Mt Penitentes, Argentina

Hello!

I am back from the mountains and happy to be ready to share our fantastic discoveries with you guys.

Together with a group of five people, we climbed Mt. Penintentes (4300mt) placed in Mendoza, Argentina. What makes this mountain so special is the fact that was climbed by the Incas 500 years ago. The Inca's built a stone cairn 10 meters below it's highest summit, which has a direct line of sight with the placed where the Inca's sacrificed a boy of nine years of age. This mummy was found in Aconcagua, at the bottom of the Southwest ridge. Mt. Penitentes offers a perfect view of that spot; therefore the Incas’s chose this mountain to become a ‘secondary altar’.

It is fascinating to feel that we were standing at 4300 mts, at the very same place where such indigenous people once venerated their Gods.

I used X9i to record logs during our three days climb and can now see in Google Earth the exact location of the Inca’s cairn on Mt. Penitentes!

For those ones interested in information about the boy that was sacrificed in Aconcagua, I recommend to search for ‘Aconcagua mummy’ in Google and you will get information from different important sources. The Archaeologist who has published good documents (in Spanish) and who was present at the moment of the excavation is called Juan Schobinger.

Have fun!

Manu