KEEPING THE PEACE

Today, the army is determined to prevent a recurrence. Fully armed soldiers patrol El Cocuy's streets. The brigade has chased the guerrillas to the low-altitude flatlands that lie beyond the peaks, a barely mapped region still populated by the U'wa indigenous tribe.

Despite the visible military presence, traveling in Colombia feels safe -- just. President Alvaro Uribe, who first won office in 2002, has deployed the army to protect the highways and major cities, beaten the guerrillas back to their jungle hideouts, and posted a dramatic fall in violence.

The U.S. State Department noted in a March 2009 travel warning that ``security in Colombia has improved significantly in recent years -- the incidence of kidnapping has diminished significantly from its peak at the beginning of this decade.''

In El Cocuy village, local authorities' biggest fear is the speed at which the park's glaciers are receding. ''They're losing ice at an incredible rate,'' said Mario Reyes, a national parks ranger. ``We installed a climate station in the north last year, and it's already shown an ice loss of six feet. In a single year, that's a huge amount for a glacier to lose.''

Like glaciers in other tropical zones, the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy's ice caps are now melting ten times faster than just two decades ago. They have already shrunk to just one-fifth of the length recorded in 1850.

Unchecked, Reyes warned, the disappearance of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy's glaciers will lead to water shortages in Colombia's major cities.

HEADING UP

The trail to the peaks begins at a ramshackle hacienda above El Cocuy, its open courtyard strewn with saddles and ponchos. We rose through a succession of páramos, high-altitude peat bogs distinctive to the Colombian Andes, their gulleys carpeted with frailejones, mysterious, yucca-type plants that stand in vast numbers like a silent army stationed in the mist.

The vegetation disappeared abruptly at 13,800 feet, leaving in its place a desolate, rocky wasteland, utterly without smell. I could detect no insect life or fauna, save a single bird, a stout-billed cinclodes, which flitted close in curiosity.

Heads pounding from the altitude, we set up camp at Laguna Grande, where other climbers had erected an altar to Pachamama, South America's earth goddess. The outlook was savage and unremitting. In all directions, nature was reduced to its most basic elements: rock, water and ice.

Alexander had chosen the spot well. All around, a morass of boulders and moraine rose unbroken to a circle of jagged peaks, each capped on its upper reaches by a glinting coat of ice. To the east was the snow-dusted pyramidal peak of Pan de Azúcar. Behind it, standing in dramatic profile, was the Devil's Pulpit, a 230-foot stack of sheer rock skewering the sky.

Yet evidence of the glaciers' retreat was all too visible -- swathes of ochre rock and moraine, once obscured by monstrous sheets of ice, now lie exposed to sight.

We took a day to acclimatize, boosting energy with sugar-cane juice and steaming pots of melted chocolate. Alexander prepped us with rope technique, and demonstrated how an ice ax can halt a fall. I learned to perform a rapid descent in crampons, and how to master the myriad buckles, clasps and harnesses we would need in ascending.

Our first peak, 15,994-foot Pico El Toti, was comparatively easy. We leaped sink holes and crevasses that tore jagged lines across the glacier, skirting menacingly weak ice that threatened to shatter at a footfall.

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