It rained overnight, but that didn’t stop Will and I from diving straight into the climbing routine on Day 2. Not the actual climbing part though, just the packing for the climbing. As you can already tell, packing (and repacking) is going to be a recurring theme here.

We spent the morning looking at the climbing topos (i.e. route descriptions) that are available in a big red folder at one of the campsites. Some of them are incredibly beautiful, and others are chicken scratch, but it’s very cool to see the hand-drawn topos of all the routes people have put up over the years. “Putting up” or “opening” a route involves picking the exact line, explaining how to find it, and usually includes installing metal bolts at the top of each pitch for belaying. It sounds simple but can be a very involved process, especially for longer routes, so we are very grateful for the folks who take the time to put up these routes and then log the information in a topo so others can also enjoy the climb. Sometimes information is perhaps a bit more sparse than you’d like, but it all adds to the adventure.

In the late morning on Day 2 we also spent an hour hiking out and back to Pared Seca (translates to “Dry Wall”), a climbing area near the campsites with single-pitch sport climbs that’s protected from the rain because it’s so overhung and steep. The climbing routes looked a bit more intense than we wanted for a first day on the wall, but definitely something to come back to on future rainy days.

There was more rain forecasted for the afternoon/evening, but just a sprinkle, and it wasn’t forecasted to rain overnight, so we decided to try our luck in the one of the upper valleys. After lounging about all afternoon we finally packed up our stuff and left the campsite around 4pm to hike the three hours up to Trinidad Valley. The nominal plan was to get to a bivy spot, stay out of the evening rain as much as possible, and then sleep overnight up there and start climbing later in the morning the next day so the rock would have time to dry.

I say “nominal” because that didn’t happen. We spent a solid half hour in the middle of the trail on the way up huddled under a tree when the “sprinkle” of rain started coming down harder. It didn’t help that we saw several other climbing hiking down out of the valley, going the opposite direction as us. We really felt like clueless foreigners, very out of sync with the other climbers and confident that we were doing something dumb. But the risk was low and we were itching to explore so we kept going anyways. Eventually, we made it up to the first of two bivy spots in Trinidad Valley, just below a giant rock wall. The rain really didn’t let up much but luckily we found some plastic tarp material stashed in the trees and were able to use it to cover our stuff temporarily while setting up camp for the night.

Will went off on a mission to fill up the water bladders while I made dinner. For dinners on the trip we ate mostly freeze-dried backpacking food that we hydrated with boiling water, since it is light to carry and water is plentiful. We used the brand Huel, specifically the hot and savoury line of products, which at the time came in big pouches with 3-4 meals per pouch instead of individual pouches like most other brands. It worked well for us because we could choose exactly how much dinner to make any given night, and had less packaging to deal with. Annoyingly, Huel has since changed their product to be sold in individual bags so I’m not sure what we’d do next time.

Will had to hike down the trail pretty far to get access to the river to fill up the water and was gone for maybe 45 minutes total. In that time, three separate waterfalls formed on the giant rock wall above us and we probably could have just gotten water directly from that but Will was already gone on his mission by the time there was enough water to form an actual waterfall. Oh well.

Because of the ongoing rain, I tried to use a plastic tarp make a mini shelter for us to sleep under. A sort of engineering in the wild. I was mostly successful, and it looked cool, and definitely helped a little bit, but we got still got pretty wet overnight as it kept raining much harder than anticipated. My sleeping pad also deflated pretty quickly so I didn’t have insulation between me and the ground and got very cold. Overall a pretty uncomfortable evening/night, but at least it can only go uphill from here.

Shaping up to be a pretty dire evening with the literal waterfalls on the rock we wanted to climb, and the ongoing rain, but we made the best of it

Day 2 Modified Perfect Ratio

0 pitches : 7 hours

Not off to a great start, but that’s to be expected, especially with the rain. We’ll catch up. We think.

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.