Here are some of the pictures of our time in Chalten...

"Tango" the local guard dog at our camp ground

Making our way out to Camp Niponino

Tackling some fixed rope on the approach

My brand new ultra light alpine style crampons

Cerro Torre, El Mocho, Mochito. Our route went up the stunning arete on the step in the middle.

camping in niponino below mochito

Witnessing the junk show

Jerome posing down at sunrise

Somewhere on route...

Catching some rays and looking out at (from left to right) Fitzroy, Desmochada, and Poincenot

Jerome learning to crack climb on pitch 7

Self portrait of a dirty man.

Jerome following the crux pitch.

Looking up at the final few pitches

Jerome on rapel. "Brandon! You go down on me?!"

The frenchmen that freed our stuck rope.

Trying to cook out of the wind

Claudio caught picking his nose

The Torre glacier

Cerro Torre is real!!!!

Lamas are real!!!

The Slovenian missiles aka Urban and Nejc

Jerome going big on the slackline

Justine leading on The Bottle

Switching over at a belay

Live music that went till morning after the bouldering festival

Topping out on the bottle with Justine on our first clear day.

Local bouldering around Chalten

Fitzroy and Poincenot

My next pizza delivery vehicle

testing out one of the creative garbage canz in town

Flailing on a warmup at the bouldering festival

Crazy eyes Claudio

Dancing with our first views of Fitzroy

El Chalten

Just one of the many friends we made on the bus ride.

Hangdogging Hardmen

We crawled out of the bus as we arrived in El Chalten around 430 am prepared to make our first unplanned Patagonian bivy at the bus station. The 33 hour ride had been interesting to say the least. The famous Route 40 had quickly turned from stunning mountains to barren desert and the nice smooth pavement gave way to bumpy dirt roads. We managed to cram into seats right behind our chain smoking driver on our overcrowded and claustrophobic little bus. All of this would have seemed normal until we lost a passenger in one of the stops, made a two our detour to get offensively overpriced food at a random little house in the middle of nowhere, and eventually ran out of gas and had to wait for an extra six hours late into the night. Our bivy spot at the bus station was soon compromised when the local police came and told us to leave. And so, we quickly packed up our things and stumbled into town where we found a camping area (more like a bunch of tents crammed into someones yard) and have been staying there ever since.

El Chalten is a tiny town placed near the foot of a wild and inspiring mountain range. On the good days you can get a clear view of Fitzroy and Poincenot from town but for the most part the weather tends to be bad. More locally, the town is surrounded by some high quality bouldering and sport climbing. Jerome, being the french sport climbing superstar that he is, soon had me going with him to many of these crags. After about a week of this, I started to get depressed and forced Jerome to go hiking with me up to Lago Torre on a clear day. The hike was stunning, giving views of Cerro Torre and the giant glaciers around it. By the end of this hike, Jerome had finally realized that the real climbing is the the mountains! We rushed back to camp to scheme and plot our next move.

The next day found us hiking and making our way across the Torre glacier to camp Niponino from where we would attempt a route on El Mocho. For some reason, the locals had all convinced us that we didnt need crampons or ice axes for this approach...I guess that was for people who actually know the way. "Jerome! Im not comfortable with this!!" is what I think I yelled (with a lot less swearing) as I slipped while trying to navigate back to the trail, way too high up on the glacier, only wearing a pair of old approach shoes. Finally, to safely make our way across the part riddled with snow ribs and cravasses back to the correct path we had to take off our socks and put them over our shoes. Surprisingly, it worked and after 9 hours of hiking we stumbled into camp.

At 4am the next morning we had 3 separate alarms to wake us up. I got lost for about half an hour trying to find camp while getting water but eventually Jerome woke up and we got rolling. We choked down our breakfast and headed up to the base of the climb. The route itself was amazing and we began it as the sun came up. An orange sunrise gave us a perfect view of the entire Fitzroy range. The route itself was amazing, following a crack system up a stunning arete on splitter granite (except when I got off route, terrified, runout, and placing nuts behind expanding flakes). On the top of the 9th pitch we decided to turn around and start heading down. Although the turn around seemed a bit premature, it ended up being a good thing to be conservative...I ran out of rope on two of the rapels before the next rap station and got a rope stuck at the last rapel (adventure! woohoo!). By the time we made it back to Chalten the next day we felt pretty satisfied and drank a lot of beer. The end. Oh yea if anybody at all actually reads this text the pictures are coming soon! The internet here is too slow to upload them.