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Like the rest of the climbers who abscond to the remote yet burgeoning village of El Chaltén, Argentina each austral summer, we had put our trust in the multi-directional arrows and EKG-like squiggles of NOAA’s meteogram forecast.
One pitch to the ridge, five or six to the end of the difficulties—we were close. But the high clouds had drifted in slowly, like an ominous fog, and the rope now seemed to defy gravity in the wind. Still we continued higher toward the summit of Fitz Roy, the centerpiece of Patagonia’s most iconic skyline, our faith firmly planted in the weather forecast that promised calm, clear skies.
Shivering in my thin puffy jacket, I paid out rope as Rob headed up the steep hand crack above the belay and disappeared from sight. Moments later he returned shaking his head. I took him off and he rappelled back down to the ledge.
“It’s not any better on the other side of the ridge,” he said. “I think we have to bivy.”
We were out of water, and although a carload of snow sat on the ledge next to us, it was too windy to light the stove. 15 knots? 50 mph? When it’s too strong to climb up or rappel down, it doesn’t really matter.
We were out of water, and although a carload of snow sat on the ledge next to us, it was too windy to light the stove. 15 knots? 50 mph? When it’s too strong to climb up or rappel down, it doesn’t really matter.
I shoved a few frozen energy chews into my mouth and mashed down on them. Though never especially difficult, the climbing to here had been brilliant—steep snow traversing and moderate mixed terrain led to the impeccable golden granite we had come all this way for—but the enormous peak shrouded its south face in deep shade, and I had followed most of Rob’s lead block in my boots. Now the subtle glow of daylight began to fade. If the forecast was wrong and the weather worsened, we’d be forced to descend the complicated, traversing route in extreme winds—a sure-fire recipe for stuck ropes. It seemed better to try and wait it out on this broken shelf, but without shelter near the summit of the highest peak in a region known for the “world’s worst weather,” I wondered if we had pushed it too far.
We scrambled to arrange the ledge’s strewn blocks into short, haphazard and ultimately useless windbreaks. I stood back to survey the result of our frenetic labor. It looked like a coffin.
Like the rest of the climbers who abscond to the remote yet burgeoning village of El Chaltén, Argentina each austral summer, we had put our trust in the multi-directional arrows and EKG-like squiggles of NOAA’s meteogram forecast. Days there are somewhat ruled by these predictions, but the massive Patagonian Ice Cap and the spires that soar above town like a set of jaws have a penchant for defying predictability. Everyone knows the forecasts can be wrong, or change abruptly, and descending these technical peaks in the midst of an incoming storm entails much more than simply making a run for it.
Two weeks earlier, our friends Josh and Jason had been pinned overnight in a small notch on nearby Aguja Rafael Juarez—the wind tearing up, down and around their rappel route. When Jason pulled his shell pants from his pack, a rogue gust ripped them from his hands, and he watched as they sailed off toward Antarctica. A few hours later, after they had hunkered down to spend the night in a shallow rock depression, Josh peed in his favorite water bottle and gave it to Jason, who tucked the precious warmth against his stomach.
“Thank you,” was all he could muster.
They thought they might both go hypothermic, until the rising sun brought calmer air, and they shivered their way down the ropes to the glacier.
When the weather was good, we all joined the condors and soared among the lofty summits. We had all heard the stories, seen the pictures, and like moths to a flame, had come here under the hypnotic spell of these mountains. But sometimes it was hard to tell when we were playing with fire.
I pulled off my crampons and thrust my frosty boots into my sleeping bag. We had intended to climb the mountain in a push—small packs, no tent, bivy sack, or sleeping pads. But after listening to Josh and Jason recount their epic, we threw in ultralight, summer-weight bags and a stove as a haphazard insurance policy. I curled up in the trough of jagged rocks and tucked my head down below the bag’s drawstring, having sudden misgivings about the gospel truth of light-and-fast alpinism.
With each momentary lapse in the gusts, I hoped that would be the end. The skies would clear to a field of stars, a glimmering spatter of paint across the inky sky. Silent calm would engulf the mountain. But then in the distance I’d hear it. The dull yet building roar of the next blast barreling its way off the ice cap, over Cerro Torre and straight toward us. And then it would hit—the incomprehensible force of something completely intangible.
A video clip I’d seen of Bean Bowers shivering through a storm on the side of Torre Egger echoed in my mind. “There’s nothing sticking up between us and us, but us,” he says.
I thought about Chad Kellogg, who just the year before had been killed by rockfall while rappelling the Supercanaleta, and whose body was still tethered to an anchor somewhere just over the ridgeline from our vulnerable, fetal forms.
When the weather was good, we all joined the condors and soared among the lofty summits. We had all heard the stories, seen the pictures, and like moths to a flame, had come here under the hypnotic spell of these mountains. But sometimes it was hard to tell when we were playing with fire.
The night inched along, and the dark visions polluting my brain were challenged only by the constant, deafening whir of nylon in the wind.
I drifted off for seconds, minutes—all-too-brief respites from the reality of the situation. But it was never long before I snapped awake to the inescapable blackness, and the need to readjust on my jagged bed of granite. Rob began softly snoring at one point, and I stirred with silent rage, more jealous than anything else. At least there was no precip.
But dawn’s slow chromatic shift revealed my worst fear—it was now snowing. The wind still swirled, and my psyche filled with visions of the perilous descent to come, the bleached tatters of old chopped ropes we had seen on the lower pitches. I rubbed my eyes, swollen and crusty from having left my contact lenses in overnight. White fluff cascaded down and piled around us.
As the contours of my vision sharpened, I began to laugh. Though the wind remained, morning alpenglow stained the Torres orange, and a few faint stars still twinkled as the night bled into morning. The snow was not snow at all. Fitz Roy’s sharp, rough-grained granite had sliced a sizeable gash in Rob’s sleeping bag, and each time he moved, 800-fill down spewed out in cartoon-like plumes. Half a goose worth was now sprinkled over our lofty perch.
Later that morning, the rope contorted in a dramatic arc as the terrain eased and we surfed up and around the ridge’s undulating granite waves under a cloudless sky.
Dehydrated and delirious, we scrambled the blocky, low-angle summit slopes to the top and dropped onto the north side of the mountain, bathed in bright mid-morning sun. The wind disappeared as if someone had shut a door. We stripped off layers, melted snow, and tried to ignore the fact that we were only halfway.
A small bronze casting of the Virgin Mary had been wired to the summit block, and though my religious upbringing had long ago left me disillusioned, I smiled. If there was ever a time to seek the protection of a higher power, the calm moments before rappelling Fitz Roy was it.
Dozens of rappels and all of the daylight later, our headlamp beams struck dry land, and we stumbled off the glacier’s toe and onto the shores of Laguna de los Tres. We sprawled barefoot in the gravel, our feet relishing freedom in the dusty stones.
“Do you hear that?” I said as we scarfed an entire roll of cookies. Surely Rob could hear the rhythmic pulse of Latin Top 40 radio, playing somewhere just over the hill.
“Yea, it’s like mariachis.”
The air was calm and clear, and too wired to sleep, we sat in shell-shocked detachment, like a quiet car ride home after a heavy metal concert.
“I didn’t say anything, but I was really fucking scared up there,” Rob said.
“I know. Me too.”
I smiled in relief. Far above, Fitz Roy was bathed in evening luminescence. What else was there to say? Sometimes it’s hard to see the light without getting close to the flames.
One pitch to the ridge, five or six to the end of the difficulties—we were close. But the high clouds had drifted in slowly, like an ominous fog, and the rope now seemed to defy gravity in the wind. Still we continued higher toward the summit of Fitz Roy, the centerpiece of Patagonia’s most iconic skyline, our faith firmly planted in the weather forecast that promised calm, clear skies.
Shivering in my thin puffy jacket, I paid out rope as Rob headed up the steep hand crack above the belay and disappeared from sight. Moments later he returned shaking his head. I took him off and he rappelled back down to the ledge.
“It’s not any better on the other side of the ridge,” he said. “I think we have to bivy.”
We were out of water, and although a carload of snow sat on the ledge next to us, it was too windy to light the stove. 15 knots? 50 mph? When it’s too strong to climb up or rappel down, it doesn’t really matter.
We were out of water, and although a carload of snow sat on the ledge next to us, it was too windy to light the stove. 15 knots? 50 mph? When it’s too strong to climb up or rappel down, it doesn’t really matter.
I shoved a few frozen energy chews into my mouth and mashed down on them. Though never especially difficult, the climbing to here had been brilliant—steep snow traversing and moderate mixed terrain led to the impeccable golden granite we had come all this way for—but the enormous peak shrouded its south face in deep shade, and I had followed most of Rob’s lead block in my boots. Now the subtle glow of daylight began to fade. If the forecast was wrong and the weather worsened, we’d be forced to descend the complicated, traversing route in extreme winds—a sure-fire recipe for stuck ropes. It seemed better to try and wait it out on this broken shelf, but without shelter near the summit of the highest peak in a region known for the “world’s worst weather,” I wondered if we had pushed it too far.
We scrambled to arrange the ledge’s strewn blocks into short, haphazard and ultimately useless windbreaks. I stood back to survey the result of our frenetic labor. It looked like a coffin.
Like the rest of the climbers who abscond to the remote yet burgeoning village of El Chaltén, Argentina each austral summer, we had put our trust in the multi-directional arrows and EKG-like squiggles of NOAA’s meteogram forecast. Days there are somewhat ruled by these predictions, but the massive Patagonian Ice Cap and the spires that soar above town like a set of jaws have a penchant for defying predictability. Everyone knows the forecasts can be wrong, or change abruptly, and descending these technical peaks in the midst of an incoming storm entails much more than simply making a run for it.
Two weeks earlier, our friends Josh and Jason had been pinned overnight in a small notch on nearby Aguja Rafael Juarez—the wind tearing up, down and around their rappel route. When Jason pulled his shell pants from his pack, a rogue gust ripped them from his hands, and he watched as they sailed off toward Antarctica. A few hours later, after they had hunkered down to spend the night in a shallow rock depression, Josh peed in his favorite water bottle and gave it to Jason, who tucked the precious warmth against his stomach.
“Thank you,” was all he could muster.
They thought they might both go hypothermic, until the rising sun brought calmer air, and they shivered their way down the ropes to the glacier.
When the weather was good, we all joined the condors and soared among the lofty summits. We had all heard the stories, seen the pictures, and like moths to a flame, had come here under the hypnotic spell of these mountains. But sometimes it was hard to tell when we were playing with fire.
I pulled off my crampons and thrust my frosty boots into my sleeping bag. We had intended to climb the mountain in a push—small packs, no tent, bivy sack, or sleeping pads. But after listening to Josh and Jason recount their epic, we threw in ultralight, summer-weight bags and a stove as a haphazard insurance policy. I curled up in the trough of jagged rocks and tucked my head down below the bag’s drawstring, having sudden misgivings about the gospel truth of light-and-fast alpinism.
With each momentary lapse in the gusts, I hoped that would be the end. The skies would clear to a field of stars, a glimmering spatter of paint across the inky sky. Silent calm would engulf the mountain. But then in the distance I’d hear it. The dull yet building roar of the next blast barreling its way off the ice cap, over Cerro Torre and straight toward us. And then it would hit—the incomprehensible force of something completely intangible.
A video clip I’d seen of Bean Bowers shivering through a storm on the side of Torre Egger echoed in my mind. “There’s nothing sticking up between us and us, but us,” he says.
I thought about Chad Kellogg, who just the year before had been killed by rockfall while rappelling the Supercanaleta, and whose body was still tethered to an anchor somewhere just over the ridgeline from our vulnerable, fetal forms.
When the weather was good, we all joined the condors and soared among the lofty summits. We had all heard the stories, seen the pictures, and like moths to a flame, had come here under the hypnotic spell of these mountains. But sometimes it was hard to tell when we were playing with fire.
The night inched along, and the dark visions polluting my brain were challenged only by the constant, deafening whir of nylon in the wind.
I drifted off for seconds, minutes—all-too-brief respites from the reality of the situation. But it was never long before I snapped awake to the inescapable blackness, and the need to readjust on my jagged bed of granite. Rob began softly snoring at one point, and I stirred with silent rage, more jealous than anything else. At least there was no precip.
But dawn’s slow chromatic shift revealed my worst fear—it was now snowing. The wind still swirled, and my psyche filled with visions of the perilous descent to come, the bleached tatters of old chopped ropes we had seen on the lower pitches. I rubbed my eyes, swollen and crusty from having left my contact lenses in overnight. White fluff cascaded down and piled around us.
As the contours of my vision sharpened, I began to laugh. Though the wind remained, morning alpenglow stained the Torres orange, and a few faint stars still twinkled as the night bled into morning. The snow was not snow at all. Fitz Roy’s sharp, rough-grained granite had sliced a sizeable gash in Rob’s sleeping bag, and each time he moved, 800-fill down spewed out in cartoon-like plumes. Half a goose worth was now sprinkled over our lofty perch.
Later that morning, the rope contorted in a dramatic arc as the terrain eased and we surfed up and around the ridge’s undulating granite waves under a cloudless sky.
Dehydrated and delirious, we scrambled the blocky, low-angle summit slopes to the top and dropped onto the north side of the mountain, bathed in bright mid-morning sun. The wind disappeared as if someone had shut a door. We stripped off layers, melted snow, and tried to ignore the fact that we were only halfway.
A small bronze casting of the Virgin Mary had been wired to the summit block, and though my religious upbringing had long ago left me disillusioned, I smiled. If there was ever a time to seek the protection of a higher power, the calm moments before rappelling Fitz Roy was it.
Dozens of rappels and all of the daylight later, our headlamp beams struck dry land, and we stumbled off the glacier’s toe and onto the shores of Laguna de los Tres. We sprawled barefoot in the gravel, our feet relishing freedom in the dusty stones.
“Do you hear that?” I said as we scarfed an entire roll of cookies. Surely Rob could hear the rhythmic pulse of Latin Top 40 radio, playing somewhere just over the hill.
“Yea, it’s like mariachis.”
The air was calm and clear, and too wired to sleep, we sat in shell-shocked detachment, like a quiet car ride home after a heavy metal concert.
“I didn’t say anything, but I was really fucking scared up there,” Rob said.
“I know. Me too.”
I smiled in relief. Far above, Fitz Roy was bathed in evening luminescence. What else was there to say? Sometimes it’s hard to see the light without getting close to the flames.
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