“The glacier is dying. Climate change, of course.” El cambio climático. Por supuesto.
I gasp for air, my head throbbing in pain, as I trudge behind Jorge—my photographer, my husband, my partner in wild, improbable leaps of faith—up the muddy, stone-strewn path to Qolqepunku, a tropical glacier high in the southern Peruvian Andes. Above us, the glacier’s white mass towers between two sharp black peaks; ahead on the trail march six young ukukus—guardians of the glacier—men in long, shaggy black robes adorned with red crosses and tinkling brass bells. They represent mythical bear-men from Andean cosmology and are said to battle the condemned souls who haunt the glacier at night. Beside me is our local guide, Paco, bright red pom poms dangling from his brown felt hat. He speaks mainly Quechua, an indigenous language of the highlands, and a hit-or-miss Spanish that is still better than mine.
Melted Away recounts what happens after Barbara Drake-Vera’s father is diagnosed with advancing Alzheimer’s and Barbara takes him into her home in Lima, Peru, beginning a process of self-discovery that uncovers a path toward personal and family healing.
A thousand feet below us lies the Catholic sanctuary and a wide, treeless basin dotted with camping tents and around 100,000 pilgrims from throughout the Andes. They have climbed nearly to the top of this 18,000-foot-high mountain, as people have since pre-Inca times, to sing and dance and pray for a good harvest and to pay homage to the Great One: El Señor de Qoyllur Rit’i, Lord of the Shining Snow Star, a divine entity who is either Christ or the living spirit of the mountain itself, depending on which priest, shaman, or anthropologist you talk to.
I have never been this high in the Andes before, not even when Jorge and I married ourselves at Machu Picchu a decade ago. I have never seen a glacier up close. I am here because Jorge decided he had to photograph a precarious ice ritual performed by a bunch of daredevil ukukus half his age, and I want to make sure he does not fall into a crevasse and die.
Thom-thom-THOM-da-dom, beat the drums. Ching, ching, ching, ring the ukukus’ bells.
I draw short, jagged breaths, head pounding, and force myself to lift one foot at a time. Every step is a torture. I want to go back to the campsite. I didn’t realize 45 is old.
“Every year the ukukus run down the mountain with holy ice for the cathedral,” Paco is saying to Jorge, who translates for me. “To bless the crops and the animals and the people for the year.”
Jorge nods in profile; he has a beautiful strong nose whose high bridge is always cool to the touch. Right now, that nose is practically all you can see of him, we’re both so bundled in scarves and knitted llama-wool caps and poufy down jackets.
Photo by Jorge Vera
“Don’t the ukukus sometimes slip on the ice and die?” Jorge asks.
“Yes, some die every year,” Paco says in his raspy voice. “But the death of an ukuku blesses everyone.”
At the blast of a whistle, the young ukukus sprint to the base of the glacier, about 200 feet away. Ukukus from other villages, some in green and black robes, are gathering there too, carrying a large wooden cross and three-foot-long wax candles. According to ancient tradition, the ukukus are supposed to camp out here tonight, carve out chunks of ice, strap them to their backs and race down the mountain early tomorrow—however, today something is wrong, apparently; they’re arguing.
“What are they saying?” Jorge asks Paco. “Can I photograph them tonight?”
Paco races up the path to check. He has lived at this altitude all his life, so breathing isn’t a problem for him.
“No photographs, no ice camping,” Paco explains when he returns, his thick eyebrows pinched in worry. The ice is no longer stable, he says. It’s too risky. Only a small group of ukukus will do the vigil on the glacier tonight. And no race at dawn down the mountain with the holy ice. Too many ukukus have died in the last few years. Big holes have opened up in the ice.
Jorge grows very still. I can taste his disappointment. We flew from Florida for this.
“Why are there big holes?” I ask Paco.
“The glacier is dying. Climate change, of course.” El cambio climático. Por supuesto.
Photo by Jorge Vera.
I am stunned. I had heard the high-altitude tropical glaciers in Peru were melting, but I didn’t realize this one was disappearing, too. And so quickly.
Por supuesto. That was a dig. He’s a llama herder from the Andes, and he knows the science behind the melting glaciers. Why don’t I, an American tourist in expensive hiking boots, know these basic facts, he insinuates? Meanwhile, in the United States, news outlets are debating whether climate change is “real,” and right-wing politicians are decrying global warming as a “hoax.”
“If only I could bring those people here, show them climate change is real,” I think.
Squinting up into the sun, I see the face of the glacier is crawling with people—gathering ice, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other. A young boy lifts an impressive chunk of ice over his head, like a trophy. “El Señor de Qoyllur Rit’i!” he shouts. Meanwhile, Jorge is trying to convince the ukukus to let him photograph their rituals. It’s three o’clock already. By four, the sun will have disappeared behind the mountains, and temperatures will quickly plummet below zero. The dangerous time. The time when cocky gringos die. Like the experienced French climber who insisted on hiking Qolqepunku yesterday at nightfall wearing only shorts and a T-shirt and got hypothermia. They brought his lifeless body down on a cloth stretcher.
Fuck it, I think, ignoring my headache. I’m going up while there’s still sunlight.
I grab my hiking poles and haul myself up the moraine path, shards of dark grey slate crunching underfoot. Every few steps, I have to stop to catch my breath. My head throbs.
Up close, the glacier is nothing like I imagined. Its walls are like the flanks of a whale, pale grey and wet and glistening, its surface studded with grit. The glacier feels ancient, alive—and sentient. I want to close my eyes and lean against it, let my humanity dissolve in the trickle of icy water that seeps from underneath, joining the other rivulets winding to the valley below.
A deep vertical crack has split the ice face to my left. Very carefully I creep along the edge of the glacier. The color inside takes my breath away. It is a translucent blue-green, lit from within, a beauty that pierces my heart. I stand there, forehead resting on the gritty ice, filled with something improbable. Affection for a glacier. It reminds me of something a shy cabdriver told me a few days ago in Cusco: “Yes, we love our mountains and their white ponchos.” White ponchos. He was referring to the ice caps.
Photo by Jorge Vera.
Apu Ausangate, the local people call the deity who protects this particular mountain range. Lord Ausangate. The living spirit of the mountains. This apu is male, like most Peruvian mountain spirits. He is a good apu, a benevolent father, his glacier meltwater giving life to the people of this high, forgotten region. “Children of the glacier,” they call themselves, a Peruvian anthropologist recently wrote.
“The pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i is when they climb the glacier to play in the lap of their father,” she wrote. “He will always be there for them, until the snowcaps disappear.”
What must that feel like, to be nurtured and sustained by one’s father? I wonder, gazing into the blue ice. To be loved completely, no conditions demanded in return?
I try to imagine it, but I can’t. Father and love and nurture don’t go together in my brain.
The ice face is turning purple; it must be time to go. I grab my hiking poles and retreat backward, inch by painful inch. At the trailhead, I double over, my head pounding so hard I want to puke. Altitude sickness.
Pebbles rain down to my right. The pilgrims are climbing off the glacier and returning to their campsites. Whole families stream by, bumping into me, laden with buckets of meltwater and blocks of ice. A man in a red poncho steps on my toe, and I don’t even feel it.
Then something is tugging on my sleeve—rough fingers, the nails caked with black dirt. It’s Paco. He holds out a dripping chip of glacier ice, two inches long.
“Señora, for you.” His raspy voice.
I thank him and let the 50,000-year-old ice melt on my tongue, down my throat, the iciness radiating throughout my chest, strangely cold and warm at the same time. The feeling lodges in my heart. For some reason, I don’t mind, just like I didn’t care about washing the gravel from the ice when he gave it to me. I stand there, quietly, just looking at Paco and his thick, slanty eyebrows and his chapped red cheeks. His chest rises and falls under his worn fleece jacket, puffs of frosty air blooming between us.
Then I notice: my headache is gone.
“Gracias,” I say. He dashes off to gather more ice.
Photo by Jorge Vera.
“Barbara, we have to get going,” Jorge is calling down below.
The glacier is bathed in purple shadows. Over my right shoulder, the sun is sinking fiery orange between the mountain peaks.
I glance up to the top of the glacier. I will write an article about you, I promise silently. About you and Qoyllur Rit’i and climate change, and get it published, if it’s the last thing I do.
But who is going to care what you say? an old, mocking voice whispers inside. You’re no science writer. You know jack shit about climate change.
My head begins to throb.
Who in the U.S. is going to listen to you?
I hurry down the path, rock crunching underfoot. The cold air whips my eyes and face. I’m walking faster, faster, almost running, then I stumble; my left pole catches me before I pitch forward. I keep going. I’m sweating into my chilled jacket, my heart pounding, pounding.
The voice chases me as I rush into darkness: Face it, Barbie. You haven’t got it in you.
Photo by Jorge Vera.
Four years and seven months after I fell in love with a glacier, my 86-year-old father, John Drake, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Two months later, with Jorge’s help, I became his reluctant caregiver in the desert capital of Lima, Pizarro’s “City of Kings.”
A year and a half later, my father drew his last breath—in bed with four young women.
The following month, in a small storage unit in Florida, I found a crumbling leather-bound journal that he had kept hidden for 60 years—and everything I thought I knew about him, and our long, painful history together, was blown wide open.
Photo by Jorge Vera.
Barbara Drake-Vera is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist from Gainesville, Florida, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida. Her journalism has been featured in the Miami Herald, the Village Voice, MSNBC.com and the Orlando Sentinel, with essays in The Invading Sea and Wild Roof Journal, and short fiction and cross-genre work in North Dakota Quarterly, Red Rock Review, New Delta Review, and Iris: A Journal for Women. Her honors include an Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the State of Florida and a grant from the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council. While living in Peru from 2007 to 2014, she worked as a field producer for NBC Nightly News and the TODAY Show before bringing her estranged father with Alzheimer’s to live with her family in Lima. Her unusual caregiving odyssey abroad has been showcased on HealthCentral.com, Minding Our Elders, and the AlzAuthors and Fading Memories podcasts. She is featured in the 2025 WEDU PBS documentary Good Natured (directed by Ash Stokes), which explores how Floridians are responding to climate change and environmental threats. Her new book is Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru.
Header photo, Qolqepunku in 2008, by Jorge Vera.
