Just arrived back in Mendoza, Argentina after a week in the closet sub-range of the high Andes.My camera and I couldn´t get along, so none of those fabulous photos. These are borrowed from summitpost.org
I summited Cerro Rincon ,5300meters (17,490ft), the big peak above, three and a half days after leaving Mendoza at 2800ft. This is awfully fast to climb this high, and I thought I would blow a gasket there for a few hours there.
The following night, at Campo Salto de Aguas (14,200ft), all hell broke loose. Katabatic winds gusting to 100 mph nearly destroyed everything. I had gone to sleep buck naked, and struggled to hold the tent upright from the inside, get dressed, and pack my kit for what seemed like the inevitable destruction of my little home.
Argentine Army soldiers scurried for cover as their training mission became the real deal at 0337. The outfitters who maintained two gigantic steel and canvas tents were left to duck and dive as one of these beasts sailed away over a cliff , flying away into the night. Impotent, we ate cookies and drank beer after buttoning down the hatches.
Things slowly settled to an amazing dawn. Lightning storms rolled over the plains below. Reports say that I snored through the last few hours of tempest. Shell shocked soldiers crawled out of the rocks, and everyone was miraculously unhurt. My tent survived, with just a couple of others. Chairs, bits of tents, and God only knows what else lay scattered below the cliffs that Salto sits on top of.
In the following few days, I climbed two likely new rock routes with a Kiwi, Jaime Foxley. Here´s his and his wife Katie´s blog http://jkfoxley.blogspot.com/
The first is on the buttress of Los Amarillos immediately above Salto. 250 meters of fun, sometimes vertical scrambling, on red ´rock´ that thousands of andinistas have looked at before and had the good sense not to touch.
The other, a two pitch affair on the lower slabs of Cerro San Bernardo; wonderful glacial polished stuff that took a few good cams, and one of my titanium pins Jaime slammed home with a crude hammer borrowed from the ski resort tool shed.
Jaime and Katie should be down from the mountains soon, and as Jaime was playing nice with his camera, some photos should turn up on his blog. Yeah! check them out along with Katie´s account of the storm!
3 days or so here in currently tropical Mendoza, then I´m off to Aconcagua, the highest peak outside of the Himalaya.
