Steph Davis
February came in with unusually cold weather. We all noticed the drop in temperature, wondering what it could mean. However, the clouds and wind didn't stop swirling. After a few shivery days at Rio Blanco, Dean decided he NEEDED to go to Chaltén. He had "bife" written all over his face. I told him I'd join him later in the evening, and he set off like a shot.
A few hours later, I started down, but couldn't stop looking nervously over my shoulder at the peaks. Clouds were still swirling, but something seemed different. A small knot of climbers was gathered on the flat slope just outside Rio Blanco, looking at their barometers and analyzing the skies.
I thought with dismay of what a long night it would be if I reached Chaltén at 6 or 7 o'clock and we then had to turn around and hike the two hours back to Rio Blanco, and then another hard three hours into the night up to the snow caves, and then maybe a full day of climbing after that.
Five days ago we'd left the snow cave in the late morning, and a few hours later I went down to Chaltén in the wind and rain to buy some more supplies. I got there at 6pm and by 11pm, the skies were totally clear and windless. Trying not to panic, I hiked through the brilliantly calm starry night (even seeing three shooting stars), and arrived back at Rio Blanco at 1:30 in the morning.
With tired legs, I lay sleepless in the tent until 3am when the wind started and the clouds came in again. It would have been a hard slog up to Paso Superior! I certainly didn't want to do that again. But with no way to communicate with Dean, there was nothing to be done. I had a really bad feeling about going down, though. It wasn't that the weather necessarily looked good. It just looked different.
I hiked down unhappily for about 10 minutes and then found Dean sitting by the side of the trail, staring up at the peaks. The same things had been going through his mind, and feeling too uncertain to go down, he'd stopped in a sunny spot and watched the clouds until I showed up. Thank God!!
We watched the skies for a while, until clouds covered the sun and it instantly got frigid and grim. "Ooh!! It would be TERRIBLE up there! Let's go down!" We started walking down, and then felt wrong again. The sun came out. We stopped and sat down to look at the clouds. After a while, it looked really nasty again, and we started down again. Then we stopped again. We did this for about three hours, covering the distance of about half a mile, until we just gave up and went back to Rio Blanco. The universe did not want us down.
When I woke up for a 3am weather check, it was mostly clear and calm. After so many days of storms and cold weather, we knew almost every route would be out of condition. But Dean still wanted to climb Guillaumet, the only peak in the Fitz Roy range that I'd climbed and he hadn't. I remembered it as being mostly a snow climb, with a few pitches of very easy rock in the middle. It could be the only thing climbable right now, even after all of this new snow.
Being one of the smallest peaks here, it's easy to get a late start and feel confident going up in questionable weather. We started hiking at 4am, planning to try to climb if the weather seemed decent but not perfect when we got to Paso Superior.
We started the long familiar first hill in the dark, astonished at being the only climbers leaving Base Camp, but probably everyone else was thinking that the routes would be too out of condition. Or maybe just annoyed at all of these weeks of trickster three-hour weather windows. Still, when the weather looks even somewhat good, you have to go up, I think, and you have to try to climb something. Luckily Dean does too!
By the time we reorganized at our snow cave and set out on the glacier, it was about 9am. Fortunately for us, we'd brought snowshoes. Still, we found ourselves arduously postholing through the deep, new powder laid down by the last five days of storms. It usually takes about an hour to walk from the snow caves to the base of Guillaumet; today it took us two hours of hard effort to get there. As we slogged, tied together by a short length of rope in case one of us fell in a hidden crevasse, clouds of every description collected, collided and swirled above us.
On the east side, on the glacier, you are often protected from the high winds that blow over from the northwest. It's easy to set out thinking that the day is calm enough to climb, but once you get started on a route and climb high enough to be exposed to the northwest winds, you find that you are sadly mistaken. This is one thing that makes the weather even harder to gauge on the east side—if you are on the west side, you know without even having to leave your high camp tent if the day is too windy. Usually you're inside with arms and legs spread out against the shaking tent walls, trying to keep the poles from breaking.
On the east side, it's all too common to waste a lot of energy by being sandbagged out of your quiet snow cave into multiple alpine starts and climbing the beginnings of routes before being blown into retreat. Too bad the Super-Caneleta or the Northwest Ridge aren't on the sheltered east side of Fitz Roy—Fitz Roy would get climbed all the time. Or maybe it's good. Or neither—I guess it just is.
But today as we walked and watched the clouds, we both felt that they were moving quickly but sporadically, and at times it even almost seemed fairly nice. The weather was doing all kinds of things. Certainly you'd never go up on a big route with it looking like this, but Guillaumet is short enough that we could probably force our way through some winds to get to the top.
My only concern was for the final snowfield at the top—if it was too windy up there, we could literally be blown off the top of Guillaumet, which would be bad. But we figured we'd just go see. We'd already done the alpine start from Rio Blanco (the crux), and we certainly weren't going to be climbing any other route today. So why not?
At the base of the first snow gully, we put on our Gore-Tex and debated. Clouds were definitely moving fast above the notch at the top of the gully, and after we got to the notch we'd have to get on rock for a while on the exposed west side. Still, the clouds weren't hurtling past, just flying. I figured it might be all right.
We simul-climbed the gully, enjoyable nevé climbing just as I remembered, with a little exciting loose snow and mixed climbing at the very top. At the notch the wind was blowing hard. But after having done all that work so far, retreat seemed really inconvenient.
And you always have to keep in mind the Venturi Effect, and hold off on a permanent decision until you leave a notch. We decided to do a pitch of the rock and see if it was too icy to climb or not. At the next belay, we debated some more, and then did another pitch. At the next belay another discussion led to another pitch. We were spending more time conferencing than climbing.
The weather kept deteriorating steadily, and now that we were on the west side of the ridge, we could see nothing but clouds, wind, and blowing snow all around. Still, we'd come this far. It was the most unconvinced ascent I'd ever done. But before we knew it, we were at the final snow to the summit.
The wind was blowing harder than ever, and the west side was nothing but a mass of grey clouds. Uncertainly we moved up towards the final snowfield.
It faces east, and amazingly once we left the last hard anchor and moved onto the snow, the wind didn't touch us. In perfect safety, we climbed to the summit, completely surprised that we'd actually been able to get up there on a day like this. In some ways I felt amused to be standing on the summit of a small peak I've already climbed, after an entire month spent here this season—probably most amused by the fact that I didn't think we'd even get there until the last possible moment.
That's the great thing about Patagonia! And climbing Guillaumet again was actually a lot of fun, especially experiencing how different the "same" climb can be in the mountains. When I did the route two years ago, there was not much snow that year and there were a lot of days with low wind but ominous cloud movement—perfect days for climbing smaller, day routes, but not good days for going up on something really big.
I remembered getting a much bigger calf pump on the stiff nevé in the first gully, and climbing the rock sections in rock shoes. This time we were bundled in all of our layers all day, climbing the rock in mountain boots and gloves, fighting the wind. In many ways, it wasn't the same climb at all, and totally enjoyable. A good lesson.
The trip back across the glacier was a breeze, as the snow had hardened up throughout the afternoon and our snowshoes kept us on the crusty surface this time. We were tired from so much hiking, but absolutely pleased to have stood on a summit at last. With another day like this, maybe some other routes would clean up.
But we woke for an early weather check, and to our astonishment the weather had completely changed to thick, heavy clouds and steady rain. We even more pleased for having used that window of halfway decent weather to have a fun climbing day, and Dean took advantage of the unusual warmth to sculpt out a sofa in the snowcave before we headed back down to Rio Blanco.
That night I realized that the day we climbed Guillaumet was February 2, Groundhog Day. I laughed a little, thinking of how I'd poked out of the tent for a weather check early in the morning, just like the notorious groundhog, and then chuckled a little more when it struck me that Dean and I had been standing on a Patagonian summit on the exact 10-year anniversary of the day I started climbing.
Ten years ago, on Groundhog Day, a friend from the University of Maryland took me out top-roping at a tiny little rock slab. (As we sat enjoying the sun, someone remarked, "I can't believe we're out here in t-shirts on Groundhog Day!" so I've always remembered the date.) What a great way to round out a decade of adventures!
Now the tiny window has closed, and I sit in Base Camp listening to the rain pour down on the tent. Dean has resumed his abortive attempt to get to Chaltén, and is probably there by now eating bife and drinking Cristal at the Rancho Grande. The climbers are all anxiously awaiting the full moon in a few days, certain that it will mark a change in the weather patterns. Who knows.... I definitely saw my shadow on the 2nd.
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Steph Davis, MountainZone.com Correspondent
