Will and I promised Pía and Nacho a big adventure day, and boy did we deliver. (That’s also my excuse for not having many photos from the day: we were too busy adventuring and problem solving to get out the cameras.)

The plan was to do a route in the Valle Anfiteatro (i.e. where we had hiked to and spent the night) called “Antes de la Lluvia” (which translates to “Before the Rain”). It’s a ~10 pitch climb on the Espejo Wall which is also confusingly referenced as the Escudo Wall in some guide topos.

There is a pitch-by-pitch route description that goes with the topo, with the caveat that only the first five pitches are well-described. The rest of the route just says “follow the easy steps to the top, maybe 5 more full-length pitches with a maximum difficulty of 5.6.” Sounds easy, right? We thought so too. All four of us can climb significantly harder grades than 5.6 (which is beginner/entry-level climbing) so this felt eminently doable.

During the planning phase, we anticipated that the descent would be the trickiest part of the day. The instructions say to rappel down a route to the left called “Excelente mi Teniente”, ten rappels in total. The rappels we did yesterday went very smoothly, so that gave us confidence. However, it’s always a little different at the end of a long day, and especially down a route that we didn’t climb up since it would be harder to find each rappel anchor.

The rappel route “excelente mi teniente” is on the left while the route we (supposedly) climbed is “antes de la lluvia” on the right

Thus on Day 9, the alarm went off early, but we were all excited for the adventure so there wasn’t too much complaining. Will and I have made a habit of leaving the jetboil (our camping stove for boiling water) and the oatmeal and bowls and spoons right next to us when sleeping so that we can eat breakfast without getting out of our cozy sleeping bags. Can recommend.

We had planned to start walking from our campsite to the base of the climb at 7:30am but somehow little things kept coming up and we didn’t leave until 8:30am. Not a big deal, we have plenty of daylight. We still packed the headlamps though; that’s a requirement for any big adventure day.

It took an hour to get to the base of the climb via a rocky little streambed and there was surprisingly little faff on the approach.

There was, however, a surprisingly large amount of faff involved in finding the actual line of the climb. The first five pitches went smoothly since we had a good route description to follow, but after that, I’m pretty sure we went the wrong way. There was a lot of up climbing and down climbing and staring contemplatively at the wall trying to decide which way to go. It was hard to decide what direction looked more like what the topo referenced as “obvious steps to the top.” Definitely did not seem so obvious in the moment.

We made it through a couple of pitches that felt a little harder than we expected although some of that was likely due to a lot of rope drag. Ultimately to get onto a big ledge Will had to climb up a scary-looking roof that was definitely harder than 5.6 and involved a little bit of grunting and a lot of wiggling and several pull-ups. He then made a gear anchor up higher and fixed the ropes so that the rest of us could avoid the roof and just climb up on the ropes. Theoretically, ascending directly on a fixed rope (also called “jumaring” or “jugging”) is easier than climbing, but in this case it was also kind of sideways at the beginning so that’s a challenge in and of itself. Plus Pía and Nacho had never jugged up a rope before, so there was a bit of a learning curve. But we all made it!

After that it was smooth climbing to the top. We’re pretty sure we ended up quite far left of where the topo expected though. So that made us feel better about struggling through those last several pitches of what was supposed to be “easy” climbing.

We reached the top around 6pm, three hours later than expected, and most of that is due to our faff in trying to figure out where the route actually went (an endeavor in which we clearly failed), and then additional faff trying to get through some of the harder sections up top. At this point Will and I are pretty papped but Pía and Nacho seem to be having the time of their lives. I think they didn’t quite realize how uncertain and sketchy the last bit of climbing was, which is fair because they were on topropes the whole time (i.e. following behind after Will and I anchored the ropes at the top of each pitch). But I was quite tired, both physically from the climb but also mentally from the uncertainty and stress of routefinding.

At this point the wind really started blowing in, to the point where we literally had to walk hunched over. Luckily it was coming from the edge of the cliff towards us, meaning it wasn’t pushing us dangerously towards the edge. But we quickly realized that we would not be able to rappel with that much wind because the likelihood of the rope getting stuck is extremely high, especially with double-rope (i.e. extra long) rappels. Ten windy rappels down a route we had not climbed up and knew nothing about sounded like a recipe for disaster. Even if there was no other way down, I would much rather spend the night on top of the cliff than hanging from the side of it, unable to go up or down because the rope got stuck.

Pía, Nacho, and I bunkered down in a sheltered area to scour the topos for any information about another way down while Will went exploring. He eventually found a way to walk around the back of the cliff top to a gulley which would theoretically take us all the way to the bottom of the cliff, based on some blurry photos that I found. It was worth a shot even though we had very little information. At least if the gulley was super steep and we needed to rappel, we’d be protected from the wind.

As we walked to the backside of the cliff to get access to the gulley, we got a view of the valley behind the Valle Anfiteatro, which is called Valle de la Bestia (Valley of the Beast). It’s huge and it’s beautiful and it’s full of more soaring granite walls to be explored. There’s basically a whole other Cochamó over there. The main access to the Valley of the Beast is via the Trinidad Valley. After three hours of hiking from the base camp in La Junta up to Trinidad Valley, it’s another two-ish hours to get over a pass towards the Valley of the Beast and then another hour or two after that to get to a camping area. Not the most accessible spot, hence why many fewer climbers venture out that way. But after getting a glimpse of the valley, it’s definitely on my bucket list to climb something over there. In fact, the tallest/longest climbing route in the Cochamó area is in Valley of the Beast, so Will and I are already dreaming about a trip back to that wall.

The gulley descent from the top of the Espejo Wall was very rocky, quite loose and a bit steep, but doable. We had to space ourselves out quite a bit to avoid kicking rocks down on each other. At one point near the end we came across a giant boulder in the gulley that we couldn’t climb down, so we started looking around for other options and found some rappel rings right on the edge of the boulder. Honestly that made us feel way better about the decision to walk down the gulley. It seems like this descent route is actually something people do even though there was no direct mention of it in any of the topos for the surrounding climbing routes.

After the one rappel, the gulley got much less steep and we were able to easily walk down the rest of it back to the base of the climb where we had started. It took us about 3 hours to get down the gulley, plus another hour back to camp. We ultimately arrived around 10:30pm, a solid 14 hours camp-to-camp. We had originally estimated 10 hours and budgeted 12, so 14 isn’t terribly far off. Between starting an hour late and faffing about trying to find our way both up and down, arriving back at camp in one piece only an hour after sunset felt like a huge victory. And Pía and Nacho were in exceedingly good spirits, because we did indeed have ourselves an adventure even if it didn’t go quite as expected.

Since it was supposed to rain a bit that night, Pía and Nacho decided to forge ahead with their plan to walk back down to basecamp while Will and I moved our bivy down to the bottom of the talus field. We found a flatter, more protected area, but more importantly we also found a tarp stashed in the trees nearby. Even though it was super late, we went through the effort to make ourselves another little cover to sleep under and made it to bed around midnight. I’m glad we did that since the rain started pretty soon after. It was a 2-3 hour hike for Pía and Nacho so I was definitely thinking about them walking down in the rain as I snuggled in my sleeping bag beneath the tarp, listening to the raindrops and wondering how wet I would be come morning.

Day 9 Modified Perfect Ratio

37 pitches : 27 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.