dimanche 23 décembre 2012

Patagonia trip second part
After Torre Egger it seemed a possible window might show up so we got back to Niponino but it was without counting on the amount of precipitations predicted.
It rained a lot and with Colin we basically only waited in the tent for the all day hoping someone would finally come up bringing the latest forecast.
When some friends appeared without any good news about the weather we hiked back to town.
Needless to say the following day was actually pretty good, a mistake due to the modern comfort of
having a weather forecast for a place whose weather is foolish anyway, and the comfort of staying
in town in a place where a couple decades ago years ago there was no town at all.
Up there i  had to learn  to not trust a weather forecast that it's not really clear and fail in his predictions and to be ready always in changing totally my climbing plans. French friends Ben and Fred succeed climbing Fitz Roy at their first week in Patagonia and gave me an urge to climb that mountain as well. I remember a Salvaterra quote saying that there are a few days where the conditions allowed to climb in the Fitz group when at a couple of km away, on Torre or Marconi it's a bad day. Running short of time and with a full week of bad weather ahead i opted to climb Fitz Roy that i haven't climbed yet. Manu is already gone home because of the bad weather lasting until his departure day. I went on to make plans for an eventual climb, with Andrea Di Donato a montain guide from Italy. As usual trying to decide what climbing and when to leave was a stressing task that absorbed me for much of the ten days we waited before we finally go up. A world class ice line, Supercanaleta, haunted my dreams since i was young when i read the book Patagonia from Buscaini-Metzeltin. His obvious straight line his Wind Serpent the many tries they gave it...little problem everybody seemed to say that it was gone, literally melted by the good weather week that we managed to miss before our arrival. With all this nasty weather we reckon it might be in, many of the local activist agreed so, local guides said no way. We were not sure what to do until just a day before we left. We were sitting in front of a coffe. The pinnacle at the top of the route in front of me on the back cover of  the brand new guidebook showed a climber from longtime ago. A climber that travelled trough a entire continent in a van only to surf and climb, lost in frost covered rock on a pinnacle of vertical rock 1400 above the ground with a bunch of pitons. No cams no goretex no guidebook and no weather forecast. Just climbing. We decided to go for Supercanaleta.
Supercanaleta
Seven hours of approach took us at the base of the route trough Paso del Quadrado. First good news to get there we just walked no swimminng in waist deep snow. Second good news the route was in, as for Cham if someone need to know if a certain route is in conditions better to ask people that climb, not the guides.
Andrea and his fitz roy

We walked in saturday. Sunday we waited during a not too bad day hoping the weather would not play with us a second time then around 1AM  we crossed the bergshrund and climbed the long couloir until daylight saw us partway up bloque empotrado.
Awesome shadow of fitz on Lautaro far on the icecap
 We said hello to Frank a dead solo climber sitting on a ledge. The day was good but bad weather was forecasted for the late afternoon.
The rock was covered with rime and fresh snow so we had to drytool all the way up ,so i reckon it was great conditions!
I was full absorbed on the climb Andrea was following fast and efficiently and after almost 12 h we were on top.
We started rappelling the route in pretty cold conditions then downclimbed the lower part of the couloir and a few hours later we were down.
Definetely great to share this route with Andrea. We had a lot of  fun. Now back to Cham winter is ready.
 On route

Upper bowl

Today is gonna be a good day!

cool mixed

climbing second tower

Lot of rime on second pinnacle
Last pinnacle

Cumbre!


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