The Puerto Montt climber and schoolteacher Michel Sanchez has been the most important Chilean local. In 2007, Sanchez forged two impressive lines in Valle La Palangana, which hangs above the main valley and boasts perhaps the area’s best rock and cleanest cracks: the 11-pitch Icaro y La Luna (5.10c), with Martin Waldhor; and Pulso (5.10c), nine pitches, with Luis Parez. Before the routes went in, Sanchez took several days to open what is now a technical, six-hour jungle slog.

Each season, more routes get added and more walls discovered, many by Verdun and Seeliger, from the refugio. A safe guess puts the current route count around 50, from sport pitches to big walls, with only about 10 percent of the potential tapped. Our mini-expedition had humbly decided to focus on repeating a few of the free-climbing gems and, hopefully, tasting the local culture.

III.
“You have to have men ... who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ...”

“I think Chico is in love with your friend,” said Martin, one of our four new Chilean friends, a quartet of college buddies from Santiago who’d come to Cochamó to screw around for a few days. I looked across the fire at Katie, assuming that one of the Chileans had snuggled up to our team chica. But she sat alone, cuddled in her downie, lost in her thoughts.

“¿A como?”

“Dan broke his heart today, but now I think Chico loves him,” Martin repeated. He waved his plastic cup of sloshing pisco (a sweet, hard Chilean alcohol made from grapes) to the outside of the firelight, where Chico and Dan crouched together like commandos. Chico held a BB air-pistol close to his chest, mimicking Dan’s stance.

“Never hold the pistol away from your body, because it makes it easier for your opponent to disarm you,” Dan counseled an awestruck and wild-eyed Chico, while manipulating the Chilean’s body like a mannequin.