IV.
“Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.”

Halfway through the trip, our team sustained a casualty. When climbing in Patagonia proper —Fitzroy, Torres del Paine, etc. — climbers half-expect to fail. We’ve all heard of people going season after season only to get fat and lazy waiting for the weather. This is why I’ve never tried one of those towers. I’d come to Cochamó instead.

Still, this coastal valley can receive more than 100 inches of annual precipitation. But February is traditionally a “dry” month, and the two weeks prior to our visit had, in fact, been bluebird. Seeliger assured us the weather was just bad luck and it would clear up any day. He swore he’d never seen so much rain in February. After a while, his voice took on a tone of pity. Then he stopped charging us for beer.

Matt, meanwhile, tirelessly tried to maintain morale by goading the rest of us to join him at Pared Seca (“Dry Wall”), a sport crag boasting several steep granite routes doable in even the most persistent deluge. A Rifle aficionado, he naturally found a project: a six-bolt 5.13b slopefest ironically called Happy Hour.

Still, Katie, in particular, was feeling the creeping insanity imposed by the weather and its brooding gloom. And to add to her woes, she’d left some relationship wounds festering back in the States, wounds that, with all the downtime, were now beginning to pus over. Katie had yet to relax and enjoy the challenges of this otherworldly place and culture.

Finally, while we packed up to hike out for a resupply and overnight respite in town, Katie sheepishly announced, “I’m going home.” She’d left too many things on the burner back in the States, she said; the rain, no doubt, and lack of success were factors, too. I felt betrayed — Katie was more or less my partner. True, the pre-trip excitement we’d shared over the prospect of climbing together had never rematerialized, but I was still counting on her for our auspicious send of the hardest free line on Trinidad (a delusion not yet sunk into its soggy grave).

We split up on the walk out, leaving each of us more time to mope. Katie going AWOL just magnified the sting of coming all the way here without succeeding on anything big. Still, once we reached the trailhead, the thought of a night out of the jungle and rain buoyed our spirits. After two and a half hours standing on the bus (the long and lanky Matt also being forced to crouch), our crew piled out onto the streets of touristy Puerto Varas, stashed our gear, and proceeded to get our drink on. We stumbled back to the hostel around 3:00 a.m., the best of drunken friends.

Hiking back into the valley a day after sending Katie off with a hug, Dan, Matt, and I realized that her stress had been making us a little crazy, too. Despite the fact that we slogged up the trail in a torrential downpour, we all felt poised to send.

What a bunch of schmucks ...

Long story short: we attempted a recently established 5.12a on the remote Pared de Patiencia called The Path of Righteousness. After a five-hour jungle-bash approach with mud tunneling and vine climbing, I bailed off the first pitch — a soaking-wet 5.11 R slab. We spent the night camped precariously on a 50-degree wooded slope. We woke up to rain. We descended. Drank pisco. Played 20 games of Gin Rummy. Lathered, rinsed, repeated.