Immense planetary forces pushed up the Andes, tearing and rending the earth’s crust. The tectonic plates crushed together, buckling and crumpling, the South American landmass crashing over the floor of the Pacific. Molten lava boiled into the fissures from deep under the surface, erupting in a 7000-mile-long string of volcanoes. But in a few places at the southern end of the continent — in Patagonia — the magma didn’t quite reach the surface. Underground, surrounded by beds of less resistant rock, it cooled into hard, perfect granite. Storms tearing out of the southern Pacific Ocean whittled away at the softer material, the awesome hand of creation slowly revealing the very form of alpine perfection: Cerro Torre, a titanic macrophallus spiked into our planet’s most hostile skies.
Behind Cerro Torre lurks the southern Patagonian ice cap, a thick-frozen wilderness of peaks and plateaus that lifts and focusses the Pacific storms, an orographic effect that looses monumental amounts of precipitation from the heavy maritime clouds and adds power to the fearsome winds. Cerro Torre is one of the world’s most coveted summits, no doubt, but the storms that batter it dispense continuous meteorological crucifixions, forcing even the toughest to look hard into a cold bucket of mortality. Having an epic in Patagonia is like being mauled by a rabid dog — unpredictably violent and outrageously inevitable.
I’ve made two expeditions to Cerro Torre and launched 16 separate attempts to climb the mountain; storms blitzkrieged 14 of those efforts. I’m one of a handful of people stupid enough to have climbed that thing twice: once via the Compressor Route, and again via the West Face, the latter in winter. (Or to almost climb it twice, since I’ve never surmounted the last 30 feet of overhanging rime to the absolute summit.) I once tried to bull my way up through a building storm. Atmospheric ferocity stalled our progress just 140 feet shy of the top. Gobs of rime glued my eyelids shut: I tore them open, and wind-flung ice particles scraped my eyeballs bloody. I went 53 hours without sleep.
Besides my Cerro Torre endeavors, I’ve been on five other Patagonian expeditions. I’ve seen rappel ropes caught by updrafts refuse to fall from the sky; I’ve cut a half-dozen others stuck far off route. God alone knows how many times the wind has tossed me off my feet. I’ve lost two tents: The wind blasted one to pieces and a rogue gust simply catapulted another into the night sky, never to be seen again. I’ve long since forgotten the number of 10-day storms through which I’ve sat. Once, I survived five straight weeks of basecamp paralysis. All standard fare, the meat and potatoes of the Patagonian experience. None of my own Patagonian epics have been in any way extraordinary, except that in their multitudes they may have touched me with a bit of anemomania — wind madness.
Perhaps that’s what makes me pity those unlucky few who get to Patagonia and immediately cruise to Cerro Torre’s summit in a rare spell of good weather. Leaving Patagonia unpummelled by storm must taste like a spongy mouthful of day-old bagel: filling, perhaps, but certainly nothing to savor. So much better the endurance of an alpine crusader like Steph Davis, who spent five seasons nailed to the Patagonian cross before finally tasting blessed redemption on Fitz Roy, the summit of her dreams, in January 2002.
In Patagonia, we climbers do not plod into peril. Baited by blue skies, we go in like Pickett’s Division, at full bore, racing upward with the naïve ambition of evading the ultimate alpine counterattack, the next full-muscled storm sweeping in from the cold western reaches of the great south sea. Indeed, there may be nothing more exquisitely beautiful in the entire mountaineering world than a small team charging the granite ramparts of the Torre valley, diamond-hard rays of hope bursting in their hearts, steeled, like the Light Brigade, to face the massed field pieces of Patagonia. Consider this, then, a tribute to four teams who have truly felt the storm.