Monte Tronador, Day 2 (Feb 7th)

The couple of hours before my alarm rang were the best. I was sleeping deeply, reassured that the wind would help our cause. Wind has its own inconveniences, of course, but I was mentally prepared for that. I was not for the rain (I was expecting snow, truthfully), but then, we were still at a relatively low altitude (about 1000m). Many times during the night, we heard the fantastic crashing of pieces of glacier, which sound like tremendous thunder.

The birds were chirping. From my windows, I could see that the skies, although still gray, were a lot lighter than yesterday. I got ready, and when I got out, I was pretty stiff all over! That's what staying put in a very small tent for nearly 17 hours will do to you. Thank goodness for pee bottles.

Ricardo, Maximo, Nativo, Victor

I ate a lot of fruit for breakfast. I needed to get through the fresh food here, before leaving for the higher camp. Last night, at dinner, I felt deeply disappointed in a promising goat cheese I'd bought at a specialty cheese store. It was about the most insipid thing I'd ever tasted. Hell, even salt-free butter is tastier! Argentines like their cheeses rather bland. The other I'd brought was tasty, thank goodness. Tasty, but not strong, but it is about the strongest stuff you can find here.

My bag was ready. Climbing stuff, ice picks, lunch, and a strong desire to move!

This is the glacier that made such fantastic, thunderous sounds during the night.

Out of the tent, people were happy! Some were laying clothes and things about on the trees to dry, but I didn't trust the rain to stay away and just lay it around inside my tent as best I could to get it to dry like that.

We left at around 8h45 for the three quarter of an hour walk to Ventisquero Negro to start the day's learning. The walk itself is through a lot of loose rocks of varying sizes.

Maximo and Nativo left us near the base and went in search of a suitable ice wall. While they are doing that, let me talk a little about them.

Maximo is an Argentine from the Bariloche area where he lives with his wife and child.
He teaches mountaineering at the university here, and during summer break (meaning now, in this hemisphere), guides groups such as ours. We were lucky to have him as he doesn't like to do too many! He is very experienced, and an excellent communicator, with a very easy going manner and lots of joking. He awakened our interest in a ton of things, was very present always, available and flexible.

Nativo is from Brasil and was in part hired for this specific gig because of the majority of Brasilians.

He is pretty much a legend in Brasil and South America for a lot of the things he has done for the mountaineering world, to which I will probably come back in a later entry. At first, he was reserved, but after a couple of days, we were able to see that he liked to joke around as well, and we had a lot of fun. Both of our guides made us feel very safe and in good hands, and I am pretty sure all of us trusted them unreservedly.

Maximo is back, he guides us to a great ice wall that Nativo is busy cleaning (Ventisquero Negro is called so because, this being a secondary glacier, it got created by a higher glacier falling in pieces over 1000m below and re-creating, and thus receives not only ice and snow but a lot of rock as well, so it is covered in gritty pebbles and the such). We gear up.

The day got broken up with them teaching us things that got progressively more difficult and then us practicing them. First was being able to walk in crampons. Those will less experience tend to slice open their pants with them the first few times (which I did a few years back), or trip over them. We learned to position our feet to walk on steeper and steeper ground and to switch positions from one to the other, always trying to make sure to use whatever technique required the least energy. A half hour had barely gone by when my quads started shaking, and I don't consider myself weak!



Then the ice tools were incorporated into it. We broke for lunch. It rained a little during the day, never hard enough to make things miserable, but certainly enough to make me more than thankful for my goretex clothes.

In the afternoon, we saw some techniques to get outselves out of difficult situations and practiced them, and also started to actually climb. The day flew by, everyone seemed eager to learn, but all was done with as much good humour and joking as intensity, and we got to know one another more and more.

We left most stuff right there, protected under rocks, and walked back to camp to start cooking. Those who'd left their stuff out to dry found them even wetter than they had been. Everyone pretty much converged toward the same cooking spot so that dinner was a communal affair, with joking, and the sharing of stories. As I will likely be speaking a lot of my companions, let me introduce you to them:


Xuxa, Rodrigo, Emerson and me.

You already know our teachers, Maximo and Nativo, and my two travel buddies Rodrigo (the dark haired one who, at 24, was the youngest in the course) and the Rodrigo we also call Xuxa (pronouned Shusha), the blond one. The only other woman, Simone, is traveling with two friends, Ricardo and Victor, and they share a tent. They also span 3 decades, with Victor in his twenties, she in her thirties (a few months younger than me) and Ricardo a very young 40 (he is Japanese descent and honestly looks over 10 years younger than he is) Simone, we found out a few days later, has also traveled with Marcelo, my ex-boyfriend, in the past, and this discovery led to a great many exclamations about how small the world is and then sharing stories and finding out how old friends are doing. All three are athletic and experienced rock climbers. Then come 5 guys traveling on their own: the only two Argentines, Lucas and Sergio, and the 3 Brasilians, Sergio, Emerson and Josias. Lucas is quiet, observant and steady and comes from Buenos Aires. He is the one who remained the most reserved throughout. Sergio, from pretty close to Puerto Madryn, is quite the opposite, and we got to know him pretty quickly, as well as his wife, whom he spoke of very often (but who, due to a small incident with a field rat, refuses to camp with him anymore). Brasilian Sergio (yes,in a small group, we managed to have two Rodrigos, and two Sergios) we differentiated from Argentine Sergio whose name was pronounced Serhio, like the ¨h¨in hospital, and the Brasilian Serjio, like the ¨j¨in jelly. At 52, he was the oldest of the students, and it was very rare to see him without a smile. He always had kind words for everyone. Later, his girlfriend came to accompany him and spent the day waiting while we studied, and she was a great addition too. Emerson, jovial and always merry and telling us stories to crack us up, was a constant source of good humour, which is always a blessing in a large group. Josias, just as jovial as Emerson if less bustling with it, was also a very steady presence, and in addition he was also the group snorer, and a rather formidable one at that, needing gusting winds to be drowned out. Everyone shared in the mountain philosophy of being there to help others out, and sharing came naturally to everyone.

So, imagine this cluster of people laughing merrily around the cooking stoves, happy and excited to be where they were, talking over the days's lessons and imagining the morrow's, and you will have a good idea of what it was like. I went to bed with a light heart that night.