Torres del Paine
Arrival to Puerto Natales and the rush to fix to camp 1
After a week or so of bad weather, Ima, Cedar, and I hiked back up to our base camp with the help of our friends Oche, Pablo, and Anouk who graciously carried 5 liters of wine up to our bivy boulder. After a night of minimal sleep due to extreme wind, we packed up and crossed the glacier to the base of the wall prepared to commit for 14 days. We knew the weather would be decent for the first few days but we brought enough kit to be prepared to hunker down when it turned bad. We had already hauled up 30 liters of water and this time we brought an additional 54 plus the wine. The weight we were required to haul was immense but with a 2:1 system and a whole bunch of shenanigans, we made it up to our first camp by the early evening, just before it began to rain.
The next morning, we woke up to perfect weather but exhausted bodies as a result of all the hauling the previous day. Ima took the first two leads of the day. His warm up was a nice pitch of run out 5.10 followed by some steep and loose 5.11. I was up next and climbed a stellar finger crack that brought us to the base of the first crux pitch… a laser cut 5.12c dihedral. I whipped quite a few times and passed the lead off to Cedar for the second crux… a 5.12c face pitch that requires a wild move involving a pocket on a blank face of granite filled with crystals. In classic cedar fashion, he somehow managed to onsight the pitch… insane.
I spent the next day working the endure corner in full project mode which is something I am not particularly familiar with but very much enjoyed. I got the pitch dialed but my arms were so pumped that I couldn’t quite put it together. I took some big whips and went back down to camp in need of rest.
It rained all night and through the morning but with one more pitch to fix to get to our next portaledge camp, Ima and I headed up to climb a pitch of running water while Cedar stayed back in camp to prepare dough for pizza night. With taped arm cuffs Ima lead up a soaking wet pitch of 5.10 that contained flakes so loose that he built anchors to keep them from falling on me on his way up. More than an hour later, the pitch of 5.10 had been climbed… but not freed. It was a badass lead but Ima’s mental state was broken by the time he got to the top. We spent the next hours trundling loose rock caused by melting permafrost and descended back to Cedar who had spent the afternoon needing dough and wondering why the mountain was falling down next to him. Cedar baked our pizza, we ate his masterpiece, and went to bed.
With our ropes fixed up to our second portaledge camp at Boeing Ledge, we packed up out low camp in freezing temperatures and began another mega haul. Cedar and Ima took the first shift and I went up to re-tick the crux pitch and give it one more practice go on top rope. Cedar gave me a belay and I managed to send the pitch… Oh man, it felt good. We continued hauling and set up our portaledge camp quite satisfied with our day. We baked some celebratory muffins and went to bed with both crux pitches freed by day 4 of our push.
Ima sat the next day out to rest his swollen wrists and Cedar and I climbed as high as we could to fix rope for our summit push that we were hoping could go down the following day. We climbed 5 pitches that day including the final 5.12 but sadly failed to send the famed offwidth above our portaledge camp. 5 pitches in this terrain make for an exhausting day. We came down to camp saturated from climbing through waterfalls and quite cold, but our hearts were quickly warmed upon finding that Ima had spent hours of his day baking empanadas. I can’t describe in words how good they tasted.
Me looking down from our portaledge at Boing Ledge. To pee, I would kneel and unzip the fly just enough so I did not feel like I would fall out. We typically attached ourselves to the wall with a sling around our waste but by the end of the trip, we gave up on that. (Photo: Imanol Amundarain)
We woke up the morning of January 11th to perfect weather and jugged 700 feet of line to our highpoint and another soaking wet 5.11 offwidth for breakfast. My hands numbed out but the pitch got sent clean and we made it to the summit ridge by noon. The views were literally the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life as we arrived on the summit in the early afternoon. No wind and abundant sun allowed us to strip down to our short sleeve button down shirts (SSBDS) and have a summit picnic with the bottle of wine that cedar carried up. Ima joked “I want my money back… I thought the weather was supposed to be bad here”. We lounged just a few feet below the true summit for maybe an hour grateful for this incredible experience. We eventually began the descent back across the summit ridge and down the most exposed wall I have ever rappelled. Dropping into the massive South African dihedral system was truly wild. We cleaned all of our ropes with the exception of the offwidth pitch just above camp and made it back to our portaledges just after 6pm to make some celebratory popcorn in our casty.
We knew that a big storm was forecasted to dump a bunch of snow on the wall in a day which meant we had one more day to send the remaining two pitches of the route… the offwidth and the waterfall pitch below. The wall was damp and the first section of the offwidth pitch was dripping with water from light rain the previous evening but we pretty much had one shot being that Cedar and Ima both don’t know how to climb offwidth and I knew that I would be wasted after a single go.
I started up the wet corner system and pulled the wild move into the splitter crack system with soaked hands and feet. The first section is tight hands but it quickly grows to 5 and then 6 inches wide… my least favorite size to climb. The crack sure is splitter but it is also filled with loose chock-stones on the verge of falling out. Some I would grab and chuck off the mountain, other times I would lie back around the loose blocks, and occasionally I would rain them down onto Cedar to test his dodging skills. I slowly scooched my way up the crack and at about the halfway point, it began to drizzle. I finished the pitch with my shoes and R1 completely soaked but a fat smile on my face.
I sheltered back in the portaledge to nurse my bloodied hands, while experiencing the screaming barfies for the first time in my big toe… so strange and quite painful. Cedar and Ima rappelled down a pitch and I stayed in the ledge to watch cedar free climb the final pitch of the route from above. The South African Route goes free once again!
I don’t really drink much or smoke at all but something was in the air that night. We hung up some string lights, blasted music, killed the wine, and rolled cigs as we danced in our portaledge to celebrate the ascent. The storm eventually came and began dumping snow on our camp that evening as we settled into our first day of being forced to rest… day 9 on the wall. We spent the day cooking and Ima finished up sewing a chalk bag from scratch that I’ve been using ever since.
A lull in the storm allowed us to make an effort to get back to the ground. As much as we wanted to cut our bags and watch them fly from the wall, we noticed the crevasse situation on the glacier had worsened and we didn’t want our precious gear to be consumed. Our descent was arduous and we all got to the ground quite frustrated by the experience. It felt like the one day of our climb where we were far from dialed. Nevertheless, we made it back to the glacier and hitched our bags together to form what Ima dubbed “The Siberia Express”, a train of haul bags that we pulled across the massive crevasse field. Occasionally a bag or portaledge would fall into a crevasse, but since everything was tied together, it didn’t matter. We got all of our gear back to rock by the early evening and headed to our bivy cave to sleep.
Ima is a tank who took the bulk of the load on the way down. Cedar and Ima fixed lines down and rappeled on GriGris and I cleaned the lines and rappeled on double ropes. The rope only got stuck badly once. I jumared on it while I was on self belay with another rope and about 5 feet up from the anchor, the rope pulled and I took a nice factor 2 fall on Ima’s GriGri 1.
Oche and Pablo woke us up the next morning at 7am and helped us carry our gear back down to their truck. We lounged out beside it drinking Mate and eating snacks before eventually driving back to town.
While our team free ascent of the South African Route on the Central Tower of Paine is not a first, nor an impressive grade when compared to the modern state of climbers, I feel proud of what we did up there. Certainly because of the climbing, but more so because of our style. I think there is an overemphasis on being “bad ass” in climbing media these days, and by baking and laughing our way up 4000 foot wall in Patagonia, I hope we can portray the idea that climbing is all about having fun and not necessarily sending hard or taking big risks. None of us are professional climbers and we hope to inspire other mere mortals to go big and have a positive impact on the environment both from both a social/cultural and climate standpoint.
https://gripped.com/news/south-african-route-30-pitch-5-12c-repeated-in-patagonia/
https://explorersweb.com/torres-del-paines-south-african-route-free-climbed-again/
