During the three years Steph and I lived in Lima, working at the International Potato Center (CIP) at La Molina on the eastern outskirts of the city (now totally enveloped by it), one or the other of us had to travel almost on a weekly basis between December and April from Lima to Huancayo. At an altitude of more than 3000 m above sea level (over 10,000 feet), Huancayo was the location of CIP’s highland experiment station.

During the first season I worked there (between January and April 1973, and before Steph joined me in Peru) most of the potato hybridization work I did was carried out in the garden of the parents of one of my colleagues, Dr Maria Scurrah. CIP didn’t have any facilities of its own during that first year, and also rented land north of the city to grow its large germplasm collection of indigenous potato varieties.

It was only after I’d moved to Costa Rica to become CIP’s regional leader in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean in 1976 that permanent laboratories, greenhouses, and a guesthouse were constructed (put in jeopardy by the rise of the terrorist organisation Sendero Luminoso in the late 1980s and 1990s).

A distance of almost 300 km by road on the Carretera Central, the journey would take around six hours. Usually we’d leave CIP before mid-morning, and aim to reach San Mateo (about 95 km) a couple of hours or so later, in time for lunch. Sometimes we’d drive as far as La Oroya on the eastern side of the highest point of the road. La Oroya, a town dominated by ore smelters and awesome pollution is one of the most depressing places I have ever visited. The fumes from the smelters have blasted all the vegetation from hillsides for miles around.

The road to Huancayo crosses the Andes watershed at the highest point, Ticlio, at 4843 m. From there the road drops quickly towards La Oroya before flattening out along the Mantaro River, and southeast into the broad Mantaro Valley.

We usually travelled, after 1974, in a Chevrolet Suburban (like the one illustrated below) that carried about four passengers plus driver, or in a pickup.

In early 1974, when I took the photo on the left, snow covered the ground at Ticlio. Two decades later during a meeting of the Inter-Center Working Group on Genetic Resources, there was hardly any snow to be seen.

One of my colleagues at CIP, and Head of CIP’s Outreach Program from 1973-76 or so, was Richard ‘Dick’ Wurster who had spent some years with a potato program in East Africa (Uganda I believe) before being recruited to join CIP. Dick was independently wealthy, and a licensed pilot. He brought his own aircraft with him! And CIP took advantage of that to use it to ferry staff to Huancayo, landing at the unmanned airstrip in Jauja, now the Francisco Carle Airport served by scheduled airlines. It was a six-seater I believe, maybe a Cessna O-2 Skymaster. Anyway, CIP had a full time pilot. A year or so later, CIP purchased its own aircraft, a much more powerful model with a longer range.

To fly to Jauja safely, the flight path had to cross the Andes at around 22-24,000 feet. Dick’s plane was not sufficiently powered to climb directly from Lima over the mountains. So it would take off from Jorge Chavez Airport (Lima’s international airport) on the coast, and climb inland, more or less following the Carretera Central, before turning around and heading back to the coast, climbing all the time. Then it would head east once again, having gained sufficient height in the meantime to cross the watershed, and miss all the mountains that stand in the way.

Flying on a cloudy day was always a tense trip, because the pilot had to dead reckon where he was, then, seeing an opening in the cloud cover, dive down to come in over the Mantaro Valley, making at least one pass over Jauja airstrip to check there were no human or animal obstacles blocking the runway.

That’s looks like Dr Parviz Jatala (one of CIP’s nematologists) alongside the pilot.

Anyway when I recently came across the photos below (taken around 1974), on a clear day crossing the Andes, I was struck by the amount of snow and ice cover, glaciers even. And that made me wonder, in these times of global warming, how that phenomenon has affected the snow cover on these Andes peaks today.

A serious decline in snow and ice cover would have considerable knock-on effects in terms of water availability east towards the Mantaro Valley, and more seriously to the west, down the River Rimac to Lima that depends so heavily on this source of water from the mountains.