Damn the torpedoes
Silvo Karo and Janez Jeglic on the south face, 1988
The south face of Cerro Torre is Patagonia’s most grotesque obstacle, a 7000-foot-tall vertical and overhanging wine bottle. A steep icefield adheres to the face at two-thirds height. The wall below is dark and monolithic, showing no weakness. The upper third — the bottle’s neck — is smooth and featureless and incomprehensibly exposed, both to the vertical mile beneath and to the austral storms sweeping across the ice cap. Planet Earth may not possess a more daunting piece of alpine terrain.
In November 1987, Slovenian hardmen Silvo Karo and Janez Jeglic started up the south face. Karo, a dark, powerful climber with blacksmith’s forearms, and Jeglic, an intense, rangy mountaineer, were veterans of three previous Patagonian first ascents (on Fitz Roy, Torre Egger, and Cerro Torre’s east face). Rockfall battered them on seven difficult and dangerous pitches of mixed rock and ice at the bottom of the south face. Above, the Slovenians aided long sections of rotten, overhanging rock interspersed with occasional free moves. They had to chop ice from nearly every placement or handhold. During the next two months of stormy Patagonian campaigning, Jeglic and Karo fixed 2300 feet of rope, but were still 1000 feet shy of the icefield. Their remaining ropes were too ragged to use, so they borrowed a slightly better one from a Swiss team, and readied themselves to blast for the top.
The weather had other ideas. For three and a half weeks, no improvement lasted more than a few hours. Finally, an opportunity. The sky was starlit when the two left their bivy below El Mocho at midnight on January 19, 1988, but by the time they reached their ropes at 2 a.m., gusty winds drove dark, angry clouds through the night sky. They sheltered in a crevasse, jammed right up against the limit of their stay — their plane tickets and Argentine visas verged on expiration.
By noon the next day they had climbed beyond the end of their fixed ropes to a point 300 feet below the icefield. A 30-foot-wide band of overhangs that would cut off their retreat lay ahead. “Around us was a true hurricane,” says Karo. Then he noticed that the Swiss cord was
hemorrhaging nylon fiber from a trio of core-shots. “We were at the mercy of the wind 800 meters from the ground,” says Karo. “With a rotten rope this was not an easy feeling.”
They cut off the ratty end of the rope and climbed the roofs. At the lip, they were embraced by violent winds and thick fog. Only by climbing up and right to the Compressor Route could they reach another line of retreat.
A hellish roar blasted over the top of Cerro Torre. Rime ice coated their gear. They were disoriented. Both men were cold, but the soul-shearing wind refused to let up or allow them to don extra clothing.
“The storm was completely crazy,” says Karo. “We couldn’t communicate.”
Finally, they reached the icefield, which canted west into the full fury of the wind. Television-sized ice blocks torn off the upper reaches of the mountain tumbled through the storm and exploded beside them. Desperate, they traversed right toward the Compressor Route.
“We had this big idea to make a film, so we were carrying a 16mm movie camera instead of a fourth ice tool,” says Karo. “But it was too windy to use, and too much money to throw away. So I follow with only one tool.”
Far to the right, Jeglic belayed from two stubby ice screws. Buffeted by the terrible wind, Karo began traversing. “The ice was steep, 70 or 80 degrees,” says Karo, “and I had one wool glove, so I froze it to the ice each time to help me hang on better.”
Shortly after he started across, a ferocious gust swatted Karo off the wall. Pinwheeling down the icefield he had two thoughts: “Will Janez be able to hold me?” and “Will the tattered rope break?” Karo felt a huge jolt around his midsection as he whacked into some rocks poking through the ice. He’d fallen 100 feet, stopping only a short distance from the bottom of the ice slope and the edge of the abyss.
“I couldn’t believe I was still attached to the wall,” Karo says. He climbed up to Jeglic, now straight above him after the wild pendulum. “Easier than making the traverse, no?”
Late that evening they reached the Compressor Route. Forty-six pitches of new route lay behind. They had planned to go down the east face route, which they’d first climbed during the 1985-86 season, but realized it was impossible with only one short rope. Neither knew the Compressor Route, but there were no options. Battling through darkness and storm in the wee hours of the morning, they collapsed in a natural snow cave at the Col of Patience, the high col atop 1500 feet of snowy mixed climbing that marks the start of the Compressor Route.
“We couldn’t believe that the storm which had accompanied us for the last 24 hours could touch us,” says Karo. “We were so happy.”

In October 1997, Janez Jeglic vanished near the 25,400-foot northwest
summit of Nuptse after climbing the west face with Tomaz Humar.