Not-climbing at
Refugio Frey

The bus in to Barriloche follows a long winding lakeside road, with steep, forested hills. Up ahead we make out little spikes on the horizon, too small and too many to be mountains, too big to be trees, those can't be rock, can they?

We believe our eyes once we open the guidebook, picked up at the Club Andino Barriloche for a few peso. The centrefold shows a whole valley full of spires, and each page lists the routes on one of them.

A few days later we're on the number 11 bus out of town, which deposits us in the Cerro Cathedral ski resort's ample car park, in steady drizzle. Our aptitude for early starts had got us here at noon, so we convince ourselves lunch is in order before we start, to save our limited food. A toasted cheese sadwich is all we can bring ourselves to afford, so it's not long before we have to lift our raincoated packs and face up to the walk.

Fortunately we are soon out of view of the mocking chair lift, which doesn't allow backpacks, as the road curves around the first hill. After the first few turns, all signposted, it narrows to a path through the forset. The walking is slow but steady, the rain means we aren't hot and there are no flies. Mud, steep climbs, a step-ladder brige (which I manage to fall through), more uphill.

At last we can see the treeline, a few more twists and Refugio Frey comes into view, how welcoming. Why's my camera not focusing propperly... aah, it's just a bit damp, I'll dry it out tonight. We choose a clearing in the bushes, surrounding the lagoon, pitch the tent, and ignore the little red things floating in our water for supper, they don't seem to be swimming do they? The rain turns to snow, a dusting of white over our dreamless sleep.

Iris isn't feeling too good in the morning, but it wasn't the little red floaters, just a bit more of the flu she thought she'd got over in Barriloche. I take the opportunity to laze around a bit, then go for a walk up to the next lake, Laguna Schmoll, in the afternoon. But tomorrow we'll be climbing, we tell ourselves, the question is what.

Hearing an American accent from the tent next door, we decide to pop over and ask help with the French grades, and perhaps a recommendation. It's a little yellow bibler, occupied by the owner of the accent and his French wife. It seems we need a 4 or an easy 5, which aren't too plentiful, we should go to El Abuelo, see that spire over there? You have to walk up this way, above that one, it looks a bit different from that angle...

We get talking, and it soon emerges that they were also on Aconcagua recently, on the Polish side. And one day, this tent blew into camp... we can hardly believe our ears, Nir's green bibler is sitting at a high camp, under some rocks, and we've just bumped into the people who caught it! They're almost as surprised as we are!

Less surprising is that we have great difficulty finding our way among the spires the next morning. The fact that some of the white space between them requires climbing or abseiling doesn't help either. Eventually we find one of the 4s, a short little thing up a minor pillar. As always with the first lead after a few months off, I'm not exactly itching to start up a long 5 afterwards.

So instead of hunting out another 4, we decide it would be fun just to walk to the top, minus the pack and ropes. What a view! And what a pity all the routes up the top spire, Cerro Cathedral propper, are 6a and harder.

We hit on a more cunning plan the next morning: follow some locals to the crag. We would never have geussed you have to walk around the left side of El Tonto, under that block, scramble up behind and down to the right-hand side.

As well as lunch in the sun, we manage to fit in a fair bit of climbing that afternoon, enjoying the thin vertical moves from the security of a toprope. We run out of fingers before running out of daylight, so walk, abseil and scramble out way back down to the lake in the long twilight.

With one day of food remaining, we bemoan our lack of a good ropegun, and resign ourselves to another day at El Tonto, the only top-ropeable pillar. No need for an early start, as the day is long and there are only a few routes left to do... Iris muses that we're both natuaral layabouts, who should really climb with natural self-starters if we ever want to do anything. I can't bring myself to agree, at least not yet, not out loud.

We get a warm welcome when we do arrive at the crag, our American neighbour is rather glad we didn't take any longer. He tried a different approach route, up an easy climb. What the guidebook failed to warn him about was the length of this climb: we discover him half way up a huge blank slab, clean out of rope, with his last protection a jammed knot below the lip. He's only too happy to be tossed a rope from above, saved the dilemma of untying versus downclimbing.

My big climb of the day is a 6a+ called Meteoritos, a solid 50m all the way up the pillar. Up a face into a corner, a traverse out from under a roof onto an airy arete, continuous good climbing with decent holds if you look, warm sunshine grazing the rock. Not as much fun for my belayer though, sitting hunched up in the wind with only the condors for company.

Our neighbour also thought the climbing looked good - good enough that he decided to rope-solo it while his belayer walked down to camp ahead of us.

Out of food and out of fuel, we walk down the next day enjoying the views we didn't guess at on the way up. And not yet regretting that I didn't get even our neighbour's name, much less address.

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