Reeve's Roadtrip Blog

(Route topo here: http://www.pataclimb.com/climbingareas/chalten/fitzgroup/exupery/chiaro.html) Tony and I arrived in El Chalten, the gateway town for the Fitz Roy massif, a day into a veritable heatwave. The town, we were told by a local builder, has grown from a collection of 20 families fifteen years ago to its current population of about 1000. This rapid increase is in response to the commensurate increase in the number of people visiting the adjoining Parc Nacional los Glaciares for both walking and climbing. Consequently the town provides a comfortable base, with its myriad of bars and bakeries, and the chocolateria! Tony lamented his lack of shorts in the unexpected heat. We'd been expecting to suffer through atrocious weather in our full-on hardshell gear! We organised ourselves and packed our bags on our first morning in town, wishing we had been able to leave the previous day like everyone else will have done. The few climbers remaining in the valley expressed surpris...

I fondly remember becoming aware of Bishop bouldering by watching the first dosage film, sat in a scruffy student house in Nether Edge. Without access to terrestrial television, Jon, Geth and I would intensely devour any DVD we laid our hands on. Perhaps through a combination of the forced repeated viewing of Sharma, Graham and Rands, and the Zeitgheist that held true in our house (Sharma was the man, Bishop was the place!) a desire to climb in the buttermilks was imprinted in my climbing psyche. Ambition and enthusiasm was then left for several years to mature. For the first few days the climbing felt very alien to me. Weeks of primarily climbing granite cracks had left me unprepared for overhanging crimpfests. It took me equal effort to maintain the discipline to persist through the unfamiliarity without becoming discouraged, yet also to have the self-restraint to avoid going mad and destroying my body on every 5 star line in sight. My enjoyment of the climbing in the Buttermilks...