Xue Way: Week 3: Cumbres

Love at first sight

Another week in summer camp and life is pretty good. Sent Brian off after a great meal at la Senyera/Domo Blanco and he's back to the US for the season. Found a partner - Tim - at the local climbing gym to get out to the mountains with and had a ridiculous weather window with a lot of sun and no winds. Tim and I went to go climb De L'S and Mojon Rojo. We initially wanted to climb two routes of De L'S - Voie Fisher and Austriaca. We ended up off route at the start of the day and made it to pitch 3 in a chossy blank corner. This is where we realized Patagonia couldn't possibly be this sandbagged. I ended up lowering Tim to a knob we could rap off of and then down climbing this blank face corner thing whilst almost shitting my pants. Sent the down climb thank god. We got to the base of another route Cara Este at 12pm and decided we could probably make it up and down before nightfall. We summited around 3:30pm after climbing 450 meters and got back down to the base at 7:30pm (after getting our rope stuck and a few shorter raps). Still plenty of time to get down from the glacier and back to camp, given a 10pm sunset down here.

The next day Tim's feet could not fit in his climbing shoes because of bad blisters. We decided to call off trying to get up D L'S again and instead scrambled up Mojon Rojo and scoped out the glacier crossing to different routes. What they don't tell you about 4th class scramble up Mojon Rojo is that the last 10 ft is the crux. There is definitely a V1-2 boulder problem at the summit - which I found hilarious. There are really no non-technical peaks down here when even the scrambles seem committing. After coming down, we moved our camp to the most scenic campsite I think I have ever stayed at - look at the video below. We jumped in the lake and it was by far one of the best decisions of the day. We were both sunburned after the day on the glacier without any winds/clouds. For me, it was a new sensation to wear shorts on a glacier, be mostly sunburned and step into ice cold crevasses. A good analogy for this feeling - it's like being burned alive on an ice cube; needless to say we basically ran down the mountain in the afternoon. Coming back to town post climb I found flowers, apple pie, brownies, and cookies waiting for me on the kitchen table. This just goes to show that Chris is a gem of a human being.

A few more days of bad weather is in the forecast and I'm not sure yet where I will be for the next weather window, but I am pretty damn stoked and humbled to be here. What I didn't realize until this past trip was how big the mountains are here. The routes here are long and the approaches even longer; and the hardest part of the climbing here isn't getting up to the cumbre, it's getting yourself safely down. We got our ropes stuck twice and lucky for us they were easy scrambles to get back to the rap station. But just imagining how hard it would be to be rapping a massive route, with wind and weather coming in; it's easy to see how people die here. There's been a lot of accidents/deaths that have been taking place down here just in the past few weeks and I think it's essential to understand the seriousness of climbing in these mountains. I think we are all super stoked to climb and when there is good weather it's easier to make rash decisions without carefully examining/communicating the objective hazards of pursuing any route here. At the end of the day, the mountains will be here long after we're gone and if conditions aren't right there is no need to go up

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