Entries from Expedition Dispatches

Hola from Puerto Natales!

Beautiful day here in southern Chile for us. The team met shortly after a hearty breakfast and plenty of coffee to walk through the schedule and review all the necessary gear to keep the famed Patagonian weather at bay.

We then took most of the afternoon to explore, shop, read, nap, adventure around town by ourselves. Everyone seemed to have had a great day and we wrapped up the evening with meeting our 2 local guides, Mauricio, and Hector that will accompany us and share their insights on this trek.

We finished the evening with another wonderful meal and great conversations and a short but beautiful walk back to the hotel.

We head into the mountains tomorrow!

RMI Guide Casey Grom and friends!

Hola friends,

As we watched the winds continue to move across the upper mountain, we kept doing what we’ve done this entire expedition — gathering information, having honest conversations, and making thoughtful decisions with the reality in front of us.

The truth is this: we can prepare perfectly and still not be promised the summit.

Over the past weeks, this team has done everything within their control. We carried heavy loads when it would have been easier not to. We rested when rest felt unnatural. We ate when we weren’t hungry. We drank water when it was freezing. We managed headaches, wind, and the slow grind of altitude. We adapted when the forecast changed. We showed up for each other.

We put ourselves in position.

And that’s not a small thing.

Many other teams descended but we kept hope and we kept trying.

But Aconcagua does not negotiate. She doesn’t bend to training plans, travel schedules, or how badly we want it. The winds remained strong enough that continuing higher would have crossed the line from determined into unsafe.

So at 21,400 feet on the Grand Traverse, we made the call.

Turning around is never dramatic in the moment. It’s measured. It’s a look at each other and a nod of the head.  It’s built on experience and trust. And on big mountains, it’s often the decision that defines a team more than a summit photo ever could.

No one here failed. No one fell short. This team did the work. They earned the chance. And sometimes earning the chance — and having the wisdom to step back when the mountain says no — is the deeper success.

We walk down proud.

And grateful.

And ready for a shower and warmth.

RMI Guide Jess Wedel and the A-team

We had a nice rest day yesterday as we made our way from La Cienega to the famous Chimborazo Lodge. Tucked in one of the valleys under the south face of Chimborazo, it’s essentially a climbing museum that happens to offer rooms for climbers- every conceivable inch of wall space is covered in photographs or memorabilia spanning the entire history of alpinism both in Ecuador and abroad. Surrounded by dozens of llamas grazing in the surrounding fields, the ambiance was perfect the last night before our final summit attempt of the trip. 

This morning we awoke to dense fog and made our way up the road into Chimborazo National Park with never more than a few feet of visibility in front of bus. The hike up to high camp was longer, snowier and steeper than the approach the Cotopaxi hut, but at least we all have a few more red blood cells at this point in the trip! The Chimborazo high camp is much more primitive than the Refugios at Cayambe or Cotopaxi, but the big white domes up here are still a big upgrade over tents, especially in a raging thunderstorm like the one that rolled through a few hours after we got up here this afternoon.

There is a lot of snow on the ground up here and more falling as I write this, so we are unsure what the upper mountain will look like tonight and tomorrow. With a high degree of uncertainty around the state of snowpack and much more consequential terrain than our previous two mountains we are going to take a cautious approach into our climb tonight and climb as high as the mountain allows us to with a reasonable margin. We’ve controlled every variable we can at this point, so it’s just a matter of seeing what the mountain allows us to do. As of right now the plan is for a midnight departure, check back tomorrow to see how we fared! 

RMI Guide Henry Coppolillo

Hello again.

What an amazing day we had here in Chile today!

Today we started early, leaving the hotel and headed to the local marina to catch a boat ride to Magdalena Island to do a little penguin viewing. It was a beautiful and calm day which made the 1.5 hr boat ride relatively smooth and allowed us to glimpse a few whales breaching and dolphins too.

Once on the Island, we were all in awe of the cute penguins that were far less curious about us as we were about them. They just waddled in every direction while we took photos and just enjoyed being in such a peaceful place. We only spent an hour with them before heading back to the boat to minimize our impact.

Once back in Punta Arenas we rushed off to a quick lunch at one of the incredible restaurants in town, then hopped aboard our shuttle to Puerto Natales.

It was a smooth, albeit windy ride across the Patagonian landscape, as we  passed many Guanacos and Nandus along the way.

The team has just returned from another fantastic meal and are headed to bed.

RMI Guide Casey Grom and team

Hello again from Colera,

Surprise! We’re still here. The cold and the winds kept us from attempting a summit run early this morning. Instead we slept in and had breakfast “in bed” but it was actually just our sleeping bags because that was the only place warm enough. We decided as a team to stick around one more night — the forecast doesn’t look great but there’s always a chance. It could surprise to the upside. We press on here at nearly 20,000 feet — we’ve come this far, what’s one more night of frozen boots and wind lullabies?

Come on atmosphere simmer down now,

--RMI GuideJess Wedel and the A-team

Greetings and Hello (Hola) from Chile everyone!

The gang is all here, everyone has safely arrived and it’s great to have the team back together again.

Today was technically a down or rest day for us after all the long fights, but this team isn’t known for sitting around much. So after a nice breakfast and plenty of coffee and catching up, the group headed out to take in a few sights and make the most of our time here.

First up was an impromptu visit to a local natural Museum, filled with countless skeletons of what seemed like every mammal and bird from Chile.
It was remarkable and the highlight was a massive whale skeleton.

Up next we visited a ship museum with replicas of the Nao Victoria (Magellan’s ship), the HMS Beagle (Darwin’s) and the James Caird (Shackleton’s life raft) that he sailed to South Georgia island on.

It was a beautiful day and the crew throughly enjoyed spending time together once again. We’ve just wrapped up a wonderful dinner and celebrated a team members birthday!

RMI Guide Casey Grom and the 8 amigos!

“The wind you really got to dread is the one that howls inside your head…” -Muni, but perhaps adapted from somewhere else.

Hello hi there,

Today we climbed again to Camp 3 — Colera — at 19,600 feet.

Another windy, cold day. At this point it almost feels… expected. Normal, even. We wake up, we zip the tents carefully so they don’t become kites, we layer up, we check each other’s hoods and buckles, and we move.

We are dialed now. Dialed with our breaks. Dialed with our systems. Dialed with how to open a snack without sending it to Chile. We don’t rush. We don’t waste energy. We just keep taking the next step.

The stretch from Camp 2 to Camp 3 is one of my favorites on this mountain. Aconcagua reigning to our left — massive and unmoved. The Andes rolling out to our right in layers of red, gold, and shadow. Brutal and beautiful, side by side, as they so often are up here.

Colera is a stark place. The wind doesn’t whisper here — it announces itself. This is where the normal route meets the false Polish Traverse (the route we took up), the lines of climbers converging under the same summit skyline. The camp is tucked into large white rocks that jut upward like a jagged crown. We nestle ourselves into their protection as best we can.

Life at nearly 20,000 feet is not casual. Every movement costs something. Simple tasks feel consequential. But the team is steady. Eating. Drinking. Checking in. Doing the small things well.

Tonight we crawled into our tents early to let our bodies rest. Tomorrow is a big question mark. We’ve done everything we can to put ourselves in position.

Now we wait to see what the mountain says.

RMI Guide Jess Wedel and the Aconcagua team

The team absolutely styled Cotopaxi this morning, or more accurately, last night. Midnight departures are more or less the standard here in Ecuador, as the hut staff typically provides hot water for coffee and tea and bread rolls with butter and jam at 11 pm. We started out on a winding sandy trail above the refugio that quickly turned to firm crunchy snow, and were soon traversing the lower slopes of the glacier.

A brief but intense rain storm rolled through yesterday afternoon not long after we had arrived at the hut, so we approached the steeper upper mountain with caution due to some uncertainty around how much snow had fallen up there and how the resulting avalanche conditions might manifest. The tropical high-alpine snowpack on these peaks can behave in strange ways and is often unlike anything we'd typically encounter in the mountains back home. But this time around Dustin and I were pleasantly surprised to find an unreactive interface and minimal slab formation from the previous day's weather. The few inches that had fallen did however make for excellent climbing conditions, allowing us to move through the steep and exposed switchbacks below the summit confidently and efficiently.

Perhaps the only detracting factor of the climb was our few moments on the summit itself, which were kept rather brief due to lots of nasty smelling sulfuric gas, and lacked the iconic views of Cotopaxi's massive crater which was largely obscured by clouds. Once on the descent however the team continued to crush it, and we were back at the Refugio Jose Rivas before 8 am! This meant we've had most of the day to catch up on sleep, food and hydration at Hacienda La Cienega. Tomorrow we'll head to Chimborazo Lodge and start preparing for our last big objective! 

RMI Guide Henry Coppolillo

PS- I failed to take a single blog-worthy photo today, but I think Dustin has a few decent ones. I'll ask him to send them when he wakes up from his nap. 

That’s a wrap. We are back at the hotel in Puerto Natales, having completed the full O Circuit with our cups full both figuratively and literally. What an incredible adventure, made even better by a truly great group of people who now feel like old friends.

We woke up this morning to the same strong winds that ushered us into the park at the start of the trip. This time, though, they felt easy to shrug off. A hot shower and a real bed were waiting, which has a way of putting everything in perspective. As we made our way back, we couldn’t help but gawk at the towering mountains and hanging glaciers welcoming us into this beautiful corner of Patagonia, all while reflecting on just how far we had traveled to arrive right back where we began.

The weather on this trip was the best I’ve ever had out here, and that good fortune belonged entirely to this team. From start to finish, it felt like everything lined up just right. Now the only luck we need is choosing which wine to taste next.

This is the Torres trek signing off. Thanks for following along.

RMI Guide Dominic Cifelli

We are settled in at the Refugio Jose Rivas on Cotopaxi. It is an exceptionally beautiful evening above the valley cloud cover with the sun setting on the mountain.

A couple of nights of good sleep have done everyone well and we are as ready to climb as we can be. The team is hopping into bed right now in anticipation of another alpine start.

RMI Guide Dustin & Team