Mountaineering Invisible Glacier Camp (day 17)

We pitch camp at the base of a lake by the invisible glacier.  The next morning we have to start out early because we must cross below a morraine wall to actually get to the glacier and it is only safe in the morning because all the rocks are frozen to the wall and less likely to come tumbling down on us.  More fun with walking on snow covered morraine ensues.  When we finally reach the invisible glacier and begin roping up the sun comes out! Nigel starts performing ritualistic praying to the sun gods and we all joyfully break out the sun screen.  Walking roped up across the glacier was really cool.  Its a challenge to keep things moving safely and at a good pace for everybody, but a neat experience.

Mountaineering Snowy Camp (day 15-16)

We wake up to discover our tents have survived the storm but are covered in a foot of snow.  They are dug out and the morning spent drinking tea and reading until we begin our day of learning snow skills!  Self arrest and walking roped up are practised in preparation for the next day when we are to cross the invisible glacier, which is snow covered and thus has the added danger of people punching through snow into hidden crevasses.  It continues to snow all day long …

We wake up the next day and are completely snowed in again, with a couple of feet on our tents.  Any footprints in the snow are covered up after an hour due to snowfall and we have to dig out our water source each morning and punch through the ice.  After a half day of sitting around doing nothing the leaders decide its not going to get any better and so we should move camp despite the snowstorm.

  Earlier in the trip when we had been complaining about how hard walking on morrain was Cece and Jeff had joked that at least it wasn´t as bad as walking snow covered morraine … and we would never see that!  So began our descent of the snow covered morraine wall down to the invisible glacier.  This was the hardest terrain by far.  You cant see where youre putting our foot because all the rocks are covered by snow, and the boulders underneath are unstable and liable to move on you.  Cece fell badly at one point while scouting and seriously scraped up her face.  When we finally reached the bottom of the wall we were all really relieved.

Mountaineering Bonsai Camp (day 13-14)

We move to Bonsai camp, apon arrival the guides ask us if we want to push on to the rappel station of make camp.  We are already wet and feel like we can keep going but the guides decide a rest would be good and so we make camp.  Myself, Holly and Amanda have tea time in the tent all afternoon since it is pouring rain, writing a letter to our trip organizers (mountaineering feedback letter) and making a birthday card for our guide Jeff.  When I return to my tent that evening I discover that the stream that was a few feet away is now 1 foot away from the tent.  Im too tired to do anything about it though so I go to bed hoping for the best.

We wake up to a repeat of Squelch camp, its very wet underfoot.  Our guides take off to find the rappel station and return in the early afternoon telling us to prepare for a day of ´bad-ass mountaineering´.  We posthole up Mt. Wank into winds that could easily blow you off your feet, this is the first time in the trip I actually feel scared-due to the heavy winds.  We reach the rappel station and in the pouring rain with super strong winds all around we rappel 40m down a cliff face.  While at the base of the rappel Amanda and I realize that Holly is verging on hypothermia as she declares to us ´I cant feel my legs!´ and we frantically set up a tent and start boiling water for her while the leaders set up a zip line for our backpacks.  When Cece gets to the bottom she informs us there is a huge storm coming and our ridge top campsite is badly exposed so we tie our tents down to every tree available and hope for the best.  That evening was spent coming in and out of sleep as the winds whipped around our tent, hoping they hadnt ripped up any of our anchors.

Mountaineering Squelch Camp (day 11 – 13)

Day 11 of the trip we moved to what we called Squelch Camp and our guides called Amazing View Camp.  They had seen an amazing view of Mt San Valentin from it but by the time we got there the clouds had rolled in.  Getting to Squelch camp involved our first experience with prussicking up fixed ropes on steep slopes, and bushwacking through the forest.  As well as our first snow!  (which we were excited about, little did we know how much snow was to come).  I woke up sick the day we moved to this camp, carrying a 40 pound pack with a head cold over sketchy morraine is definitly a ´character building´ experience.  Ive come to dislike that phrase after this trip …

Squelch camp day 2 we did a forward carry of gear up the ridge we were camped on.  This was our first bad weather day, which really affected people´s spirits.  It was wet and windy and there was lots of snow, which meant lots of bad postholing.  Or at least what seemed like bad postholing at the time.  Little did we know what the weather had in store for us.

Mountaineering Feedback Letter

One day while stuck in our tent, Holly, Tini and I wrote a letter to our trip organizers.  Too bad it was before all the bad stuff happened.

Dear Ben & Jaya,
 
We were wondering, is this a sick joke? We particularly enjoyed your question “Can you swim 200m?” as a fitness assessment. We feel a more appropriate question would be, “Would you be fit for military training in the 1920s in Bangladesh?”
 
Thankyou for providing us with two dedicated guides, who at the expense of sticking to a time table carried the weight a small sherpa child would carry, up the morain walls deemed too dangerous for us to twice.
 
We particularly liked the ever-variable terrain with perils ranging from slipping on thrice, falling off a mountain side, or being crushed by a morain rock fall or avalanche. In fact, when we became used to the constant threat of death and no longer feared falling, our guides noted the spark in our eyes and made us walk with crampons on thrice. Doing in three times just multiplied the fun!
 
But it wasn´t all walking.
 
Balmy mornings cooking on our defunct stove, finishing off our lumpy cereal with a carbon hit to save the palnet. Burdened by the GORP in our pack, we briefly toyed with the idea of consuming it all in one sickening hit. Then we realized we would probably have to eat our own vomit as part of a strict Leave No Trace ethos.
 
As if this wasn´t enough entertainment we really appreciate the conecpt of a ´pee funnel´, a means of experimenting with wetting our clothes in a novel way. Of course, we feel secure in the knowledge that the items of clothing in question would be easily dried under one armpit. If only those fools with clothing driers would realize this, a great blow would be dealt to the clothing drier industry.
 
We are writing this to you, Ben and Jaya, cloistered in our wet tent, knowing tomorrow – another day – may bring our death… as at last we succumb to the effort of extricating ourselves from waist-high snow for the seventieth time – our bellies full of GORP and our dreams full of flushable toilets.
 
Death would be a welcome release.
 
That, or a chopper flight as the weakest member goes down first.
 
We know, of course, this is mere conjecture. As at the crucial moment we will round the corner of a glaciar, or be presented with a canoe to row home, and your smiling faces will greet us, assure us that this is a reality TV prank, and we will be heftily compensated.
 
Looking forward to that moment any moment now.
No, not yet?
Haha you do love your suspense.
 
warm regards,
Holly, Tini, Tracey

Mountaineering Dirty Pond Desperation Camp (day 8-10)

This was by far the most intense day of the trip at this point.  The glacier had to be crossed, then a huge morraine wall climbed on the other side up the river of illusions.  Going up the morraine wall had to be done as quickly as possible for fear of rocks coming crashing down from it.  When we finally reached the top I was kind of hoping for open grassy fields that would be easy to walk on, but we were treated instead to morraine as far as the eye could see.  After a couple of hours walking on this searching for a campsite we began to get a bit concerned so we dropped everything uneccesary into a cache so we could move faster and find a place to camp.  Finally as it was getting dark we found a small pond of water and sraped out a camp in the surrounding morraine rocks.  Holly immediately named the camp ´Dirty Pond Desperation´ and our guide named it ´Thunder Camp´ because the glacier above the camp kept releasing small avalanches that sounded like thunder across the valley.

Our second day in Dirty Pond Desperation was a rest day for us, while the guides when back down the river of illusions to retrieve our cache.  We spent the day washing socks, scouting for the next day and making fudge!  It was by far the best fudge I have ever eaten.  Never underestimate the power of butter, sugar, chocolate and manjar (a caramel like condiment in South America) cooked over an msr stove.

Day three we did a forward carry of gear up the Glacier San Valentin, and enjoyed incredible views as this was our best weather day so far.  You could see the glacier all the way up to the ice cap and had views of Mt San Valentin, a massive imposing mountain above the glacier.  Then after the carry we practiced prussiking and rapelling in more moulins because we would need those skills in the following days to get over the terrain.

Mountaineering Glacier Base Camp (day 4-7)

We spent 4 days at Glacier Base Camp learning the skills we would need for the next 2 weeks to safely navigate the terrain and glaciers we were to cross.  Our first day we learned to walk safely on crampons on all sorts of glacier terrain, flat ice, 45 degree slopes up to 90 degree walls, hoping over crevasses and lots of other stuff.  Then we spent the afternoon ice climbing out of moulins which was really really fun.  Moulins are holes in glaciers that water runs in to and then dissapears down.  They are kind of like bottomless pits in a glacier, and much more dangerous than crevasses in a lot of ways.  I asked one of our guides at one point what would happen if one of us fell into a moulin.  He said that we would probably be washed away underneath the glacier and were pretty much dead, but if we were lucky to get stuck in a smaller one and were head down with feet up they might be able to tie a rope around your feet and haul you out.  If you were head up then you were pretty much stuck.  The take home message being dont fall into a moulin.  The afternoon was spent rapelling down and then ice climbing out, which was definitely a highlight of the trip!

The second day we did a forward carry of our gear across the exploradores glacier.  Actually crossing it and seeing the amazing blue ice formations and crevasses and the humungous ice fall where the glacier comes crashing down from the mountains was humbling.  Glaciers can seem like very still places where nothing is happening, but in reality things are constantly changing and moving, which is what can make then so dangerous.  We carried our gear to the river of illusions, and got to experience the fun of walking with crampons on morraine rocks over ice.  Coming back across the glacier it started to get dark, and we got a bit lost in a field of crevasses that took a lot of navigating to make our way through back to camp.

The next day we were exhausted and so we had another skills learning day with more fun ice climbing, then the day after that we finally moved camp off the Exploradores Glacier.

Mountaineering Sandy Camp (day 3)

We were introduced to the wonders of carry 40plus pound backpacks in mountaineering boots over marginal terrain.  What I considered to be a tough walk on that first day though would quickly become terrain we longed for later in the trip.  Walking in stiff mountaineering boots for the first time was a challenge.  We negotiated our first morraine wall, and received a lesson on the dangers of rocks falling off the morraine wall, something not to be forgotten later in the trip.  Our first camp was at the base of the morraine of the Exploradores Glacier, which took 2 carries to get to.  For the first half of the trip we had to do double carries to transfer all of our gear and food because it was physically impossible to carry all of it in one load.

Mountaineering Base Camp (day 1-2)

Our mountaineering base camp was on a small farm just outside Coyhaique, in picturesque green hills above the town.  We spent the first day getting to know our guides Jeff (from NZ) and Cecilia (from the states but hoping to defect to Canada), and the rest of the group, Amanda and Holly who were doctors from Melbourne but had never met before, and Nigel who was from Britain.  The first day and a half were spent packing up all of our gear (I have never seen so much gear before) and food (food for 6 people for 18 days is a scary amount).  The gorp alone could have filled a couple of our packs!  Seeing everything laid out gave us a good idea of how much we were actually going to have to carry for the next 18 days.  We packed everything up and drove down the Carretera Austral, Chiles attempt at a highway to link the remote Patagonia region with the rest of Chile so Argentina wouldnt be able to take over the land.  The drive itself was full of gorgeous scenery.  Finally we reached our destination for the first evening – a gorgeous swiss style mountain house in the middle of nowhere run by a lovely German couple.  They had spent years searching the world for a remote place to set up a bed and breakfast and had settled in the Patagonia region.  There we enjoyed our last meal cooked on a real stove, and our last hot shower for the next 2 and a half weeks.

Returned from Mountaineering!

I have successfully spent 21 days in the remote Patagonian wilderness, crossing glaciers, scrambling up morraine walls, getting snowed in for a few days, freezing my feet, forging across rivers, postholing for days on end and loving it all.  Theres so many stories I have and pictures to put up that Im not sure where to begin.  I had an incredible time on the trek though, it will definitely be one of the most memorable parts of my trip.  Now Im relaxing in Coyhaique (a small town in Southern Chile) with some people from the trip enjoying eating real food (no more gorp and oatmeal!) and taking warm showers.  I will try to post the full stories soon, and lots of pictures.