For years I had read epic stories from climbers who have ventured to Patagonia at the tip of South America. Two overriding themes always seemed to prevail –bad weather and failure. On Thanksgiving Day of 2000 I found myself on a plane heading to Argentina. Over the two previous years I had experienced a streak of good luck, with successful big wall/filming expeditions to West Africa, Southern Greenland, East Africa and Baffin Island. Maybe this was the reason I chose to ignore all sensibilities and believe that I could go to Patagonia and beat the odds. The team I was traveling with was actually just a group of friends; Steve Bechtel, Mike Lilygren, Justin Bowersock, Ty Mack and Bobby Model. We were going to Los Glaciares National Park to attempt a free climb on Fitz Roy.

After 3 days of airplanes and busses we eventually made our way to a small town called El Chalten'. From there it was a 2 hour hike to our base camp in the beech wood forest of Campo Rio Blanco. We employed the help of 9 horses to assist in carrying our ton of gear, including all the food we would need for 6 weeks. The locals there say that the wind sweeps the land like the “Broom of God (La escoba de dios)”. I didn’t truly understand how massive that broom was until my first trip up to the base of Fitz Roy from camp. Imagine a 4 to 6 hour post-holing uphill schlogg including spots of exposure, slab avalanche potential and exposed bergshrunds. Then add negotiating through a heavily crevassed glacier and all the while fighting 50 – 80 mph winds. This all takes place before any true rock climbing can even be attempted. The only somewhat calm place to wait out the eternal barrage of blowing snow and rain is in the snow cave at Passo Superior, a small col about a half-mile from the true base of the mountain. Snow cave life consists of two activities; eating a lot of fatty foods to stay warm and shoveling snow to get semi-dry. After a few weeks I started wondering what in the world I was doing there and asked myself how I could have been so naive.

Don’t get me wrong, Patagonia can be a beautiful place if the sun comes out and the wind stops blowing. Which it did a few times in the six weeks we were there, but only long enough to take some pictures and halfway dry out the pile of wet clothing and gear we had acquired. Fitz Roy’s summit stands at 4200’ above the Piedras Blancas Glacier, in six weeks we had climbed only six pitches (about 900’) and eventually had to pull our fixed lines and walk away empty handed, a feeling I had yet to experience in the mountains. Failure is a hard pill to swallow, especially when you travel half way around the world to swallow it. But living in adverse and sometimes life threatening conditions always makes me realize how lucky we all are to be alive in this world today, and how fortunate we are to have luxuries such as a dry bed, a shower and extreme places to visit to keep us all humble.