Friday, February 12, 2010

bariloche, el bolson, frey climbing

on paper it was a great plan. erick and i would stay a night in bariloche, hike our camping and climbing gear up to refugio frey, stay 2 nights, climb 1 day, then come down and meet don. we'd buy food for a week, erick and i could carry that and some of don's gear since our packs would be empty with all our gear up at frey, we'd get one great week of climbing in and then head back to bariloche so don could meet up with another friend and we'd move on.

unfortunately the infamous Patagonian weather did not cooperate. the summer weather here this year has been all messed up due to el niƱo, very wet even in usually stable areas like bariloche.

erick and i did hike our camping gear up. it was really windy (30 mph winds with 50 mph gusts) for the 2 days. got up there to a few inches of snow. spent a cold and windy and rainy day sitting in the refugio. erick went to check on the tent and it didn't look good, the stakes were pulled up from the wind and the tent was held down by rocks. so Erick moved the tent and built up the rock wall wind break.

came down and met don. forecast was windy and rainy for a few more days. decided it wouldn't be fun sitting up there in rain and heavy wind for a few days. spent a couple days in bariloche eating lots of ice cream and drinking beer. then headed down to el bolson for 2 nights, a cute laid back town a couple hours south of here. went on a hike and ate a lot.

came back to bariloche, forecast looked good. hiked up the food and gear. miraculously our tent was still intact despite the constant 30 mph winds and gusts for the 4 days we were gone. good tent. weather cleared and we got in 2 days of climbing on 3 different spires. fun climbing and nice summits. unfortunately we were going to climb this morning before we hiked out but it was cloudy and windy and people told us it was forecast to rain. so we slowly packed up and right when we started hiking out the skies cleared and it was beautiful. we continued down.

so 2 days of climbing out of 6 planned days. guess that's patagonian weather. don's meeting another friend here. erick and i will stay a couple nights then take an overnight bus to Mendoza and make our way to aranales in search of more climbing with hopefully good weather.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thank goodness for the Great Wall of Refugio Frey! Must be some pretty good tent. I always wonder what happened to the great Andes culture.

Happy Valentine and Lunar New Year!