Getting High-South American Style.

Published in NZ Wilderness Magazine June 2004

Sean Waters and Jo Kippax make the first ascent of the notorious south face of Cerro Aconcagua by a New Zealand team.

"What do you know about the south face of Aconcagua?' There was a long pause, before finally, the local guide lifted his eyes from the paper on his desk and fixed us with a weathered stare. 'The only thing that I know is that those people that come back, swear they'll never go near it again'. Silence. As he went back to his paperwork we realised that the advice was over. Opting to put his words down to the wonderful Latino sense of melodrama, we smiled naively, and wandered off along the tree lined Mendoza streets to drink an afternoon coffee. Before too many weeks were up we would be aching for the shady cafes of Argentina's fourth largest city and ruefully pondering the guides' ominous words.

Cerro Aconcagua lies in the center of that mountain backbone of South America, the Andes. Thrust 6962m into the rarified atmosphere by the same colossal geological forces that have formed New Zealand's mountain landscapes, Aconcagua is the highest peak in the Americas, indeed the world outside of the Himalayan ranges. We had come to climb its' southern precipice. At 2800m tall the South Face is among the worlds' biggest mountain walls and seems custom built to repel anyone with an instinct for self-preservation. Appallingly loose rock, huge ice cliffs and continual avalanches conspire to ensure that not many mountaineers ever set foot on its plunging slopes. The other side of the mountain however, is a very different story.

Aconcagua was first climbed in 1897 by Mattias Zurbriggen, the famous Swiss guide who, in New Zealand in 1895, was beaten in the race to climb Mt Cook, by three young colonial upstarts. When he finally staggered onto Aconcagua's oxygen deprived summit he could scarcely have imagined what a circus the mountain would become. As one of the 'seven summits'- the highest mountains on the world's seven continents, the peak now sees thousands of climbers each season, from all over the globe. Almost all of these hopefuls, including our very own Helen Clark, head to the 'normal' route on the north-west side of the mountain. While technically easy, little more than a high altitude walk, the lack of oxygen, extreme cold and life threatening weather cull out the majority. Most of the hoards submit in the face of an extreme environment and few reach the summit. Of those that persevere, the people still capable of surveying their surroundings may peer nervously over the edge of the abandoned side of the mountain, the South Face. Far below them is Plaza Francia, the dusty, parched, hell hole of a base camp that, for three weeks, we called home.

Some base camps in the worlds' mountains are fantastically beautiful. Plaza Francia is not one of them. Nestled in a martian landscape of decomposing red rock, it is, alternately, scorching hot and deathly cold. Every time the wind blows, which is almost incessantly, clouds of red dust sweep the valley covering everything, both inside and outside your tent, in a fine, rouge grit. Everything we ate crunched between the teeth and tea became soup-like. After three weeks of waiting and preparing, even our souls were dusty and our resolve to attempt the route was weakening by the day. We hoped to climb the face in single, four day push, carrying everything we needed and not returning to basecamp until we had reached the summit. To have any chance of pulling it off we needed to get our bodies prepared for altitudes of nearly 7000m but during an acclimatization climb up the normal route we had not fared well, feeling sick as dogs for the two nights we spent not far below the summit. The lack of oxygen up high is totally debilitating and, if not adjusted to slowly, fatal. Imagine the worst hangover you've ever had. Moving just a few steps feels as though you've sprinted 100m, headaches and nausea lurk, and, due to some strange physiological reality, you urinate ten to the dozen.

Waiting back in Plaza Francia, the colossal face loomed over us day and night, nagging at our doubts and feeding our fear. We worried about the wind, we worried about the avalanches and we worried about the altitude. When we went to bed we worried some more. As the days left on our mountaineering permit dwindled, the decision to get on with it, despite a fresh dump of snow came as a huge relief. Heading off with morale sapping loads of five days food, fuel to melt snow for all our water and a carefully selected array of technical gear and ropes, we were finally going to find out if the grim reputation was deserved.

Someone smiled on us for the next five days. Every night we would crawl into our sleeping bags, exhausted, and wonder if the weather was about to turn nasty, but each morning the deep blue sky of high altitude would stretch clear to the horizons over Chile and Argentina. It was as if the gods of storm and tempest knew we were stretched enough without the worry of more wind or snow. The climb unfolded as a series of huge, difficult rock steps interspersed with long slopes of steep ice. The rock proved every bit as bad as the stories- everything we touched came apart under our weight and clattered off into the void below our feet, and the safety equipment we tried to attach to the mountain was of purely psychological benefit. The ice slopes felt more secure but were serrated into 'penitentes', thin fins of ice up to a meter high that conspired with the lack of oxygen to make progress painfully slow. By the fourth night we were perched on an iceshelf at two thirds height and completely committed. Going back down was inconceivable, by far the easiest way off the wall was by going up and over the summit, eight hundred meters above us. The next morning we climbed past a Brazilian climber who had been hanging, irretrievably, on the end of a rope, since his death in 1997, a stark reminder of the fine line between success and getting it horribly wrong. Darkness found us 200m below the summit, very cold and vomiting in the snow, struggling to hold it together. Slowly, methodically, we moved up until at 1.30 am we could go no higher. Thirty seconds was all the summit saw of us before we turned and pointed our cold noses down the normal route. Elation would come later when we were warm and safe.

The guide was right- as the locals usually are. We had come back and I swear that I'll never go near it again. In fact, had we known what we know now, we may never have chanced our hand- but that is the essence of adventure. Sipping a dust free café-con-leche in the idyllic, leafy streets of Mendoza, the images of vertical cat litter and the last vestiges of high altitude headaches slowly faded from memory as dreams and plans for new escapades began to form.