered across the Áncash and Huánuco regions —rock shelters with paintings, terraces and ancient roads— point to thousands of years of human occupation, tied to the seasonal herding of llamas and alpacas on the high punas, a way of life still partly maintained today by local communities.
With the expansion of the Tahuantinsuyo, the region was folded into the Inca road network, though more peripherally than other parts of the central highlands. Today's peasant communities around the range —Llámac, Pocpa, Queropalca, Huayllapa, Pacllón and others— descend from those high Andean populations and keep their agropastoral traditions, with cattle and sheep herding as the central activity, combined today with income from trekking tourism.
This continuity between the pre-Hispanic past and the present is one of the distinctive traits of the Huayhuash: unlike other Andean destinations dominated by monumental ruins, here the heritage is above all the lived landscape, the bond between the communities and their sacred mountains (apus), which still organizes the social and ritual life of the area.
Modern mountaineering reached the Huayhuash in the twentieth century, later than the neighboring Cordillera Blanca. Yerupajá, the highest and hardest summit of the massif, was climbed for the first time in 1950 by an American expedition led by David Harrah, which opened the route up the southwest face after several failed earlier attempts by German and Austrian expeditions in the 1930s and 1940s. Its technical difficulty —vertical ice, exposed ridges and changeable weather— quickly made it one of the most respected mountains in the Andes.
In the decades that followed, European and South American climbers opened new routes on Siula Grande, Jirishanca and other summits of the massif, establishing the Huayhuash as a world-reference destination for technical mountaineering, comparable in prestige to parts of the Alps or the lesser Himalaya for the quality of its ice and rock faces.
The Cordillera Huayhuash became world famous thanks to one of the most celebrated survival stories in mountaineering. In 1985, the British climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates made the first ascent of the west face of Siula Grande (6,344 m), one of the summits of the Huayhuash. On the way down, Simpson fell and badly broke a leg. Trying to lower him on ropes in the middle of a storm, Yates was forced into a wrenching decision: to cut the rope, convinced his partner was already lost.
Simpson, however, did not die. He fell into a crevasse in the glacier and, against all odds, managed to get out and drag himself for days, with a shattered leg and no food, back to base camp, just before his companions gave up on him. Simpson told the story himself in his book Touching the Void, published in 1988, which became a classic of mountain literature, and later in an acclaimed documentary of the same name in 2003, directed by Kevin Macdonald.
The story introduced the Cordillera Huayhuash to a global audience and reinforced its reputation as a high mountain destination as beautiful as it is demanding. Today, many of the trekkers walking the circuit pass close to Siula Grande and the lake that bears its name, recalling the epic that put this remote Peruvian range on the world mountaineering map.
Recognizing its exceptional natural and scenic value, the Peruvian state declared the Cordillera Huayhuash a Reserved Zone in 2002, a protective designation intended to conserve its glaciers, lakes and high-altitude ecosystems, home to Andean wildlife such as the condor, the vicuña and the taruca deer. The area has long been a candidate for stronger permanent protection, and it is regularly listed among the best treks in the world in guidebooks and specialist publications.
One particularity of the Huayhuash is that the circuit crosses the land of eight peasant communities that have lived in the area for generations: Llámac, Pocpa, Queropalca, Quisuarcancha, Túpac Amaru, Uramaza, Huayllapa and Pacllón. These communities have organized a system of community fees, or tolls, that trekkers pay as they pass through their territories, and which are a direct source of income for local people as well as funding the upkeep of trails and campsites. Many of the muleteers who support expeditions with their mules also belong to these communities.
This model, combining conservation and community benefit, makes the Huayhuash an example of mountain tourism with local roots, though not without tensions: local environmental organizations have pointed in recent years to the impact of litter and visitor overload at some campsites, and insist on the need for more sustainable management. The responsible visitor follows the signs, pays the community fees, leaves no litter in an area with no services and treats the host communities with consideration. Looking after the range is the condition for it to remain, at once, the livelihood of its people and one of the great high mountain sanctuaries on the planet.