Our climbing routine

We wake up at aroud 6 am in El Chaltén. Our bags are packed except for a few morning necessities. After a quick but hearty breakfast, we don our packs and head north towards the mountains.

The road out of town

Our first waypoint is the bridge over Rio Electrico, about 16 km north of El Chaltén. To get there, we walk to the north end of town, drop our bags, and raise our thumbs. We usually get a ride within 15 minutes, and reach the bridge within an hour. We've gotten rides from two men in a pick-up in their way to work, tour operators (actually operating a tour and explaining the sights and stopping for passengers to get out and take photos), and a wealthy Brazilian family on a road trip with their two kids in a Land Rover.

Our next stop is Piedra Fraile, a cute bungalow/restaurant about 8 km up the Rio Electrico valley. The hike there is almost entirely flat, gaining only 100 m. The trail takes us through what feels like ancient forest filled with gnarled beech trees, across turquoise glacial streams, along huge rock walls that would be a climbing attraction anywhere else, and finally to the meadow of Piedra Fraile. The meadow in front of the lime green main building is filled with violets and lupines. We stop in to greet the land owners -- a young couple with a 1 yr 9 month year old boy -- and sit down for tea or a snack before the climb ahead.

The beech tree groves on the way to Piedra Fraile

Leaving Piedra Fraile for Piedra Negra, everything changes. For the next 2-3 hours, we ascend 1000 m up steep vegetated trail with bright red and yellow flowering bushes, then over steep rocky scree, and onto the snow that marks the terminus of the glacier. We can spot Piedra Negra from 250 m below -- giant black boulders on the rock field above. Once we finally arrive, we go and fetch our stashed gear, set up camp, and rest.

Aguja Guillaumet from our tent at Piedra Negra

The next few hours we start preparing for climbing. We evaluate conditions relative to our last attempt. We make a plan, repack our bags with ropes and our rack, arrange food, make dinner, and try to get to bed early. It is still light out -- it is almost always light out this time of year.

Preparing climbing gear in camp

At 3:30 am our alarm wakes us from whatever sleep we could get. After a hot breakfast and final preparations such as putting on crampons and fixing our headlamps to our helmets, we start to climb the next 600 m to Paso Guillaumet. As we ascend, the sun rises in the northeast, the temperature drops, and the slope steepens. 

One hundred meters below the pass, we enter the final couloir. In the couloir, the walls close in around us and we are forced to climb with crampons and ice axes due to the steeper snow. In some sections, the walls close all the way in and we climb up the rock using a technique known as "dry tooling." Higher up, we pass under a truck-sized chockstone. Here, the snow is nearly vertical and we kick steps to climb. Falling here is a bad idea, but the climbing is secure so we don´t use a rope. Above the chockstone, there is a hanging snowfield that is the last crux to the pass. Around to the right, the angle of the snow diminishes, and we finally emerge at the pass, about 2 hours after leaving camp.

Sheila high up on one of our attempts

At the pass, we can look down onto a steep glacier rolling down the east side and up onto our climb. We haven't had good rock climbing conditions yet but, even when covered in snow, the granite cracks and features look amazing. The climb starts with three easy to moderate pitches that we could simulclimb. Then there is a head wall with four parallel cracks ranging from 5.10c to 5.11a. From there, there are four more pitches ranging from moderate to 5.10. Then the route joins Comensaña-Fonrogue, angling up and right for four more pitches. The rock climbing ends on a 150 m long 30 degree hanging snow field just below the summit. A final scramble should take us to the proper summit needle or "aguja."

At this point we will have climbed almost 2100 m (~7000 ft) up from El Chaltén. This is a bit more than the climb up Mt. Whitney, which ascends ~6000 ft from the trailhead. Ideally, we will reverse the entire climb in the same day, celebrating back in town with a cheap bottle of Malbec.

$6.50 Malbec