Climbing Wila Manquilizani

On Thursday March 5th I did a smaller climb. The mountain is called Wila Manquilizani and it's the closest mountain with permanent snow/glacier from where I live. It is located in the La Cumbre area which I know "really well" because I have been riding mountain bike there a lot. It took about 35 minutes to drive up to the paved highway pass at 4650 meters/ 15,250ft. There is a small dirt road that goes higher, but I thought it wold be better to leave the car to a place where there is more traffic, and where tourists begin their mountain bike descent adventure down the Death Road. Anyway it's not very likely that anyone would be able to steal my car because I use a lock or a tool that makes it impossible to turn the steering wheel. And the gas tank has a lock too so that no one can siphon the gas out.
I walked up to a mountain ridge and tried to follow it as it got higher, but at some point it got too difficult and I decided to descent a few hundred meters. From there on it was really difficult to walk because the terrain was so rough and rocky. So, it took almost 3 hours to get to the base of the actual climb (snow) at 4990 meters/16,370ft. The snow was really wet and the visibility was really bad. In the picture the low end of the snow line is barely visible because the mountain was covered by fog and at times it was snowing. The last time I had seen the snow slope was in 2012 so I didn't have a very good idea how long the climb would be.

I started climbing the left side of the snow slope which limits to a rock face. I heard pieces of rock falling down from really high up, and moved a little bit to the right. It's pretty steep!

Looking up:

It took 1.5 hours to get to a point where it was not as steep, and I saw a little gully. After that there was a little mixed section up to a high point. My gps showed 5252 meters/17,230ft. I thought it was probably not the highest peak of the mountain, but being there without seeing much, I had no desire to look for a way to get higher on bad rock, or alternatively on questionable snow. I wanted to get down fast, but in the snow gully I took a little fall and slid down some meters. Thankfully it was just before the not-so-steep high part of the mountain face. After that I made the decision to down climb rest of the way down, really carefully, and it took 1.5 hours to get down. Once I cleared the terrible scree slope below the snow slope, it was a really neat walk back to the road on some interesting rock: