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Gregory Crouch climbing at the end of the first day |
We passed the base of Inominata on the way down and saw Doug and Rolo again, now way up near the top of St. Exupery. Enough light remained for them to make the summit before dark. They're cracking off the second ascent of a 780-meter alpine wall, and they're going to complete the 28 pitches after starting at 11 a.m. I'm impressed!
The bomber weather holds. Fed and rehydrated Jim and I feel okay. We need a new project. We want a face this time—a route with a plumb line. Rolo thinks we should try some six or seven hundred meter cracks on Aguja Poincenot's North Face he saw a few years ago. Jim and I give each other the eye, nod, and begin loading gear. The sleeping bags and the stove go in this time.
Twenty-four hours later, we're 300 meters up the North Face of Poincenot. The wind is blowing, a cloud cap has swallowed the summit of Fitzroy, the temperatures are plummeting and it's hard to ignore that a storm is coming on.
The gut-grinding howl of the wind rises over the top of Fitzroy. The wind is oddly out of the north. We on the North Face of Poincenot are in Fitzroy's wind shadow. Yet, with a storm on the march, we need a bivi, and fast.
The Wind's Cheerleader
I scramble up a pitch to the top of a sloping ledge and scope some bivi possibilities on a rock tower over to the right. Jim jumars the load while I rappel over on the slack of the fixed rope and check out the sites. One is too small, but the other will do. We shuttle our gear over amid snow flurries and wild gusts. I prepare the site while Jim chops ice from the back of a ledge beside us. We make a floor of sleeping pads, ropes, and backpacks and dive into bivi sacks and sleeping bags. The ledge is one person wide, and only a person and a half long, but it has good slope, rolling us back towards the solid rock instead of pitching us out into the void. It works if we put our heads at opposite ends and overlap our feet in the middle.
"Cup of potatoes, Jim?" I'm exhausted all of a sudden.
"Sounds great."
We sit in our bags with our feet over the drop and use the ends of our sleeping pads to make a shelter for the stove. While the water heats I do a quick inventory of our food.
"Hey Jim, how dumb do you think we are?"
"Pretty dumb, why?"
"Because we're gonna run out of food again. These flakes for tonight, and then only some candy bars and another bag of potato flakes. We don't even have a tea-bag. DUMB!" I cuss us roundly for idiots.
Visibility hasn't disappeared, and we are treated to scenes of clouds and snow flurries racing through the cols between the peaks. The dull roar of the major north wind still grinds over the top of Fitzroy. Local gusts sound loud and sharp like gunshots as they attack our lonely ledge high on this wild Patagonian wall. When the local gusts stop snow flakes pile up on our bivi sacks—then the gusts try and drive the flakes into the little breathing holes out of which Jim and I poke our noses. We howl and cheer the better gusts of wind.
"Pretty radical, Jim. We're squarely in harm's way again."
"This feels like a wanker storm, Greg. I've never seen a storm from the north before."
"Me neither, but if the wind swings around to the west we're totally screwed."
Where are you going?
What do you want to do?
