Waking up after a downpour is hard because it means you have to leave your dry cozy tent and venture out into the wet grass. Annoyingly, I could not for the life of me figure out how to get out of our small-ish backpacking tent without getting myself wet. It was impossible not to touch the fabric of the rain fly at least a little bit while getting out, especially since my morning flexibility after sleeping in a tent is not the best. On the (literal) bright side, our campsite gets morning sun and things dried relatively quickly while we ate more bread and bananas for breakfast.

We still wanted to climb but had to wait until the afternoon so that the rock would be at least somewhat less wet. So in the morning, I got motivated and did a load of laundry of all of the clothes we had worn on the trip thus far. I thought I was putting some elbow grease into my scrubbing but honestly smelling the clothes afterward I definitely did not do a great job. At least the fabric feels cleaner on my skin and I think that’s really what matters. Will can deal with the smell :).

We also had a long chat with one of the campsite hosts who lives in Cochamó full-time, including in the winter when the campsite is closed to everyone else. It’s wild to think about living in such a remote area even for just the entire summer, let alone all year long when the winter snows make the trail even more inaccessible. Major respect.

I also spent another hour this morning trying to find the leak in my sleeping pad, coating the entire thing in soapy water. Alas, it’s just not going to happen. I have a sleeping pad for the main campsite in La Junta, but it’s big and bulky and the smaller backpacking-style sleeping pad is what I was planning to use in the upper valleys. I’ve heard ropes are comfortable to sleep on, kind of, so that’s the current plan for next time we hike up into the valleys.

In the afternoon, we ventured out to Apnea, a two-pitch climb that you can see from the campsite. It’s supposed to be a 20 minute approach but between the extra muddy and extra steep trail, and taking a couple of wrong turns, it took us double that time to get there. It was a fine climb, fun but nothing to write home about (although to be fair, here I am writing home about it). In fact, the most notable thing that happened is that we got our ropes wrapped around each other on the last rappel and had to ask the next party to rescue the ropes for us. So much rappel faff. We spent the hike back to camp talking about strategies to avoid that in the future because this level of incompetence is unsustainable and mostly just embarrassing.

In the evening, we gave ourselves the luxury of an hour of wifi. In our attempt to save all of the topo climbing route photos to our phones, we had missed a couple of climbing areas, so Will wanted to download those. We also contacted my friend Pía who is planning to hike in and meet up with us tomorrow, along with another friend Ignacio (Nacho). I wanted to make sure we knew where and when to meet up with them, since we wouldn’t be able to chat via phone at all. I also had the brilliant idea to ask Pía to buy and bring in a new sleeping pad for me if she could find one in time. Fingers crossed!

Day 6 Modified Perfect Ratio

We’re on the up and up! Astute readers will notice that I added three pitches for today instead of just two, and that’s because we did an extra pitch of top-rope climbing from the top of the official Apnea route. (If you look at the topo, we did the second pitch of the Nerviosísimo route after climbing to the top of Apnea.)

15 pitches : 17 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.