Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

January 11, 2025

869m

Santiago, Chile

Cerro San Cristóbal is the lowliest P100m hill in the middle of the city of Santiago and is also one of the city’s tourist attractions. There are gondolas and bus services for those lazy (or uncapable) to hike, but the actual summit is for peakbaggers only. The true summit is largely occupied by a water reservoir and some communication structure that some degree of trespassing would be required, though with a careful search of a secret backdoor access path one would not have to encounter any prohibitive sign. In any case this was an easy objective that required minimal hiking. Erica booked our flights homewards with two long layovers. The first of which was in Santiago and I proposed immediately that we should aim to at least get Cerro San Cristóbal since it’s right there. I had visited this city 5 years ago with Connor but I wasn’t that keen on add-on dumpster-diving at the time, so didn’t bother. These days every P100m objective matters and I’m much more strict in making the most efficient use of my time spent peak-bagging. If I had a layover long enough to bag something especially with 100 m prominence then the time must be spent for that. The weather was sunny but it was going to be a hot outing, but that’s fine as the heat could never be an excuse.

The plan was to take an Uber to very much near the summit of this objective and of course I did absolutely no research besides reading several trip reports on peakbagger.com and browsing the Gaia’s map. I missed the information that the roads on this peak aren’t for public use, but that’s even better as we would have to earn the elevation ourselves, making this a more legit “ascent”. The second piece of information that we missed was the Uber service was technically illegal in Chile, and the Taxi drivers were warning us for that. I thought they were plainly lying but they were actually not. However, the government had not banned the app and we could still easily get an Uber in the airport so why not saving a few dollars here. I also did a stop in ATM to grab ~40 dollars worth of pesos, and of course they charged me almost 20% interest rate. At this point I had absolutely zero penny of cash left so to have at least some degree of contingency I must suck up that interest rate. In retrospect that ATM stop could be avoided as credit card payment was actually accepted in all of the places we visited in Santiago. The Uber from the airport to the base of Cerro San Cristóbal costed about 16 USD and as mentioned earlier, the driver could not drive us to the top of the mountain.

From where we were dropped the west side route made the most sense, so we quickly walked past the zoo at the bottom and picked up the trail. This was actually a very pleasant urban hike and the temperatures weren’t nearly as bad as I thought. This was similar to a hot summer day in eastern China. The sun was never that strong thank to the smog and air pollution but it was humid. The most ridiculous thing was that I had to carry my computer bag with two laptops and one tablet and a bunch of converters up to the summit as that’s my carry-on bag for the air travel. This bag was surprisingly quite heavy (and definitely exceeded the limit for American Airline’s carry-on luggage, though nobody bothered to check). We turned towards the true summit after arriving at the touristy saddle with that gondola-assisted south peak, and thankfully encountered no official in the quest of bagging the highest point. I had Jacob’s peakbagger report in mind so upon seeing a sneaky path heading the way we wanted we took that path and that got us directly to the summit reservoir via the SW Ridge. This likely avoided the private property problem, if there’s any.

We didn’t linger much up on the true summit as it’s simply an ugly place to stay, and quickly made our way back down to the saddle and joined the hordes. Erica was keen on checking out that south peak so we went a ways that way. We didn’t bother to tag the summit as this bump lacked 100 m prominence. We then leisurely walked down to the city, had a lunch of ceviche and took our time relaxing. We still had the majority of the afternoon/evening to kill in the city and Erica was keen on visiting her friend. I wasn’t too sure what should I do, but let’s meet up with her friend first. It turned out that the meet-up location was only a few kilometers away from Cerro Manquehue so I made the spontaneous decision to solo that objective as well. This is the tallest of the hills in this city and boasts more than 400 m prominence, so it’s a much bigger prize. I estimated that with Uber services I should have enough time.