A wind-scoured saddle at 4,630 m below the glaciers of Salkantay, where the long walk to Machu Picchu tips over into jungle.
Salkantay Pass — Abra Salkantay in Spanish — is a bare notch of rock and scree at about 4,630 m, 60 km west of Cusco. It is the high point of the Salkantay trek, the main alternative to the permit-capped Inca Trail: four or five days on foot from Mollepata to Machu Picchu. The path climbs out of the tawny high grassland the Andes call puna, squeezes between Salkantay's ice and a lower ridge, then drops north into cloud forest. Up there breathing takes effort, the wind never stops, and the mountain feels very close.
The mountain above the pass is not, locally, only a mountain. In the Andes the great peaks are apus — mountain spirits that own the water, the weather and the luck of the valleys below — and Salkantay is among the most powerful in the Cusco region. Its name comes from the Quechua word sallqa: wild, savage, untameable. Spanish scribes were writing it down by 1583. From the stone sundial at Machu Picchu, the Incas saw the Southern Cross stand highest directly above this summit in the rainy season, and treated the peak as a keeper of rain and fertility. People still pay their respects: on the pass stand apachetas, cairns built one stone at a time by passers-by, each stone a small thank-you or a request for safe passage, with coca leaves tucked among them.
Almost everyone standing here is walking to Machu Picchu the long way round. The classic Inca Trail is capped at 500 people a day, guides and porters included, and sells out months ahead; the Salkantay route needs no permit, so it became the escape valve, and a much-repeated National Geographic Adventure list of the world's best treks did the rest. Day two is the one people remember: up through frozen grass before dawn, over the pass by mid-morning with the glaciers close enough to hear, then down, and down, and down, shedding nearly two vertical kilometres into a valley where the air turns warm and green. Two days later you are among coffee bushes and banana trees at Lucmabamba, soaking in hot springs near Santa Teresa, and looking across the gorge at Machu Picchu from the ruined terraces of Llactapata.
Be honest about the height. At 4,630 m the air holds roughly half the oxygen it does at sea level. Headaches, nausea and broken sleep are normal; fitness does not protect you from altitude sickness, and the only reliable cure is to go down. Spend two or three days in Cusco first, walk slowly, drink more water than feels sensible, and take the offer of a horse without embarrassment.
The making of Salkantay Pass
The pass itself
A bare saddle of scree at about 4,630 m — the highest ground on the trek, marked by a battered blue sign and a growing heap of trekkers' stones.
Nevado Salkantay
The 6,271 m ice peak that owns the skyline: highest in the Vilcabamba range, second only to Huascarán among Peru's most towering-above-its-surroundings mountains, and first climbed in 1952.
Offerings to the apu
Salkantay is an apu, a living mountain spirit, and walkers still add a stone to the apachetas — the little cairns on the pass — asking safe passage.
Humantay Lake
A glacier-fed pool at about 4,200 m, an hour's steep climb above the camp at Soraypampa, turned electric turquoise by the rock powder the ice grinds into it.
The Salkantay trek
Four or five days and roughly 70 km from Mollepata to Machu Picchu — the permit-free alternative to the Inca Trail, crossing the pass on the second morning.
Coffee at Lucmabamba
Down in the warm Santa Teresa valley, family smallholdings grow coffee, bananas and avocados; most groups stop to pick, roast and drink a cup before the last climb.
Machu Picchu from Llactapata
Overgrown Inca terraces on a ridge at about 2,750 m, looking straight across the gorge at Machu Picchu — the back-door first sight of it, hours before the crowds.
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