Our three-week film shoot in Peru is drawing to a close as we head back to Cusco after two great days at Machu Picchu. Everyone on the crew — associate producer Ashley Tindall, cinematographer Vicente Franco, sound recordist Willy Elizarde, and fixer Vernonica Perez — is getting a little tired as we’ve had several 4 am calls, once to climb a glacier to film a Q’eros ceremony, once to film sunrise bringing light back to “The Lost City of the Incas” (no longer lost as evidenced by the swarms of tourists). Hiking many miles with gear and working in extreme cold at 15,000 feet definitely took a toll. But spirits are high as we enjoy the beauty of the Andes and the warmth and wisdom of the native people.

With the help of Q’eros community president Marianno Carmen Machacca and 23-year old videographer Fredy Machacca and his band of horsemen (Juan, Anselmo, Lorenzo, Gregorio and others) we had a remarkably adventurous and productive seven days with the Q’eros on their annual pilgrimage to Q’olloy riti and then back home to the village of Cochomoco. I recognize the arrogance of trying to access a community like the Q’eros with very little time invested in developing trust, but with the help of some truly generous people who have worked with the Q’eros for years it felt like we met with acceptance, approval and trust, and the footage we came away with will, I think, be deeply revealing of profound sacred places and people. The weather cooperated, snow-capped mountains (Apus) like sacred Mt. Ausangate revealed themselves, we lived to tell the tale of our 4 am ascent to the foot of the retreating glacier at Q’olloy riti, and even Benito the Q’eros shaman gave us an interview.

At a community meeting after filming a potato harvest, I agreed to help pay for the roof of a new and badly-needed school in Cochomoco and Fredy Machacca asked three of our film team to become godparents and participate in the ritual of cutting his one-year-old son Nicasio’s hair, which we accept as a responsibility for the future, as we look forward to years of collaboration and friendship with Fredy and the Q’eros people.

After filming at Q’oyllur riti for two days, we pack up quickly and chase up the rugged mountain trails after the Q’eros with all our equipment, horses and aching lowlander lungs. We arrive in Qochamoqo long after the Q’eros have arrived home, some in Qochamoqo and some back to the other Q’eros villages, like Hatun Q’eros which lies another eight hours hike further into the Andes.

It is beyond quiet in the narrow valley in the shadow of Huaman Lipa. We film the village for two days. Life here is slow-paced and routine, lovely and harsh. The impossibly adorable children drive the alpaca and sheep up the slopes at dawn. The women gracefully spin wool as they walk on dangling spindles. The men dig at the soil, unearthing dozens of varieties of native potato.

Milton Gamarra of Asociación ANDES has been working with the Q’eros of Qochamoqo to repatriate native varieties of potato that had ceased to be cultivated. As Peru adjusted to European colonization and modernity, many indigenous communities no longer grew their traditional potatoes and lost the bountiful nutrition that the variety had provided. But, with help from the International Potato Center in Lima and their potato gene and seed banks, ANDES is bringing these potatoes back. Communities like Qochamoqo have seen their subsistence production improve. However, with the changes in climate due to global warming, they are now experiencing droughts. Most of Peru’s glaciers are melting. Temperatures are climbing even at this altitude. Now, potato blight (remember Ireland?) is spreading, reaching up to higher elevations and threatening the existence of indigenous communities who have lived in balance with nature for millennia.

In the early morning, the Q’eros enter Anccasi on their way to the annual festival of Q’oyllur riti at Mount Ausangate, the main apu for these indigenous people of southern Peru. They come through town in small groups and families, first heralded by the whimsical dancers and drum-and-pipe band that staggers hungry and slightly inebriated (they’ve been fasting for several days and feted in each village) down one pass and up to the next. They walk dozens of hours to reach the tent city at the base of the nevado Ausangate, a glacier that has been the site of Q’oyllur riti for hundreds of years.

We follow on foot and on horse, trying to keep up with the Q’eros, who seemingly surmount all the intervening mountain passes effortlessly despite their hunger, their sleeplessness, the great altitude and the searingly bright Andean sun. Filming intermittently, our crew captures their arrival at the festival. It is truly an astonishing sight to gaze upon the tent city after breaching the last pass and descending down the tiny well-worn path to the edge of the valley. There we hear the fireworks breaking the mountain silence and the tinny sounds of music caroming around the stalwart mountains and echoing up to us.

Below, we stumble into the marshy festival grounds where bands from nearly every village in southern Peru have converged in a cacophonous yet ecstatic celebration of the mountain and the Lord of Q’oyllur riti. As in most of Latin America, Christian and traditional beliefs collide here at Ausangate. For the Christians, Q’oyllur riti is the celebration of a young boy’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the snow. For the traditionals, like the Q’eros, the annual rite is a pilgrimage to the apu, where they give thanks for their fortunes and ask for the gods benevolence for the coming year.

We are now in Anccasi, a tiny Quechua village of wattle-and-daub huts and a handful of cinder block buildings around a dirt square at somewhere around 3700m, a full day’s drive from Cusco. It is cold. Period.

Fortunately for us some money for the community materialized about a year ago and allowed Alejandro Chispe (the mayor) to build a simple structure  — a community center – with a metal roof, wooden floor and freshly painted peach walls and shuttered windows. This room is where we are all camped, our whole entourage laid out side-by-side, with our equipment and gas-powered generator along one wall and food along the other. A couple of water barrels and a plastic board and squeaky fold-out chairs serve as our dining area.

Our crew is an eclectic mix of Babel proportions, which so far has led to a great deal of humor and confusion – as we all have varying degrees of competency in Quechua, Spanish (here called castellano) and English. Besides Toby and myself, we are:

Veronica (our 26-year-old fixer from Lima who is both tiny and exceptional), Vicente (formerly of Spain but with the laid-back humor of Northern California and the energy of a Real Madrid forward), Willy (our soft-spoken Peruvian sound recordist whose thin clothing and hipster glasses betray a preference for urban environments), Fernando (our baby-faced mountain guide) and Toro (the excellent but shy camp cook).

We are also joined by Milton Gamarra (the passionate potato researcher from Asociacíon ANDES) and Ricardo (a potato farmer and volunteer production assistant who is half Jokey Smurf and half Bionic Man) and, lastly, Fredy Flores Machacca.

Ah, Fredy, an aspiring filmmaker and the only Q’ero among us as we prepare to meet his community in the next days. He is full of energy and passion. What an inspiration!

Toby and I arrived in Lima, Peru on May 13 for a few days of logistical set-up for this shoot and then flew on to Cusco to meet up with our director of photography Vicente Franco, sound recordist Willy Ilizarbe and our fixer Veronica Perez Orbezo. We spent a couple of days in Cusco which were filled with last minute preparations, good food (after all, we knew we’d be camping for eight days and Peru is known for its cuisine) and all the dull but necessary stuff of pre-production. We even had to rush around tracking down emergency oxygen supplies as we were going to be above 14,000 feet for more than a week. Then we left the city of Cusco in two vans driven by Miguel 1 and Miguel 2 (henceforth known – inexplicably – as Pachín) for several weeks filming with the Q’eros community.

Along the way we stopped for a few shots of the construction of the Transocéanica carreterra. This is the first highway that will bisect South America. With several lanes running in either direction, this highway is bound to rapidly change western Brazil and southern Peru from a cluster of rural towns with slow and ancient Andean-Amazonian trade to a network of expanding modern cities. Theories abound here about why the highway is being pushed through this difficult terrain at an amazing 5 kilometers a day (by Peruvian government estimates), but the amount of timber and minerals coming from the southern state of Madre de Dios bordering Brazil is a clear indication that making travel more convenient for locals and tourists is not the primary reason. Forget Brazilian socialism and Peruvian “progress”, say the people here. The Amazon and the Andes are open for business and the only people seeing the benefits are “los grandes” – a local term like “fat cats”, well-connected businessmen and government officials.

While construction crews stretch and smooth this highway over the devilish turns and passes of the sawtooth Andean chains, local life continues at campesino pace. People who have slung their hay and wood and children onto their backs to walk grassy paths for centuries now find they walk the same route but on the precarious shoulder of the highway. Trucks fly by at reckless speeds, and buses can no longer pull over to let them on. It seems that in the design of the carreterra, the builders did not consider how the majority of people living in the Andes travel: on foot.

In the misty mountains of the Vilcanota Cordillera, southeast of Cusco, on the steep slopes of the Andes, the Q’eros grow potatoes, herd alpaca, chew coca and pray to the mountain deities they call Apus. On my recent research trip to the Q’eros village of Qochamoqo, I was accompanied by Milton Gamarra, the Potato Repatriation Coordinator with Associación ANDES, who hiked in at harvest time to see how different potato varieties were doing in the face of climate change. The Q’eros harvested three fields at varying elevations and carefully bagged the different types of potatoes to determine how each seed type is faring under a variety of conditions. As El Niños come and go over the years, resilience has always been central to the vitality of Q’eros culture, and as the planet warms and the glaciers melt, the Q’eros are determined to be on the cutting edge of awareness with regard to climate change and what they can do to survive it.

Watch a new four-minute film clip documenting my recent trip: Research in the Andes.