The fog of war
David Autheman, Patrick Pessi, and Frédéric Vallet on the west face, 1994

The west face of Cerro Torre hides from the civilized eye, staring straight into the malignant west winds and showing its rime-spackled countenance only to those adventurous few willing to risk the savagery of the ice cap. It was first tried by Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri in 1959; first climbed by Casimiro Ferrari and his team of Lecco Spiders in 1974; and first climbed alpine-style by John Bragg, Dave Carman, and Jay Wilson in 1977.
The route begins in the Cirque of the Altars, an amphitheater opening onto the ice cap and dominated by the towering west faces of Cerro Standhardt, Torre Egger, and Cerro Torre. A 300-foot mixed step and a 1000-foot ice funnel punctuate the long glacial slopes that gain the Col of Hope. Three more long pitches reach a snowy platform below the Helmet, a 200-foot-tall meringue-like blob of precipitous rime that blocks access to Cerro Torre’s upper tower. Past the Helmet, a rocky section gains a frozen mixed dihedral capped 1000 feet higher by a plumb-bob vertical headwall smeared with ice. Over the headwall, on the upper shoulder, 600 moderate feet abut 200 feet of vertical and overhanging rime that guard the summit plateau. Once on the plateau, climbers confront a final 30 to 40 feet of overhanging mushroom to gain the ultimate summit.
Cerro Torre’s west face occupies a place in modern mountaineering similar to that once held by the north face of the Eiger: Most every member of the alpine tribe is in some way pulled to the route. It is one of the world’s most legendary climbs.
In 1994, Frenchmen David Autheman, Patrick Pessi, and Frédéric Vallet attempted its fifth ascent. All three were mountain guides. Previously, Vallet had climbed three 8000-meter peaks. Autheman had climbed Fitz Roy. The west face was Pessi’s first expedition outside Europe, although, like the others, he had a tremendous amount of experience on the mountains and crags of his home continent. They attacked light, without sleeping bags, and climbed thousands of feet of intricate terrain, up through the Col of Hope and over the 200-foot rime walls of the Helmet. A storm caught them on the headwall.
Somewhere on the upper shoulder they stumbled across a natural slot in the rime and crawled inside, seeking shelter. “In the hole, it was not too bad,” Autheman says. “No wind, and not too cold.” Though they had no real idea where they were on the mountain, all three felt certain that a long distance remained to the summit. For two days, they huddled in their bivy sacks.
The wind moderated on the third afternoon. Wrapped in cloud, they climbed an easy pitch of rime and a second that was very difficult, and were stunned to discover themselves on the summit plateau. They bivied again, in another natural foxhole.
On top, the Frenchmen decided to descend the (relatively) more sheltered Compressor Route. “And besides,” adds Autheman, “the mountain had not been traversed.” They made three long rappels to the top of the Ice Tower, where a tiny saddle formed by the confluence of two big clefts separates the tower from the main wall. Autheman, Pessi, and Vallet didn’t know the route. They scouted the left-hand cleft and saw nothing. They spotted an anchor a little way down the right-hand cleft and opted to use it. What they didn’t know was that the Compressor Route climbs the left-hand face of the Ice Tower, and that the anchor typically lurks under a six-inch armor of rime.
They rappelled twice and found bolts at each anchor. They made a third rappel, and with the ropes still in place, Autheman announced, “We are on the wrong route.” The clouds parted enough to show that they had strayed far from the southeast ridge, the site of the Compressor Route. They seemed to be dropping down the east face, probably into the upper part of the route first climbed in 1986 by a Slovenian expedition that included Silvo Karo and Janez Jeglic. About 3000 feet of steep, rimy granite hung from their heels. Autheman inventoried the rack — eight or 10 ice screws, one set of nuts, three or four Friends, a handful of pitons — hardly the gear for a Patagonian big wall. The trio held a council of war.
The climbers were too tired for a loud argument, but the extreme gravity of the situation mandated a thorough exchange of opinions. They had no idea whether or not they’d find serviceable anchors below. Vallet was optimistic, saying, “We are okay, this is a route, we’ll find other bolts.” Pessi didn’t have a strong opinion, up or down, but Autheman advocated going back up. “If we cannot find anchors, or if we lose the way, poopf, we are finished,” he says. “I was very, very stressed. I wanted to go up, but I did not have the energy, the strength, to do all the leading back to the top of the Ice Tower. So we pulled the ropes.”
They continued to find bolts and sections of tattered fixed rope, but the wall steepened, and in many places they were forced to leave gear to reinforce suspect anchors battered by nearly a decade of exposure to the extreme Patagonian conditions. “Then we hit an overhanging traverse, and at this place we
didn’t know whether to go left or right,” says Autheman. “It was very hard to find the next belay. Patrick was a very strong climber, so he did this pitch. He made a very big pendulum.” They aimed left for an ice couloir that stretched down to the base. Reaching it cost them the remainder of their rock hardware. They were still at least 1300 feet above the glacier.
The ice in the couloir provided other anchoring possibilities, but the couloir also exposed them to new dangers. Small ice chunks falling from the Compressor Route rattled down the cleft; a large block would wipe them out. The Frenchmen rappelled from a succession of single ice screws.
American climbers Conrad Anker, Steve Gerberding, and Jay Smith were in a snow cave below Cerro Torre that day, waiting to renew their assault on Torre Egger’s east face, when they heard voices. “We had no idea where they were coming from,” says Gerberding. “The weather was bad.” No one had walked by; no one was up at the Col of Patience. The Americans knew that no one was on Cerro Torre. “We started talking about the ghost of Toni Egger [the Austrian killed while attempting Cerro Torre’s first ascent with Cesare Maestri in 1959],” says Gerberding. “Finally we see ‘em and they’re like six pitches up the Slovenian Route. We had no clue where they’d come from.”
The Frenchmen used all their ice screws, then whacked their axes into the ice and left them behind, one after the other, to anchor the last rappels. Finally, they lowered over the bergschrund and wallowed 100 yards through the snow to join the Americans, who plied the surprise arrivals with food and drink. “They looked pretty haggard,” said Gerberding, “and way, way relieved.” “And so we arrive at the bottom,” said Autheman, “without nothing. In the mountains, you have to be ready for what you want to do, but sometimes you just need luck.”

Author Gregory Crouch, one of Climbing’s senior contributing editors, chronicled his personal Patagonian adventures in his critically acclaimed book Enduring Patagonia, published by Random House.