El Cocuy is a chain of eighteen snow peaks in the Eastern Andes of Colombia, six degrees north of the Equator, with more permanent ice than anywhere else in the country. Nobody is allowed to walk on it. The glaciers are sacred to the U'wa, whose land wraps the range, and they are too thin now for traffic, so every trail stops at the edge of the ice. The northern route takes you up rock and old moraine to the snowline beneath Ritacuba Blanco, the highest peak at 5,330 metres, and that line is as far as anyone goes. This ice cannot rebuild. Tropical glaciers have no cold season to replace what each day melts. The range has already come down from around twenty-five ice-capped summits to eighteen.
What you cross to get up there is stranger than the ice. The páramo is a high wet moorland found only in the northern Andes, a sponge of moss and peat that takes in the rain and lets it out slowly into the streams. Much of Colombia's water starts in ground like this. All over it stand frailejones, thick-stemmed plants with pale velvety leaves, some as tall as you are, in crowds that run up whole slopes. One of the three routes brings you out at Laguna Grande de la Sierra, a glacial lake lying still inside a ring of snow peaks. Condors ride the thermals overhead: the species had all but vanished from Colombia by the end of the last century, and these birds, with three metres of wing, are the offspring of captive-bred releases. Beside the Pan de Azúcar glacier stands the Púlpito del Diablo, the Devil's Pulpit, a flat-topped block whose sheer walls rise out of the moor near 5,100 metres. A frailejón grows about a centimetre a year, so the tallest ones in the mist have outlived everyone walking past them. When the ice above is gone, they are what will still be holding the water.