Before I dive into our daily adventures in Cochamó, here’s an aside for the math nerds among us. Which is relevant, considering I’m more than halfway done with my second master’s degree, this time in mathematics. What can I say, we are all caricatures of ourselves.

Anyways, let me set the scene. The climbing gear is ready, the van is packed, and the mountains are calling. Unfortunately, sometimes they’re just too dang far away for a trip to be worth it. But how do you decide?

With the Perfect ratio, of course, named for my friend who came up with the concept and whose last name happens to be Perfect (not a joke). The Perfect ratio is usually used in the context of a weekend climbing trip and is defined by the number of pitches climbed divided by the number of hours driven roundtrip to get to said adventure spot. The goal is to make that ratio higher than 1. For example, if you’re going to drive up to Lake Tahoe from the San Francisco Bay Area for the weekend, that’s ~8 hours roundtrip, so the goal is to climb at least 8 pitches (8 lengths of rope) while you’re there to make the trip worth it. If you manage to climb 10 pitches, then the resulting Perfect ratio is 10 pitches : 8 hours or 10/8 and is clearly higher than 1.

Chile is far enough away that considering roundtrip travel time from home for any sort of climbing trip would just destroy the Perfect ratio. Plus, climbing in Cochamó involves a lot more hiking than climbing in Lake Tahoe or in Yosemite or in Indian Creek (our most frequented climbing spots). So, for this adventure, Will and I created the modified Perfect ratio, which is defined by the number of pitches climbed divided by the number of hours hiked, and all of this is cumulative during the trip starting from the hike into the Cochamó valley.

During our trip, the goal was to keep our modified Perfect ratio higher than 1, and even better if we could get it to 2. In other words, we wanted to climb at least one and hopefully closer to two pitches for every hour hiked. It’s actually more challenging than it sounds considering that the hike into the valley itself is 3-4 hours, and then to get to the good climbing you need to hike another 3 hours up into one of two higher valleys, and from there approaches can still be up to an hour long. On other words, we’re going to have to do a LOT of climbing to make up for all that hiking. 

So, as I go through this blog series on our trip to Cochamó, I’ll keep track of our modified Perfect ratio at the end of each day to see how we’re doing on that goal. Spoiler alert: it was a close one.

So. Much. Hiking.

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.