Will and I did the accounting of our food stores this morning and realized we might not have enough breakfast supplies for our entire stay. I think we were assuming we wouldn’t eat breakfast on non-climbing days, because that’s what we do at home. Turns out we were burning a lot of calories hiking around so much (hence why the modified Perfect ratio is currently suffering). And hiking makes you hungry when you wake up.

Considering how much of a planner I am, this felt like a bit of a failure, but luckily there was a solution. The third campground in the area (Trawen) has a minimarket that sells bananas, apples, eggs, fresh baked bread, giant cookies, and hot chocolate. So we had a slow morning and got some fresh hot bread and bananas which sounds kind of weird but it actually kind of worked as a flavor pairing. Or maybe I was just hungry.

We eventually repacked our stuff yet again to go out climbing for the afternoon. There is one longer route close to the main campsite called Camp Farm. It was nice not to have to hike three hours up into one of the valleys in order to get to the climb, but the hourlong approach did involve crossing a river. Our two options were walking in the river or using a Tyrolean traverse, which is a rope tied across the river between two giant trees. Basically you attach yourself via your harness and then pull yourself across on the rope. We ultimately decided to ford the river and it occurred to me that I learned that word playing the Oregon Trail game when I was 8 (the one where you die of dysentery more than half the time).

Anyways, it was a nice sunny day and the river was not too cold but we did have take our pants off to walk across because it pretty deep. And Will immediately started practicing a new Spanish phrase which roughly translates to “have you seen a gringa without pants?”.

And then we did some more climbing! Camp Farm is an 8-pitch climb, and starts off with a fun crack that quickly turns into three pitches of slab (i.e. positive-angle climbing with tiny holds, usually very balance-y, relies a lot on friction and good technique and continuing to make upwards progress even when you’re scared). Will is generally not a fan of slab climbing and I may have heard a few curse words under his breath but I thought it was awesome. Then the joke was on me when we had to wriggle up an offwidth bulge which is very much not my jam but Will sailed through it.

View from the top of pitch 5

At the top of pitch 5 we took a break to check on the weather. It wasn’t supposed to rain until the evening but the clouds were starting to blow in and we got a little worried so we started rappelling down. Even after all the rappelling faff yesterday, we did not learn our lesson and somehow kept getting the ropes awkwardly crossed which adds a lot of friction to the system when you pull on the rope to get it down. To be fair, we usually walk off of climbs in Yosemite instead of rappelling. Plus, this is only the second climbing day, so we have lots of time to practice.

As we were fording back across the river, two guys just sailed across above us on the Tyrolean traverse going super fast and we really felt like scrubs at that point. (You can see the guy hanging from the horizontally-strung rope above the river if you look closely at the backpack picture below.)

It turns out we made a good call to come down early off of the climb because it started to rain almost as soon as we got back to camp. We had not left our stuff waterproofed in trashbags when we left in the morning because there wasn’t wet weather on the radar until later at night. Luckily we were back in time to save all our stuff from being torrentially wet. I’m very stoked we didn’t have to learn that lesson the hard way.

Other than an evening downpour and a cozy dinner and some more Kindle time (we are absolutely flying through books), there’s not much else to report. We’re hoping there will be some climbing tomorrow but also the rock is going to be wet so we shall see. At least today we’re starting to look a lot better on our modified Perfect ratio.

Day 5 Modified Perfect Ratio

12 pitches : 16 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.