Cut from the same cloth
On February 28, 2006 one of my best friends died in a bus crash on the way to Cuzco, Peru. There was one other American on the bus with Darian who died as well. The two men seemed to be cut from the same cloth. This is a newspaper article from the hometown of Matt Valencia, the other American on the bus.
Posted on Sun, Apr. 02, 2006
Former Kansas City man was a free spirit to the end
A traveler at heart, his was a life marked by adventure
By STEVE PAUL
The Kansas City Star
The backpack has yet to arrive. Greg and Ania Valencia buried their son Matt a day ago and here it is Saturday and they’re still waiting for the pack.
It’s in the air. It’s on the ground. Some hitch in Peru. They don’t even know where the pack is this minute. And they don’t know what will be in it.
Maybe some of Matt’s things will be gone. That’ll hurt, but no more than the hurt that comes from losing your 27-year-old son. That is tougher than anything.
But the Valencias know one thing. No matter what’s left in it, Matt’s backpack will be something to hold.
With Matt, it went to the top of the world.
And now, in Matt’s absence, it can’t help but carry back some of his spirit.
Matt Valencia, a young man who loved the mountains, constructed his life with a vigor and intensity that inspired everyone who knew him.
He was the kind of guy who worked hard to play hard. The kind of guy you will miss forever because he shaped the way you lived, too. “Those type of friends, they come round once in a lifetime,” says one.
In February, Matt Valencia was touring South America, in the midst of a trip of a lifetime. Climbing, hiking, biking, surfing. Meeting wandering souls from all over the world. Practicing his Spanish with country people in small mountain villages.
The trek ended early, tragically, unfairly.
And on a warm and sunny Saturday at Raintree Lake in Lee’s Summit, the Valencias listen as some of Matt’s best friends fill them with stories.
Matt the snowboarder. Matt the whitewater rafter. Matt climbing over the iron beam of the Red Cliff bridge and rappelling head first 250 feet straight down to the Eagle River. (“Are you scared?” his friend asked. “I ain’t scared,” said Matt before they leapt.)
For real.
That was Matt Valencia’s mantra: “For real.”
Greg Valencia is in the downstairs family room of the house he designed and built. He stands at the head of a foosball table. It’s just a place to hold onto. Matt’s brother, Aaron, and some of Matt’s buddies line the side, like a small prayer group. Green-headed ducks waddle on the edge of the lake out the big window. Picture collages line the walls - pictures of Matt and his mountains.
Greg’s voice is steady and strong: “You guys grew up from boys to men in Colorado.”
He is so proud. And so devastated at the same time.
And he and his wife can’t wait until Matt’s backpack comes home.
Matt Valencia’s outdoors experience began before he was born, his mother says. Ania Valencia was four months pregnant. She and Greg loved to camp and canoe and they were floating the Buffalo River in Arkansas.
Later came Boy Scout High Adventure trips. With his father and others he explored the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota twice. Another time it was the Needles in South Dakota. There’s a picture of Matt climbing one of those vertical rocks, and another showing him waving from the top.
Matt Valencia had his father’s dark hair, directness and penchant for hard work; he had his mother’s smile and reserve, her love of art and of the scenic grandeur of the outdoors. He graduated from Raytown South High School in 1998 and headed west.
“I’d move to Colorado in a minute,” his mother always used to say, and Matt went ahead and did it.
To the mountains.
First it was a seasonal job on the ski slopes. He and his buddy Billy Marks went together the first winter after high school. Later came work as an electrician.
He was hooked. He was primed to be out in the world of fresh air, pristine woods and challenging snow. God’s country, he’d say. He reveled in it.
As an electrician, he’d put in 50, 60 hours a week. He wasn’t always happy with it, but it paid for his passions. And he did well enough to take on more and more responsibility.
He shared a house in Breckenridge with Lance Heiman. Lance was two years older but he spent an afternoon and more telling Matt’s father how much he learned from his son.
“I fought fires for eight or nine years,” Heiman says. “So I was kind of a rugged person. I thought I was a tough guy. Then I met Matt. He opened my eyes to adventure.”
Matt would put in a full day of work, then go snowshoeing at night. Or mountain biking. Or skiing. He’d already climbed at least a dozen of Colorado’s famous Fourteeners. Evans. Blanca. Quandary. There are 53 peaks beyond 14,000 feet, and Matt had his sights on them all. He didn’t brag about it. He just did it.
With Matt, there was always a feel of controlled chaos. When he barreled down a mountain atop a snowboard or a bike, you could sense his grip on fragile reality, you could feel how well he kept it all under control when you knew at any moment it could all fly off into disaster.
Matt taught many of his friends not just to appreciate the outdoors but to experience it. They trusted him. Every one of Matt’s friends has a tale, a peak experience in their own life that always began and ended with Matt front and center.
Billy Marks spent two vacations a year with Matt. Once, they drove to the top of the Continental Divide. They hiked from Loveland Pass four hours in the cold and snow. They stood at the rim of a vertical drop and looked down.
Prime, untouched whiteness. A snowboarder’s dreamscape.
Goggles, turtleneck masks, three layers of clothes. They must have stood at the edge of the precipice for five minutes.
“Are we sure about this?” Billy wasn’t so sure.
Matt inched his board over the edge.
“We can do it,” he said. “We can do it.”
Matt went first.
Their boards sank deep into the soft fresh surface as they ripped down the slope. Forty-five, maybe 60 seconds was all it took to descend and level out. But in one of those Einsteinian space-travel moments, it seemed like three days. “It happens so fast,” Billy Marks says, “it feels like it’s in slow motion.”
Matt was nothing if not particular about safety. When he was growing up, he always stopped and looked both ways - twice, his mother says - before stepping into the street. Checking the rigging on a zip line; knowing his equipment; having the right tools - it was all part of the outdoors way.
But that sense of safety never got in the way of his journey.
I’m going to spend six months in South America, Matt told his friends and family. For real.
Maybe his new girlfriend, Lindsay McBride, would join him at some point. Maybe, just maybe, when he got back, they’d settle down together. Seems like all his friends were getting married.
He’d been planning the trip for months.
“South America,” he wrote and underlined in a datebook back in March 2005.
“Why not,” he wrote to himself, “you scared?”
By December, Matt had worked six and seven days a week in Breckenridge. Supervising job sites, stringing wire. Lance Heiman had begged off from making the South America trip; he didn’t think he could afford it.
Matt returned home, to his parents’ place on Raintree Lake, on his birthday, Dec. 23. He wanted some down time. He needed to get his energy back for the trip. “I don’t know what this trip is going to do for me or how it may change me,” he wrote in a journal that month, “but I am ready to find out.”
The holidays were special for everyone. One night the family went out to dinner. Thai food in Westport, food so spicy it made them sweat. But Greg and Ania Valencia were happy. Here they were with their two boys, Matt and Aaron, 24. Aaron’s girlfriend, Vivian, was there and Matt’s Lindsay had come in from Colorado.
That meant so much. To have them all there, together, this joy around the table.
Greg and Ania Valencia could see the future in it.
Matt left for South America on Jan. 15. In Quito, Ecuador, he worried at first about his Spanish, but soon began to feel comfortable. He noticed the palm trees, iguanas and “strange squirrels” in a city park.
One day he set out walking three miles to Quito’s Old Town. “The streets were strange and a bit dirty,” he wrote, “but the people seemed nice, even though we could not understand each other.”
Soon he was in the midst of a demonstration. Young people were throwing rocks at police in the midst of some anti-American fervor. The police answered with tear gas. His eyes burned a bit, but he got out otherwise unscathed. “I knew this place would be wild, he wrote, “but I didn’t expect to see it my second day.”
Over the next few weeks he hiked through jungles, rode a bike to waterfalls, met up with travelers young and old - mountaineers, snowboarders and wanderers from London, Switzerland, Montana. At 12,000 feet, up a volcano near the village of Runton, he made a lunch of ramen and hot dogs. On the hike down, he passed a dead horse along the path; it hadn’t been there on the way up.
A few days later he set out for Volcan Chimborazo, elevation 20,700 feet. One day, to get the feel of the mountain, the snow cover and the thin air, he hiked solo to 17,000 feet. “Saw five slides along the way and almost started one myself.”
The next morning he met people coming down the mountain. They’d turned back before reaching 18,000 feet, concerned about avalanches along the glacier that covered the upper flank of Chimborazo.
Matt hoped a day of sun would “bake” the glacier, making it stable enough for an overnight climb in darkness, and he spent the next day back in the town of Riobamba arranging for his own ascent. He was sitting, waiting for the outfitter to open, when he met another traveler, from Australia. They agreed to climb the mountain together the next night.
The ascent began from a refuge at 16,500 feet. Matt and the Australian - another Matt, Matt Smith - saw the base-camp markers honoring those who had died on the mountain. They heard guides talk about two Germans who had headed out unaccompanied just a few weeks earlier and failed to return.
No one had successfully climbed the mountain since then, the two Matts learned. They planned to begin their upward trek at 11 p.m.
After a meal, Matt lay awake for hours. Later, by candlelight, they had tea and biscuits, and then, by midnight, Matt and the Australian and their two guides headed out the door into fog and wind. It was oddly warm when they started, wrapped in three layers of pants, fleece and jackets, but that changed quickly.
They reached the glacier an hour later. Each climber was tied to a guide. With ice axes and crampons the two roped pairs of men worked their way up and around a ridge.
By 2:30 a.m. Matt got to the spot where the climbers he’d spoken to had turned back. “Here,” he wrote later, “was the start of the long, steep stretch on the glacier, over and through crevasse to the summit.” The surface was just right, frozen solid, but Matt still felt a bit nervous. No one could see much in front of him, and he knew that any slip could lead to “a long slide down.”
For four hours they inched their way upward. At about 19,000 feet, more than three miles in the air and still more than 1,500 feet from the summit, Matt’s guide spoke up. His life was more important than reaching the summit, he shouted through the wind. Matt understood but wanted to press on. He agreed, though, if conditions got worse, if the snow began to “slab” too much, he would turn around.
At that altitude the air makes it feel as if you’re in a vacuum. Your lungs grope for any “odd atom of air floating around,” Matt Smith put it, “and your heart is hammering violently, trying to pump non-existent oxygen around the body.”
The wind and snow churned in the bitter cold. Their fingers froze deep inside three pairs of gloves. As Matt’s guide chopped into the ice, shards flew by him. Occasionally a foot would break through to nothingness below, as the glacier spanned a crevasse.
Matt remained confident even as he sensed his guide struggling with delirium.
For the last 20 minutes of the climb, a hint of sun appeared, and soon, seven hours after they set out, they rolled onto the summit just as the sun rose. “We all sat down right on top and buried our axes,” Matt wrote.
There were high fives in the cold, and a few pictures got snapped before the cameras froze. A few minutes later, exhausted and still a long way from safety, the four men headed back down the glacier, first to the ridge, then to the refuge and rest. And then, from 16,000 feet, Matt and the Australian climbed onto mountain bikes and rode the last 24 miles - 24 miles of pedaling and coasting - down to Riobamba.
Matt had conquered Chimborazo. For real.
About two weeks after the Chimborazo climb, Matt was making arrangements for his next big outing. Destination: Cuzco, in the mountainous heart of Peru. He planned to set out on the Inca Trail, a four-day hike to the ruins of Machu Picchu and other remnants of a lost civilization.
On Feb. 27, he e-mailed his father from the capital, Lima: “I am leaving for a 30 hour bus ride tonight.”
To fly from Lima to Cuzco, takes about an hour and 15 minutes. Most young travelers prefer to see the countryside and take the land routes, the train or, more typically, the bus. The roads wind through mountains and villages. They’re narrow, steep and scenic. The drive, even on modern motor coaches, can take more than 24 hours.
More than 200,000 Americans visit Peru each year, and more and more of them are being preyed upon by thieves and increasingly brazen muggers. On its travel advisory site, the U.S. State Department notes that more young travelers have been targeted, even those who typically “stay in inexpensive accommodations, carry backpacks, and travel alone or in pairs in isolated areas, rather than in large groups.”
The government also cautions against traveling at night.
Darian Willette, another young American, had gotten on the bus at Lima, too. He’d told his father, back in Davenport, Iowa, that taking the bus was a good way to get acclimated to the altitude before reaching Cuzco, about two miles high. The motor coach was operated by Oremeno, a big, respected company.
Greg Valencia can imagine a scene on the bus: Matt and Darian spotted each other getting on in Lima and sat together. The two young Americans buddied up and spent hours trading tales and dreams.
But this we know for certain: Six or seven miles outside Cuzco, after hundreds of miles and 20-some hours, the driver of Matt Valencia’s bus saw a truck in the narrow road ahead and swerved. It was raining. Another bus was coming other way.
At least 13 people died in the collision, including Darian Willette, who was soon to begin a master’s program in environmental education in Oregon, and Matt Valencia.
Greg Valencia can imagine his son sitting up front in the bus. In Greg’s mind, he can see Matt wanting to lean over and tap the driver on the shoulder and say, “Hey, there, Why don’t you let me drive.” For real.
Matt would’ve been in control then. Matt would still be alive, his father says.
That’s what’s unfair, his friends say. After all of Matt’s extreme life in the outdoors, it wasn’t the adventure or the challenge that got him. It was a bus accident.
“Matt had a lot of concerns about being in South America by himself,” Lance Heiman says, “but that wasn’t one of them.”
At Matt’s wake, it had taken an hour to snake from the Raytown funeral home’s front door, down a narrow hallway and into the brightly lit chapel to reach the hands and hugs of Greg and Ania Valencia. Former Scout leaders, family friends, buddies from here and from Colorado and elsewhere stood in line and talked nonstop about Matt. The funeral the next day was even bigger.
Now, on a Monday morning, it’s just Matt’s parents and brother living with their quiet grief.
Ania Valencia folds a couple of Matt’s shirts.
Greg sits on the carpet, Aaron’s on the couch.
Matt’s backpack, a Lowe Alpine Hyper Lite, got to their house that morning. They’ve arranged Matt’s things on the floor: the collapsible trekking poles, the water purifier, the stuff sacks, a bag of ramen, maps, a couple of hats. Matt had learned to travel light and efficiently: He’d roll up a towel to fit inside an empty water bottle.
But Matt’s camera is gone. So is a favorite folding knife. And the iPod. No surprise there.
Greg opens a leather-bound journal.
The last entry fills almost 12 pages in Matt’s small, clear but hasty printing. It’s dated Feb. 12, shortly after his climb up Volcan Chimborazo and just before a surfing lesson at Montañita, Ecuador.
Greg reads Matt’s pages aloud. Ania and Aaron listen.
Within 200 meters of the Chimborazo summit: “The clouds would break every once in a while and we could see the stars and the full moon. It was beautiful.”
Greg’s voice breaks. Tears puddle and slide down his cheeks. He pauses before reading to the end: The high fives and sunrise at the summit, the frozen camera, the trek back down, the bike ride to Riobamba.
Matt had been awake for 36 hours. After sleep he knew he’d be heading to Montañita. The last words in Matt’s journal: “The Beach! I’m ready!”
A few days later Greg Valencia woke up in the middle of the night. Matt was in the room. He could sense him. He smelled him. As he put his thoughts together after dawn, he knew what it meant.
“I am not just Greg anymore,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I am Matt’s dad.”
For real.
Reporting this story
This story, including reconstructed scenes, was based on interviews with a dozen family members and friends of Matt Valencia. His journals and e-mails provided essential details, as did e-mails and an e-mail interview with Matt Smith. Bus crash details came from news accounts and the U.S. Consulate in Lima.
The article on Darian from the Quad-City Times is still forthcoming.
Posted on Sun, Apr. 02, 2006
Former Kansas City man was a free spirit to the end
A traveler at heart, his was a life marked by adventure
By STEVE PAUL
The Kansas City Star
The backpack has yet to arrive. Greg and Ania Valencia buried their son Matt a day ago and here it is Saturday and they’re still waiting for the pack.
It’s in the air. It’s on the ground. Some hitch in Peru. They don’t even know where the pack is this minute. And they don’t know what will be in it.
Maybe some of Matt’s things will be gone. That’ll hurt, but no more than the hurt that comes from losing your 27-year-old son. That is tougher than anything.
But the Valencias know one thing. No matter what’s left in it, Matt’s backpack will be something to hold.
With Matt, it went to the top of the world.
And now, in Matt’s absence, it can’t help but carry back some of his spirit.
Matt Valencia, a young man who loved the mountains, constructed his life with a vigor and intensity that inspired everyone who knew him.
He was the kind of guy who worked hard to play hard. The kind of guy you will miss forever because he shaped the way you lived, too. “Those type of friends, they come round once in a lifetime,” says one.
In February, Matt Valencia was touring South America, in the midst of a trip of a lifetime. Climbing, hiking, biking, surfing. Meeting wandering souls from all over the world. Practicing his Spanish with country people in small mountain villages.
The trek ended early, tragically, unfairly.
And on a warm and sunny Saturday at Raintree Lake in Lee’s Summit, the Valencias listen as some of Matt’s best friends fill them with stories.
Matt the snowboarder. Matt the whitewater rafter. Matt climbing over the iron beam of the Red Cliff bridge and rappelling head first 250 feet straight down to the Eagle River. (“Are you scared?” his friend asked. “I ain’t scared,” said Matt before they leapt.)
For real.
That was Matt Valencia’s mantra: “For real.”
Greg Valencia is in the downstairs family room of the house he designed and built. He stands at the head of a foosball table. It’s just a place to hold onto. Matt’s brother, Aaron, and some of Matt’s buddies line the side, like a small prayer group. Green-headed ducks waddle on the edge of the lake out the big window. Picture collages line the walls - pictures of Matt and his mountains.
Greg’s voice is steady and strong: “You guys grew up from boys to men in Colorado.”
He is so proud. And so devastated at the same time.
And he and his wife can’t wait until Matt’s backpack comes home.
Matt Valencia’s outdoors experience began before he was born, his mother says. Ania Valencia was four months pregnant. She and Greg loved to camp and canoe and they were floating the Buffalo River in Arkansas.
Later came Boy Scout High Adventure trips. With his father and others he explored the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota twice. Another time it was the Needles in South Dakota. There’s a picture of Matt climbing one of those vertical rocks, and another showing him waving from the top.
Matt Valencia had his father’s dark hair, directness and penchant for hard work; he had his mother’s smile and reserve, her love of art and of the scenic grandeur of the outdoors. He graduated from Raytown South High School in 1998 and headed west.
“I’d move to Colorado in a minute,” his mother always used to say, and Matt went ahead and did it.
To the mountains.
First it was a seasonal job on the ski slopes. He and his buddy Billy Marks went together the first winter after high school. Later came work as an electrician.
He was hooked. He was primed to be out in the world of fresh air, pristine woods and challenging snow. God’s country, he’d say. He reveled in it.
As an electrician, he’d put in 50, 60 hours a week. He wasn’t always happy with it, but it paid for his passions. And he did well enough to take on more and more responsibility.
He shared a house in Breckenridge with Lance Heiman. Lance was two years older but he spent an afternoon and more telling Matt’s father how much he learned from his son.
“I fought fires for eight or nine years,” Heiman says. “So I was kind of a rugged person. I thought I was a tough guy. Then I met Matt. He opened my eyes to adventure.”
Matt would put in a full day of work, then go snowshoeing at night. Or mountain biking. Or skiing. He’d already climbed at least a dozen of Colorado’s famous Fourteeners. Evans. Blanca. Quandary. There are 53 peaks beyond 14,000 feet, and Matt had his sights on them all. He didn’t brag about it. He just did it.
With Matt, there was always a feel of controlled chaos. When he barreled down a mountain atop a snowboard or a bike, you could sense his grip on fragile reality, you could feel how well he kept it all under control when you knew at any moment it could all fly off into disaster.
Matt taught many of his friends not just to appreciate the outdoors but to experience it. They trusted him. Every one of Matt’s friends has a tale, a peak experience in their own life that always began and ended with Matt front and center.
Billy Marks spent two vacations a year with Matt. Once, they drove to the top of the Continental Divide. They hiked from Loveland Pass four hours in the cold and snow. They stood at the rim of a vertical drop and looked down.
Prime, untouched whiteness. A snowboarder’s dreamscape.
Goggles, turtleneck masks, three layers of clothes. They must have stood at the edge of the precipice for five minutes.
“Are we sure about this?” Billy wasn’t so sure.
Matt inched his board over the edge.
“We can do it,” he said. “We can do it.”
Matt went first.
Their boards sank deep into the soft fresh surface as they ripped down the slope. Forty-five, maybe 60 seconds was all it took to descend and level out. But in one of those Einsteinian space-travel moments, it seemed like three days. “It happens so fast,” Billy Marks says, “it feels like it’s in slow motion.”
Matt was nothing if not particular about safety. When he was growing up, he always stopped and looked both ways - twice, his mother says - before stepping into the street. Checking the rigging on a zip line; knowing his equipment; having the right tools - it was all part of the outdoors way.
But that sense of safety never got in the way of his journey.
I’m going to spend six months in South America, Matt told his friends and family. For real.
Maybe his new girlfriend, Lindsay McBride, would join him at some point. Maybe, just maybe, when he got back, they’d settle down together. Seems like all his friends were getting married.
He’d been planning the trip for months.
“South America,” he wrote and underlined in a datebook back in March 2005.
“Why not,” he wrote to himself, “you scared?”
By December, Matt had worked six and seven days a week in Breckenridge. Supervising job sites, stringing wire. Lance Heiman had begged off from making the South America trip; he didn’t think he could afford it.
Matt returned home, to his parents’ place on Raintree Lake, on his birthday, Dec. 23. He wanted some down time. He needed to get his energy back for the trip. “I don’t know what this trip is going to do for me or how it may change me,” he wrote in a journal that month, “but I am ready to find out.”
The holidays were special for everyone. One night the family went out to dinner. Thai food in Westport, food so spicy it made them sweat. But Greg and Ania Valencia were happy. Here they were with their two boys, Matt and Aaron, 24. Aaron’s girlfriend, Vivian, was there and Matt’s Lindsay had come in from Colorado.
That meant so much. To have them all there, together, this joy around the table.
Greg and Ania Valencia could see the future in it.
Matt left for South America on Jan. 15. In Quito, Ecuador, he worried at first about his Spanish, but soon began to feel comfortable. He noticed the palm trees, iguanas and “strange squirrels” in a city park.
One day he set out walking three miles to Quito’s Old Town. “The streets were strange and a bit dirty,” he wrote, “but the people seemed nice, even though we could not understand each other.”
Soon he was in the midst of a demonstration. Young people were throwing rocks at police in the midst of some anti-American fervor. The police answered with tear gas. His eyes burned a bit, but he got out otherwise unscathed. “I knew this place would be wild, he wrote, “but I didn’t expect to see it my second day.”
Over the next few weeks he hiked through jungles, rode a bike to waterfalls, met up with travelers young and old - mountaineers, snowboarders and wanderers from London, Switzerland, Montana. At 12,000 feet, up a volcano near the village of Runton, he made a lunch of ramen and hot dogs. On the hike down, he passed a dead horse along the path; it hadn’t been there on the way up.
A few days later he set out for Volcan Chimborazo, elevation 20,700 feet. One day, to get the feel of the mountain, the snow cover and the thin air, he hiked solo to 17,000 feet. “Saw five slides along the way and almost started one myself.”
The next morning he met people coming down the mountain. They’d turned back before reaching 18,000 feet, concerned about avalanches along the glacier that covered the upper flank of Chimborazo.
Matt hoped a day of sun would “bake” the glacier, making it stable enough for an overnight climb in darkness, and he spent the next day back in the town of Riobamba arranging for his own ascent. He was sitting, waiting for the outfitter to open, when he met another traveler, from Australia. They agreed to climb the mountain together the next night.
The ascent began from a refuge at 16,500 feet. Matt and the Australian - another Matt, Matt Smith - saw the base-camp markers honoring those who had died on the mountain. They heard guides talk about two Germans who had headed out unaccompanied just a few weeks earlier and failed to return.
No one had successfully climbed the mountain since then, the two Matts learned. They planned to begin their upward trek at 11 p.m.
After a meal, Matt lay awake for hours. Later, by candlelight, they had tea and biscuits, and then, by midnight, Matt and the Australian and their two guides headed out the door into fog and wind. It was oddly warm when they started, wrapped in three layers of pants, fleece and jackets, but that changed quickly.
They reached the glacier an hour later. Each climber was tied to a guide. With ice axes and crampons the two roped pairs of men worked their way up and around a ridge.
By 2:30 a.m. Matt got to the spot where the climbers he’d spoken to had turned back. “Here,” he wrote later, “was the start of the long, steep stretch on the glacier, over and through crevasse to the summit.” The surface was just right, frozen solid, but Matt still felt a bit nervous. No one could see much in front of him, and he knew that any slip could lead to “a long slide down.”
For four hours they inched their way upward. At about 19,000 feet, more than three miles in the air and still more than 1,500 feet from the summit, Matt’s guide spoke up. His life was more important than reaching the summit, he shouted through the wind. Matt understood but wanted to press on. He agreed, though, if conditions got worse, if the snow began to “slab” too much, he would turn around.
At that altitude the air makes it feel as if you’re in a vacuum. Your lungs grope for any “odd atom of air floating around,” Matt Smith put it, “and your heart is hammering violently, trying to pump non-existent oxygen around the body.”
The wind and snow churned in the bitter cold. Their fingers froze deep inside three pairs of gloves. As Matt’s guide chopped into the ice, shards flew by him. Occasionally a foot would break through to nothingness below, as the glacier spanned a crevasse.
Matt remained confident even as he sensed his guide struggling with delirium.
For the last 20 minutes of the climb, a hint of sun appeared, and soon, seven hours after they set out, they rolled onto the summit just as the sun rose. “We all sat down right on top and buried our axes,” Matt wrote.
There were high fives in the cold, and a few pictures got snapped before the cameras froze. A few minutes later, exhausted and still a long way from safety, the four men headed back down the glacier, first to the ridge, then to the refuge and rest. And then, from 16,000 feet, Matt and the Australian climbed onto mountain bikes and rode the last 24 miles - 24 miles of pedaling and coasting - down to Riobamba.
Matt had conquered Chimborazo. For real.
About two weeks after the Chimborazo climb, Matt was making arrangements for his next big outing. Destination: Cuzco, in the mountainous heart of Peru. He planned to set out on the Inca Trail, a four-day hike to the ruins of Machu Picchu and other remnants of a lost civilization.
On Feb. 27, he e-mailed his father from the capital, Lima: “I am leaving for a 30 hour bus ride tonight.”
To fly from Lima to Cuzco, takes about an hour and 15 minutes. Most young travelers prefer to see the countryside and take the land routes, the train or, more typically, the bus. The roads wind through mountains and villages. They’re narrow, steep and scenic. The drive, even on modern motor coaches, can take more than 24 hours.
More than 200,000 Americans visit Peru each year, and more and more of them are being preyed upon by thieves and increasingly brazen muggers. On its travel advisory site, the U.S. State Department notes that more young travelers have been targeted, even those who typically “stay in inexpensive accommodations, carry backpacks, and travel alone or in pairs in isolated areas, rather than in large groups.”
The government also cautions against traveling at night.
Darian Willette, another young American, had gotten on the bus at Lima, too. He’d told his father, back in Davenport, Iowa, that taking the bus was a good way to get acclimated to the altitude before reaching Cuzco, about two miles high. The motor coach was operated by Oremeno, a big, respected company.
Greg Valencia can imagine a scene on the bus: Matt and Darian spotted each other getting on in Lima and sat together. The two young Americans buddied up and spent hours trading tales and dreams.
But this we know for certain: Six or seven miles outside Cuzco, after hundreds of miles and 20-some hours, the driver of Matt Valencia’s bus saw a truck in the narrow road ahead and swerved. It was raining. Another bus was coming other way.
At least 13 people died in the collision, including Darian Willette, who was soon to begin a master’s program in environmental education in Oregon, and Matt Valencia.
Greg Valencia can imagine his son sitting up front in the bus. In Greg’s mind, he can see Matt wanting to lean over and tap the driver on the shoulder and say, “Hey, there, Why don’t you let me drive.” For real.
Matt would’ve been in control then. Matt would still be alive, his father says.
That’s what’s unfair, his friends say. After all of Matt’s extreme life in the outdoors, it wasn’t the adventure or the challenge that got him. It was a bus accident.
“Matt had a lot of concerns about being in South America by himself,” Lance Heiman says, “but that wasn’t one of them.”
At Matt’s wake, it had taken an hour to snake from the Raytown funeral home’s front door, down a narrow hallway and into the brightly lit chapel to reach the hands and hugs of Greg and Ania Valencia. Former Scout leaders, family friends, buddies from here and from Colorado and elsewhere stood in line and talked nonstop about Matt. The funeral the next day was even bigger.
Now, on a Monday morning, it’s just Matt’s parents and brother living with their quiet grief.
Ania Valencia folds a couple of Matt’s shirts.
Greg sits on the carpet, Aaron’s on the couch.
Matt’s backpack, a Lowe Alpine Hyper Lite, got to their house that morning. They’ve arranged Matt’s things on the floor: the collapsible trekking poles, the water purifier, the stuff sacks, a bag of ramen, maps, a couple of hats. Matt had learned to travel light and efficiently: He’d roll up a towel to fit inside an empty water bottle.
But Matt’s camera is gone. So is a favorite folding knife. And the iPod. No surprise there.
Greg opens a leather-bound journal.
The last entry fills almost 12 pages in Matt’s small, clear but hasty printing. It’s dated Feb. 12, shortly after his climb up Volcan Chimborazo and just before a surfing lesson at Montañita, Ecuador.
Greg reads Matt’s pages aloud. Ania and Aaron listen.
Within 200 meters of the Chimborazo summit: “The clouds would break every once in a while and we could see the stars and the full moon. It was beautiful.”
Greg’s voice breaks. Tears puddle and slide down his cheeks. He pauses before reading to the end: The high fives and sunrise at the summit, the frozen camera, the trek back down, the bike ride to Riobamba.
Matt had been awake for 36 hours. After sleep he knew he’d be heading to Montañita. The last words in Matt’s journal: “The Beach! I’m ready!”
A few days later Greg Valencia woke up in the middle of the night. Matt was in the room. He could sense him. He smelled him. As he put his thoughts together after dawn, he knew what it meant.
“I am not just Greg anymore,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I am Matt’s dad.”
For real.
Reporting this story
This story, including reconstructed scenes, was based on interviews with a dozen family members and friends of Matt Valencia. His journals and e-mails provided essential details, as did e-mails and an e-mail interview with Matt Smith. Bus crash details came from news accounts and the U.S. Consulate in Lima.
The article on Darian from the Quad-City Times is still forthcoming.