Aconcagua - Vacas Valley (ACV)

19 days/18 nights
Starts & finishes Mendoza

The Valle de Vacas route offers an exciting alternative to reach the summit of Cerro Aconcagua.

You will still tackle the demands of this unique mountain, while at the same time you can enjoy stunning and attractive scenery of this quiet and scenic ascent route.

We have three trekking and climbing programmes on the mountain: the Vacas Valley route, the Normal Route and the 360 Traverse of the entire mountain.

Group members and guides carry just a day sack to Base Camp, with mules carrying everything else. However, above Base Camp you carry all of your own equipment in a large backpack up and down the mountain. Porters available at extra cost. To maximise the chance of summit success on Cerro Aconcagua, we typically employ a ratio of one mountain guide to every 3 or 4 clients. In the mountains, we use two-person mountain tents. In towns, we use clean, comfortable hotels.

This is not a route where you will find technical difficulties or glaciers although it does have the same difficulty as the normal route. The difference lies in the distance, which is a little bit longer and, therefore, more demanding physically. Technically, there is only one part of hard snow, where you would usually use crampons, a slope of about 30° and of approximately 200 to 300 mts long.

The name Aconcagua appears to have one of two origins. It either derives from the Quechua ‘Ackon Cahuac’, meaning ‘Sentinel of Stone’, or from the Mapuche ‘Aconca Hue’, applied to the river, and meaning ‘Comes from the Other Side’.

The first ascent of Cerro Aconcagua was made in 1897 by the Swiss climber, Mathias Zurbriggen, a member of a British Expedition led by Edward Fitz Gerald.

For more information about high altitude, please visit the Medex website.

Here you can download, for free, Travel at High Altitude - a guide to staying healthy in the mountains, a booklet which draws on the research and experience of more than 20 internationally-recognised experts.