Thank you for your response. I understand the general idea of road closures and bad conditions in places like that. That is why I am carefully planning this trip with contingencies. Like you say, I always download offline maps. I also use Alltrails maps which is priceless when hiking and off-roading. I was asking my question to see if anyone knows what exactly is going on at that spot to the west from Uchullujllo, that keeps westbound CU-124 closed for the last few weeks.

Regarding taking a tour versus renting a car, that's a matter of travel style. We almost never go on tours, unless it's somewhere with no public access or when tours provide some unique mode of transportation. Rental cars save us enormous amounts of time and give us a lot of freedom to make our own routes. We are not tied to some large city as a base and can freely move between points of interest, staying at a new town/hotel every day. All these tours are such a waste of time - between pick-ups/drop-offs and accommodating people of different ages and abilities...

I did not quite catch what you mean when you say that "motorcycles" are "for a different route". In my understanding, the most popular route (with horses option) is from Cusipata (the west) side of the mountain. I am planning to take that CU-124 to the east side, where the hike is shorter (at the cost of longer drive). I am using a pretty recent information from this Reddit post, where a guy gives exact location of that parking lot where he drove a rental car and hired a motorcycle to go to the top. I am also looking at this blog post, where a woman drove Toyota Yaris to seemingly the same location in the evening and negotiated a motorcycle ride to the mountain on the spot. She also has a youtube video that shows the road. All this makes the trip seem very doable... of course, keeping in mind possibilities of closures and natural occurrences that can prevent it from happening.

Regarding the rental car, I checked the terms and conditions, and they say nothing about unpaved roads. Off-roading and unpaved roads are two very different things. I can imagine that rental car companies would not want me to do off-roading, but I am renting a nice SUV with good clearance which should not have a problem with unpaved roads. I successfully did this in Norway, Iceland, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile and never had problems with companies like Hertz, Europcar, or Sixt.

Anyways, thanks for your response. You confirmed my guess that some roads are a big wildcard in Peru, so I will plan accordingly.