PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADOLFO MURO
“As a kid, one of my biggest dreams was to get to the top of a glacier,” says Adolfo Muro. So, when a friend invited the 24-year-old photography student at Lima’s Centro de la Imagen to summit the 18,655-foot Nevado Vallunaraju this past April, he “jumped at the opportunity.”
Muro and three friends made the eight-hour drive from Lima to the Andean city of Huaraz, and began their nine-hour summit hike at midnight, led by two guides. “I don’t remember any sounds on the mountain except the subtle wind, the slow footsteps crushing snow, and the harnesses moving along the ropes,” he says. As the hours went by and sunrise approached, the altitude began to take its toll, which actually afforded him the chance to capture this image. “Because of my lack of experience in the mountains, I wasn’t having a good time at all,” Muro recalls. “Around the seventh hour of hiking, I was feeling sick and very weak, so I started walking at my own pace, with one of the guides accompanying me. After a while, my friends and the other guide were far ahead, and I noticed they were about to enter a huge ray of light that made the scene just too beautiful to believe.”
When Muro looks at this image now, he says it takes him back to “the overwhelming emotions of the most intense adventure of my life. The memories of feeling I couldn’t do it, but fighting with intense effort and making it. This picture represents to me the realization of a lifetime dream.” It’s appropriate, then, that many hikers refer to Vallunaraju as the “mountain of dreams.”
