Today’s climbing route is called No Hay Hoyes, on the Silverback Wall of Gorilla Peak. The topo guide says, “Hay ayeres, hay mañanas, pero no hay hoyes” which directly translates to “there are yesterdays, there are tomorrows, but there are no todays.” It feels like it should be profound but honestly I’m a bit lost on this one. I asked a few different native Spanish speakers about the saying and they didn’t really get it either, so I don’t feel too bad for being confused.

Will and I had an early-ish start up the approach trail around 7am, but not as early as the Spaniards we met the previous evening. When we were eating breakfast at 6:30am they had already tidied up their sleeping area and left. We never even heard them get up. These are potentially the most Andy Spanish-speaking people I’ve ever met, and that’s coming from me, the eager-est of beavers.

The approach trail up to the Silverback Wall was wild. For an hour we wound under and over trees in a dense forested area, slipped on some steep muddy bits of the trail, hiked straight up a cascading waterfall, and passed some of the clearest natural pools I’ve ever seen. Cochamó is generally full of stunning scenery but this area was particularly breathtaking and worth the extra effort to get there.

The climb itself was a short-ish six-pitch jaunt that we very much enjoyed. Will got stoked on some horizontal finger cracks and the crux lieback move, and I fought through some too-big handjams to get over a roof and also eventually successfully climbed the crux (hardest) move after some falls and some coaching from Will. Plus at one point a giant condor came to circle around and give us some positive energy and/or eat us. The message was unclear.

Ultimately we decided it was our favorite climb of the trip, which is fitting as it’s sadly also our last climb of the trip.

The summit of Gorilla Peak was equally as cool. It’s described in the topo as a soccer-field-sized flat area, and it’s maybe more like the size of a basketball court but still astonishingly flat. And it would be pretty annoying if the ball went out of bounds and you had to rappel down the side of the mountain to get it.

After Will took a nap on the summit, as is customary, we rappeled back down to the base and meandered back towards the Trinidad Valley cave where we had spent the previous night. We had talked about walking all the way back down to base camp in the lower Cochamó Valley that same evening so that we could sleep on our extra comfy pads in the tent, but ultimately we decided to spend one more cozy night in the cave.

The fire was crackling when we arrived right around dinnertime, and it was lovely to chat with other climbers about their days, add a few more climbs to our to-do-eventually list, and speculate about the people that we knew had gone out climbing but hadn’t made it back yet (they eventually did arrive around midnight, so that was a relief). I’m mostly just glad we ended the climbing part of the trip on a fun day out instead of the mess that was Al Centro y Adentro.

Day 14 Modified Perfect Ratio

This was our last day of climbing and now we regret not doing just one more pitch to get to an even 50. There’s still a fair bit of hiking to do but I think we’ll be able to stay about our goal ratio of 1.

49 pitches : 38 hours

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.