Torre Valley
April 2 - 23, 2024
The Torre Valley looked very enticing to me last year but I didn’t feel confident going out there alone at the time. However, after asking Rolo and Ty about the route across the glacier, I decided it was worth at least going out to take a look and decide for myself. I’d just be very strict as usual about avoiding no fall zones and not making any irreversible moves, and be ok with turning around if I encountered any section where I couldn’t stick to this. It turned out to be a lot easier to get out there than I was imagining.
I hiked out to Laguna Torre in the evening on April 1st, woke up for an underwhelming sunrise, and then went back to sleep in my bivy sack. It started dumping snow during my nap and I was awoken by Manu, a concerned park ranger wondering if I was ok lying in the fetal position on the ground with snow piling up on top of me. I assured him that everything was great and this was just how I tend to operate, but he still seemed concerned. He invited me into their cook tent for pancakes and warm drinks before I headed on my way. I made very slow progress the next day, taking hours to walk just a couple miles in total. Intermittent snow flurries made for remarkable conditions and I couldn’t stop taking photos of the ice queen Cerro Torre in all her glory. I slept at the edge of the glacier that night so I could start early the next day and navigate the glacier with plenty of daylight.
It ended up being quite straightforward to find a route across the glacier that avoided crevasses. I realized I forgot to bring sunscreen and, not wanting to get roasted from all the reflected light on a bluebird day, decided to protect my face with a balaclava, sun hat, sunglasses, tape across my face, and SPF chapstick smeared on any remaining patches of skin. I stopped to check out a couple sweet ice caves along the way.
Making my way deeper into the Torre Valley flanked by Cerro Torre on the left and Fitz Roy on the right is an experience that really left an impression. Huge seracs were frequently ripping down from the hanging Adela Glacier while echoes from rockfall ricocheted off the walls on both sides of the valley. I was passing through a gateway into Elysium, an exalted frozen wasteland of alpine rubble, a place where divine splendor and wrath seem to coexist. The sublime was embodied by these ancient towering fortresses of rock and ice, commanding complete respect, authenticity, and humble devotion. This place seemed alien, completely indifferent to human activity, the cold unforgiving rock exposing and cutting straight through any weakness or impurity, simply amplifying whatever attitude one brings. I tried to bring reverence and curiosity. Eventually I located the climber’s camp called Niponino and dropped most of my gear there before continuing on very steep and loose terrain up to Noruegos for sunset. I stood there soaking the place in long after it got dark. I was dwarfed on all sides by sky-piercing rock faces that seemed to take on new character in the faint light. It felt like the grandest cathedral imaginable. I eventually descended back to Niponino in the dark and quickly fell asleep.
Noruegos at dusk
I walked back a short way down the Torre Glacier the next morning to shoot a magical sunrise. After exploring some other interesting glacial features including an icy portal to hell, I headed back to Niponino and went to sleep for a few hours. The light was incredible that evening for a drone flight.
Later that night I was feeling extremely nauseous and started throwing up. I think my cheese or salami went bad but I’m not totally sure. My plan was to wake up super early and go back up to Noruegos to try flying the drone up to the summit mushroom of Torre Egger but I had trouble falling back asleep after throwing up and was feeling so shitty that I decided just to sleep in and start heading back to town whenever I woke up.
Sunrise on the Torre Glacier
Icy portal to hell
The sandwich that did me in
I was awoken at noon by a woman’s voice asking me in Spanish if I had a radio. Confused and still half asleep, I poked my head out of the tent. Two women were there asking for help, and through a combination of broken Spanglish and Google Translate they told me that two other women in their group of four were severely injured in a climbing accident after an anchor failed while rappelling down from Filo del Hombre Sentado, resulting in broken vertebrae and an exposed tibia fracture among other serious injuries. They hadn’t been able to get a hold of anyone on their radio, so the two uninjured climbers left their friends in as good condition as possible and walked through the night and morning to Niponino hoping to find help. We used my inReach to send a message to CAX, the volunteer rescue team in El Chalten. While waiting for a response, I sent Fiona an inReach message asking her to urgently call Rolo’s WhatsApp number out of the blue, hoping that Rolo might be able to get in touch with CAX right away and initiate a rescue more quickly. Rolo alerted CAX, and it was around this time that the two women were able to speak with CAX directly on the radio as well, relaying details of the accident. By a stroke of luck, there was a tourism helicopter in El Calafate that was deployed to help with the rescue. The helicopter was unable to land very close to the injured climbers, so instead they flew back and forth from town to Niponino ferrying out a couple rescuers at a time to reach the injured climbers as soon as possible and help stabilize them. Something like 20 other people walked from town as well. The huge rescue team carried the two climbers on stretchers from Filo del Hombre Sentado down to Niponino where the helicopter was able to land and airlift them to a hospital in El Calafate early the following morning. It sounds like both were in extremely dire condition after being stuck in the mountains for 36 hours after the accident but are recovering well. Climbing Magazine published this article about the rescue.
Once the helicopter arrived with the first rescuers, I left all my food with the uninjured climbers and started walking back across the glacier, as I was still feeling extremely weak from my night of vomiting and sleep deprivation and didn’t think I would be a positive addition to the very large and competent rescue team. I made it back to the Tyrolean traverse by the shore of Laguna Torre around midnight where I ran into Gonzalo and Franco, two guys who worked at the nearby campground and were close friends with one of the injured women. They took me into their cook tent and fed me heartily. Meeting them and feeling their warmth and companionship after all that had just taken place really went a long way. I hiked back to town the next day and ate a pound of ice cream to try and further replenish myself.
Helicopter first arriving
Headlights from CAX walking across the glacier
Gonzalo and Franco watching the helicopter carry their friends to safety
Medio kilo - much needed
Fiona already had made plans to come visit from Chicago and arrived in town the day after I got back from the events in the Torre Valley. I was so excited to see her and spend two weeks together. I did my best to be a good mountain guide, although I led us into a sticky situation one day on the way to Laguna Sucia, accidentally sandbagging her into following me on terrain that ended up being much different than she was expecting. In our mutual meltdown, I uncharacteristically dropped my phone deep into the talus. After walking with her back to the Poincenot campground and making sure she was safe there, I ran back out there in the dark and excavated a bunch of heavy boulders to find my phone shortly before it started raining. We did various other outings including to Laguna Huemul and partway out the Torre Valely. I’m grateful for the wonderful trip we had. It was really special to show her a little more of my world and create shared experiences with her in this landscape that has been so personally meaningful to me. By bringing herself she only enhanced the color and magic, as she tends to do.
Master photographers at work. Why find interesting foregrounds when you can just arrange your own?
Another weather window arrived two days after Fiona flew home, and I headed back into the Torre Valley with the sense that there was still a lot more to see and photograph out there. This time I started hiking from town at around 6pm for no good reason and walked for 11 hours through the night, arriving at Noruegos at the base of Cerro Torre at around 5am. Though it was a rather silly endeavor, it was invigorating to push myself and give myself a reminder that I’m still quite capable of doing hard stuff in the mountains when I want to despite feeling less of a drive to do so compared to a couple years ago. It was also cool to do this with relative ease in the dark in a single push when the exact same route had felt like a huge adventure just three weeks earlier. I reveled in walking across the glacier at night, in complete silence except for the crunch of my crampons digging into the glittering ice, with the watchful forms of Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy silhouetted against the starry sky. Upon arriving to Noruegos exhausted, I found a bivy cave and slept for a couple hours before waking up to shoot sunrise. There was a cloud inversion over the icefield with some of those clouds pluming over the summits of Torre, Egger, and Stanhardt. I kept trying to fly the drone up close to the summit mushroom of Egger but the wind up there was ripping too powerfully for the drone to handle, and I just barely managed to land it before the battery died in the wind and cold. I slept most of the rest of the day and then flew the drone around Aguja Bifida at sunset, nearly losing signal behind the rock tower.
Sunrise was spectacular the next morning, still with plenty of wind for the drone to battle. I spent the next few hours scrambling around on the slabs above Noruegos, about as close to the base of Cerro Torre as I could get without entering sketchy glaciated terrain. There were many incredible ice caves up there framing the west face of Fitz Roy with interesting light and weather blowing through all day. The weather started worsening and I went back down to my bivy cave to take a late afternoon nap. It was only getting stormier when I awoke from my nap and the forecast looked terrible for the following few days so I decided it was probably a good time to bail. I packed up and started descending the steep and loose terrain down to the glacier. The unrelenting wind seemed to get funneled through the glacial corridor between Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy. I was getting violently blown forward while being pelted with freezing rain. I was glad to get a little taste of the true fury of this place. It felt as though the mountains were telling me in no uncertain terms that I’d spent enough time here and it was time to leave, literally blowing me out of the valley. I set up camp for the night once I got across the glacier, used my last drone battery the next morning, and walked back to town.
