!Hola amigas, amigos, y familia!
I‘m recently home, having been in Chile and Argentina for eight weeks. Some of you have expressed curiosity about what my trip was like. I hope this isn't too much information!
I went with a guy I barely knew and some of his friends. He had seen the area and peaks from a distance a few years ago.
We had been NOLS students together in 1986, which comprised 99% of our contact until this trip. In the interim he had become an Outward Bound course director (for a different OB school), so I was counting on shared OB values to make this trip work.
It did.
We went in to a national park few people have heard of because it is new (12 years). For those who have not traveled in such places, "national park" is merely 12 letter on a map. That's it. The people living just outside of it did not know what we were talking about, much less where the boundary lies. Hornopiren NP is at the northern end of the chain of islands along Chile's (west and only) coast in northern Patagonia, the Lake District. The peaks were low, 7500', but glaciated and including steep rock. We planned for Cascades-like conditions and terrain.
The map we had was 1:250,000 (one tenth the detail of most USGS maps) with contour intervals of 50 meters (not 40 feet, which gives intimate detail on the shape of the land), so we just knew in a general sense that there were some mountains. The map also included some question marks.
We spent a lot of time throughout the trip reconning routes of travel as well as climbing. Out of basecamp on the river was a bushwhack up 3300' in less than a mile and a half (steep), including bamboo (a nightmare), burned logs from a slash-and-burn-agriculture fire that had gone out of control, the resulting steep eroded soft dirt, steep rock, and dense shrub trees. Yeowza. We broke our loads into two trips (2 days) for this.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed, once up high, having so little information on the terrain. I loved that we had to spend a day figuring out how to get to the next camp, how to get down from the steep rocky pass that led to the glacier. It was great having to scramble around and look, to figure it out, to get to use route finding skills and mountain intuition, to get different view angles to determine just how steep a slope or cliff actually was. Cool.
On the other hand, I was at times intensely frustrated with the skill and experience level of (most of) my partners. Gary had assured me that everyone was an experienced solid climber. My desire for that to be true led me to overlook clues to the contrary before we even left the US. That alone is a valuable lesson.
The leader and another turned out to be, in my estimation, peak baggers (easier summits) and casual rock climbers, another was a rock climber with minimal alpine experience, and thank the godz the fourth was a serious climber. Rich had difficult technical experience in the mountains, and was adept at camp skills (so critical for expeditioning). AND he was physically strong despite being 20 years older than most of the rest of us. Somehow the rest of the guys were not as... "efficient" traveling.
Ok, what I really mean is that they were damn slow, especially with packs over steep rocky terrain. This about drove me nuts, especially when tied together crossing the glacier, and I struggled hard to behave like the mature, patient, compassionate person that I wasn't. I managed to keep from erupting, but it of course squeaked out in other ways (comments).
Over time we did talk about it, which in itself helped a lot. There is hope for me.
My situation was a bit different than theirs. Yes we all love the mountains, but not everyone does enough to structure their lives around it. I love my work, it's easy for me to be patient, walk slow, teach, all of it. I love it.
But when I'm on my own (paying, not getting paid), I want to do my thing. I want to move, to flow through the high country, to get exhausted, to climb hard enough to really get my attention, to be relieved when the difficulty eases, to be free...!
I did remind myself how great it was that they were not a 'boys club' group. In fact they really were great guys: super nice and emotionally mature (probably more than me). I am lucky they put up with me. I quite liked each for who they were. It was just of matter of my expectations of climbing/camping skills, not any of their characters. I sure could have dramatically worse, and in my better moments I remembered how lucky I was to be here at all, the risk Gary was taking on inviting me in the first place. It worked out and I am grateful to have been invited and so included and welcomed in the group.
The first peak we all did as a group, which was fun for that day. A military plane buzzed over us and made a circle to check us out (no bombing). I was wearing my summit dress and jumped around in a bit of a dance on the snow to show it off.
I've long been talking about and looking for a summit dress. Recently I found one (second hand of course) that works great so was psyched to finally wear it. It's a cocktail dress, dark green velour (really, looks better than it sounds), short, form fitting upper, perfect for first ascents, and other ascents too. While I'm actually climbing, the wind catches the skirt so it does the Marilyn Monroe bit blocking my view of footholds, but it's easily tucked into my long underwear until easier ground. I wore it on every peak we climbed (4 to 7, depending on how tight a definition one uses for separate summits). I loved wearing it and it doesn't seem to look any different having been wadded up in the bottom of my pack.
Fortunately I got to climb with Rich for most of the rest of the trip. He and I (hours ahead of the rest) found our way up a couple more fourth class summits, exposed and loose, of course. We were the only ones to get to the real summit of the biggest peak in the range, which required some tricky climbing in a narrow coulior (snow gully), as well as a couple easy peaks later on. Fun terrain for sure: light and fast.
We named the peaks (whatever that means) (well, Gary does plan to submit this trip/summits to various relevant places) in Spanish and tried to avoid stupid names related to us, instead choosing names related to the peaks themselves or the land. I was glad these guys were into such names too.
Towards the end we discovered that we were meteorlogically closer to the famous hideous weather of Patagonia than we thought. We were hammered by slashing rain and winds in very exposed locations; several long nights trying to keep our shelters on the mountain. It was unbelievable just how hard it could blow and rain for how many days.
Somehow we ended up with a mid up high, a lightweight floorless tent not made for such weather. I was an inhabitant of this shelter and have a lot of experience with them including in high alpine winters at treeline. For my first time, the pole folded in the wind. We splinted it with ski poles and a cordelette, and spent the rest of the night trying to keep sheltered and dry (limited campable terrain, drainage not always an option).
There were multiple days and nights like this, and some of the guys discovered that bivy sacks are not as dry as the manufacturers seem to believe: saturated sleeping bags. At one point, all five of us cowered in the 3 person tent, cooking with the hanging stove... you get the picture. It was ugly, significantly more severe than the Cascadian conditions we'd planned for.
But really, it was a cool trip. This is the first big personal trip I've been on since 1993, before the Earthship era. Now that that is wrapped up, my climbing life resumes!
I was supposed to return home after a month in Chile, but days before, while we were still in Puerto Montt in the south, I found out that another trip I hoped would work out was had fallen through. I didn't want to return home so soon. What to do?
I knew that Aconcagua was in neighboring Argentina, and that it was very nearly 23,000' (7000m) high, and largely a walk-up. This is all I knew about it. I hadn't been that high (just 20k several times). I am interested in some more aesthetic and technical peaks of similar heights elsewhere, and knew I should get that high first on an 'easy' peak to check out how the altitude feels before adding technical difficulty.
I hope all is well for you... keep in touch!
Love and wild winds, Susan
Addendum: My slides just came back, yea. I forgot just how gorgeous Chile was (ecosystem variety), and especially how incredible the GRANITE was. Gary expected that we'd be on volcanic rock, which is notoriously rotten and awful for climbing, but I went on the trip anyway.
Along the Puelo River we saw granite cobbles, and the whole way up, up the Rio Triador, and up that huge bushwhack, I kept my fingers crossed. And yes, the beautiful, crisp, clean granite-and-related rock continued. That's when I knew for sure that there is a god. I love rock, especially such stellar rock, and it made all our climbs and even that traverse a lot of fun.
