Day 13 in the land of Cochamó corresponds to Monday, February 3rd, 2025 in real life, which means our time in this beautiful valley is winding down (as is this blog post series). We absolutely have to be in Valdivia for a friend’s wedding on Saturday, which is four hours of hiking plus five hours of bussing away from where we are right now. Saturday is theoretically a week away (well, five whole days) but also somehow feels imminent. We need to plan our days carefully to really take advantage of the time we have left.

The torrential rain yesterday is an extra bummer because it means the walls won’t be dry enough to climb safely until at least tomorrow. Plus, it’s supposed to sprinkle again tonight, and we all know what happened last time it was only supposed to rain a “little bit”.

After some discussion, we decided to pack up our stuff (again) to head up to the Trinidad cave bivy in the hopes that we can climb something up in the Trinidad Valley tomorrow. With limited time, we don’t have much to lose by trying. In the worst case, we got another pretty day of hiking in and just have to come back down. (RIP to the Modified Perfect Ratio.)

As is on-brand, I also took only one photo/video the entire day, which happens to be of this cow walking through the campsite, with Will and our tent in the background. Priorities.

As we prepped our packs and walked through the campsite to get to the trail that leads up to the Trinidad Valley, everyone who saw us looked a bit confused. Somehow we always end up going counter-current to the rest of the climbing community in Cochamó. So, either we are super lost gringos or geniuses. My bet is on the former.

It took us a solid 3 hours to get up to the bivy cave, arriving around 2pm, and it was cold. Will immediately snuggled into his sleeping bag while I did a quick rinse in the river before doing the same. It may have been the coldest dip of my life, or at least of this trip, but I always feel better getting the sweat off and putting on dry clothes before getting into my sleeping bag.

We literally stayed cozy and read our kindles for over 3 hours before convincing ourselves to get up to make dinner around 6pm. At that point a lovely Spanish couple arrived to also spend the night in the cave, so at least we weren’t the only lost gringos. While chatting with them we also learned that they were on their honeymoon, because Spaniards get 4 weeks of vacation when they get married. Normally I claim that the main reasons for getting married are kids, taxes, and health insurance, and maybe even all the nice family pictures, but I think I’ll add “extra honeymoon vacation days” to the list if we ever move to Spain. Definitely a motivating factor.

Some more Americans also showed up around 7:30pm, at which point they had to get out cutting boards and frying pans and pots in order to chop and cook veggies and boil pasta. Will and I were feeling quite smug about our dehydrated Huel meals and continue to be quite happy with that choice even though we’ve now had five yellow curry dinners and five green curry dinners and turns out that in this case the color of the curry doesn’t make it taste all that different.

As they prepared dinner, it also came out that as a group everyone had hiked up with at least a pound of carrots thinking that no one else would bring carrots. What are they going to do with so many carrots.

Fingers crossed it doesn’t rain too much tonight and we’re able to get some climbing in tomorrow!

Day 13 Modified Perfect Ratio

43 pitches : 36 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.