Somehow both Will and I missed the 6am alarm and woke up around 6:45am instead. But we still managed to walk out of camp at 7:15am so I’ll call that a win.

The route of the day is called “Al Centro y Adentro” (To the Center and Inside) and it’s the climb I was most excited about so far on the entire trip. The route description says that this climb “makes its way up the center and literally inside Pared Atardecer. It’s one of the most repeated at its grade, qualifying it as a don’t-miss route.” The name “Pared Atardecer” translates to “Sunset Wall”, so you know it’s going to be pretty up there. Plus the 12-pitch climb is the longest and hardest one we’ve attempted thus far in Cochamó. All very exciting!

Some eager beavers that clearly hadn’t missed their alarm beat us to the base of the route. We could tell based on their accents that they were from the United States (not from Chile or any other South American country) so it makes sense that they were able to get up early. They also climbed way faster than us so it’s a good thing they got there first.

The climbing itself was very cool. Will did an amazing job sending the first couple of pitches, which were wider cracks that involved getting a knee or sometimes your entire body inside the crack. He’s an offwidth wizard. I, however, was having a tough time on the wider stuff and also just a rough day in general. I was moving pretty slow and not having a particularly fun time, which was a huge bummer considering how excited I had been to climb this route. At the top of pitch 5, there was an awesome ledge that we hung out on for a while and ate gummy bears and then decided to go back down without finishing the climb. It was just one of those days.

On the bright side, the rappels went super smoothly, our best ones yet. We’re counting today as 6 pitches of climbing in total even though we only made it to the top of pitch 5 because we each repeated a pitch on toprope. It all counts.

We did not take a single climbing photo during the entire day, but the route is very fun with cool features so I wanted to show a few pictures. The below photos are from the more detailed topo for this climb on cochamo.com (and obviously not of us). We did climb through the roof in the first photo but didn’t quite make it to the “duck bill” feature in the second photo or the exposed corner above the duck bill in the third photo, so we definitely need to come back to this route another time. I’m sad that I couldn’t get my shit together so we could do the rest of the climb but these things happen sometimes.

We bailed pretty early, starting to rappel around 4pm or so, and made it back to camp by 5:30pm. We then re-packed our stuff (yet again) for the trek back to base camp in La Junta, which luckily only took 2ish hours.

When we got down to base camp, we had quite the surprise waiting for us. When we had left camp a few days prior to hike up to Valle Anfiteatro, our campsite was empty and peaceful, with maybe two other tents in sight. When we returned, there were at least twelve other tents set up in our formerly quiet little corner of the campground. Turns out a class of environmental science college students and their professor had arrived and taken over, which we know because we chatted with one of the students for a while. Apparently they had been there for a few days and one of them noticed that we hadn’t come back to our tent in that time and was worried about us. Very cute.

I was initially a little worried about how loud they would be especially in the evening but they turned out to be a pretty chill group. And as we were going to bed that night, we overheard one of the college guys ask in a loud voice: “Does anyone want to come see the frog I just peed next to?!” I tried to convince Will to get out of his cozy sleeping bag to go take a look but he was not even a little bit interested.

Before the invasion of the college kids. I wish I had an “after” photo but I didn’t think of it at the time.

Day 11 Modified Perfect Ratio

43 pitches : 33 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.