Cerro Tronador: A Journey to the Underworld and Back

“Let’s stop here for a minute.” Jim dropped his heavy pack to the ground before I had a chance to respond, and flopped down onto the river rocks. I peeled off my own backpack, relieving myself of 60-ish pounds of wet ski gear and mountaineering equipment, and leaned my battered body against a small boulder. The scene before me had an ethereal quality to it, as if I was looking at the image from above.?

We sat next to Rio Aguas Turbias – “River Muddy Waters” in Spanish – and the sun was shining for the first time in days. The raging, gurgling fingers of the rapid before us curled through a channel of white and gray rocks, occasionally surging with a burst of vicious power to splash onto the remains of an old footbridge; a skeleton of rusted cables and rotten planks with gaping holes.?

“I need a moment,” Jim’s voice felt far away, and I turned my head slowly, struggling to bring my focus back to his face; a sunburned nose, sharp cheekbones, and streaks of dirt. It seemed crazy to think that just five days of cold and limited calories could already have such a visible, physical effect. And yet, I could feel the hollowness in my own stomach; the tightness of my chapped cheeks and stinging lips.?

“I wanted to stop here before we cross back over the river.” Jim spoke slowly, testing out the right words. “It feels a bit like we went to the Underworld; to a hostile place of shadows, separated from the land of men…” Jim was gaining momentum now. “...And now we’ve come back to the River Styx. Our guide awaits us on the other side.”?

I laughed with pure delight; the analogy was perfect. We had just existed for days in a space without any obvious signs of human life; where the elements had pushed us to the bare bones of survival, and hunger and pain sharpened the edges of reality. We had slept in the mud, shredded the skin of our hands on vicious underbrush, and staggered our way through a raging snow storm. And now, the rickety remnants of an old bridge were all that stood between us and a world where a wrong decision would no longer have such dire consequences; where our guide and horses and extra bags were waiting for us.

I pushed myself to my feet and held out my hand to Jim. It was time to go back to the land of the living.?

In the end, Jim and I spent 10 days forging a path through the Valle Esperanza in the Lakes Region of Chile, with the goal of summiting and skiing Cerro Tronador. Tronador is a behemoth of a volcano—the largest in Northern Patagonia—and I had been staring at it from a distance for years. It’s not a completely unexplored mountain, but most attempts to climb it happen from the Argentinian side, which has a more accessible approach. Even then, the exposure to the harsh elements, the fickleness of winter in Patagonia, the remoteness of the mountain itself, and the intimidating glacial terrain deter many from even thinking about summiting, let alone lugging ski gear along.?

Our desire to attempt a Chilean approach, summit, and ski was born from a combination of my six years spent living in southern Chile, of the relationship that I had built with the family of gauchos (South American cowboys) living in the shadow of Cerro Tronador, and of the fondness that Jim and I have for rogue, off-the-beaten-path, multi-sport adventures.

We spent several months studying maps, following the weather and snowpack, and talking with my gaucho contacts about the reality of what it would take to attempt a horseback approach through the Chilean rainforest. We still began our trip with more unknowns than knowns; the mission could take us 8 days, or up to 15. We could reach the base of the mountain by horseback, or we might have to turn around at the first swollen, uncrossable river. The winter might have brought enough snow to cover the majority of crevasses on the glacier, or our prospective summit route might be completely impassable.?

It turned out to be a combination of all of the above.

We set off under a gray sky and a cold drizzle of rain. Our stoic guide, Gerardo, was unimpressed with his two-person crew of a woman and a gringo who didn’t speak Spanish. He spoke sparingly.?

The first day of riding took us up and over several small mountains; the sure-footed Chilean ponies trudged up deep channels worn into the hills over generations, slid down mud-slick switchbacks, and crossed rocky streams with swollen spring currents that pulled at their legs and spilled over into the tops of our boots. Jim and I watched as the tips of our skis—placed lengthwise and propped up with a stick to keep them off of the horse’s rear end—narrowly missed catching onto numerous branches, until finally they did just that; pulling down a dead trunk that crashed into pieces on top of us and spooked the line of horses.?

We slept in abandoned farms, placing our sleeping bags on moldy, rotten floorboards or dirt floors littered with sheep droppings—the only remnants from the past generations, before many of Gerardo’s family began to move to towns for a more convenient lifestyle. By the third day, Gerardo had warmed up to us, and we had settled into an easy rhythm, boiling water for his maté while he stomped around in his spurs and tattered chaps, feeding his hunting dogs and saddling the horses.?

My eyes swelled up from sleeping in the dirt, our clothes were damp and covered in horsehair, and travel through the forest became more difficult the further we got up the valley. Several times we had to dismount and guide the horses over exposed cliff bands or through deep, swirling rivers.?

On one harrowing switchback, Gerardo stopped and studied my face closely, nodding in approval. “I just know that women get scared more easily,” he explained, impressed. I had to smile at that; the occasional reminders of the way that life had shaped our worlds so differently continued to astound.?

When we found ourselves facing the Rio Aguas Turbias—our River Styx, and clearly impassable by horse—we weren’t anywhere near where we had hoped to be when we started off on foot. We guessed it would take us several days to bushwhack our way to the base of the mountain, and we had to make some tough decisions as we organized our gear into packs that we would be able to carry. We had to leave behind our heavy rain gear, tent, and most of our food.

Over the next two and a half days, we thrashed our way through the dense forest amidst freezing sheets of rain. The sharp undergrowth grabbed at our packs and our ankles, shredding any exposed skin. We held our skis in our hands, climbed over fallen trees, waded through rivers, and guessed the curves of the path from the wild boar tracks in the mud.?

We began our ascent of Cerro Tronador in a raging snowstorm. The goal was to reach an old refugio that we were pretty sure still stood on a ridge several thousand vertical feet below the summit, where we would make a high-camp and wait for a weather window.?

Despite the fact that the pure ferocity of Patagonia had surprised us at every step of the way so far, we still underestimated the brutality of the storm that we would have to barrel through to get there. Or maybe by that point we were simply existing in survival mode; facing each new adversity as it pummeled us, simply taking one step, followed by another, not allowing any treacherous thoughts of despair to infiltrate our single-minded determination to continue moving forward.?

The wind howled; it tore at my hair and prodded at my balance with every stride forward. A wall of fog surrounded us, so thick I felt I could taste it. Bouts of dizziness hit me as I tried to discern up from down; the vertigo was inescapable. Communication with Jim was reduced to brief shouts that left my throat raw; the wind stole my breath, my voice, my balance, and my sanity. Finally, unbelievably, we popped up next to the refugio. I rounded the corner of the metal structure to find Jim, who had arrived slightly ahead of me, on his knees at the door, scrabbling with an ice ax.

“Don’t celebrate yet,” he gritted out, as he hacked at the bottom of the door. “I can’t get in.”?

There we were, exhausted, at 7,000 feet, with limited daylight hours and even more limited energy, and our shelter, our respite from the wind, was inaccessible to us. The fear in that moment was so tangible that it pooled in my mouth, bitter and suffocating.?

Jim slammed himself into the door in frustration, and—miracle of miracles—the top half of the door exploded open.?

The situation was grim inside of the refugio. Snow not only filled up half of the live-able space, but there were also heavy drifts that sat in both the bottom and top bed shelves. We were also exhausted. Three days of eating less than 1,000 calories each had begun to take its toll, and the storm had made it impossible to stop for water. We managed to clear out most of the snow before we fully crashed, shutting ourselves into our little ice box just as dark was falling.?

The cold seeped into my bones from below, from above, from the sides. I passed in and out of a traumatic sleep, too tense to even shiver. Fear began to permeate deeper than the chill, but the strange dream-reality that I was in kept me from fully waking, from reaching out to Jim, or from consciously acknowledging these thoughts. I needed the night to end.?

Sometime pre-dawn, the pounding vibrations of a migraine began creeping up from my tense neck muscles, making my eyes swim in pockets of pain. My mouth started to fill with spit, and I had to panic-pull my stiff body out of the frozen tangle of my sleeping bag. I staggered out the door, barely registering the clear sky and the breathtaking view, before dropping to my knees and vomiting. The pain in my head subsided for a moment, and I noticed that the only thing in my stomach had been liquid.?

The hallowed sun finally rose, and we dragged everything outside, finally defrosting the residual layer of ice from the previous day’s storm. I tilted my head up to the sky, sipped a hot tea, and then shoved the still-hot Nalgene down into my shirt. My Garmin pinged— a message from the land of the living: “You guys are set up, the forecast is holding. Wind decreasing overnight. Keep crushing, you got this.” This beautiful, breath-taking life. This beautiful, breath-taking world!

Later that afternoon, Jim and I headed out on a tentative scouting mission. We moved at a relaxed pace, conscientious of the deficit of food and water that we were running on, and wound our way gracefully through the dips and valleys of the glacier until we topped out at the highest skiable point on the West face of the Pico Argentino, one of Cerro Tronador’s three peaks. We had simply taken one step after another, until there was nothing left above us.?

As we skied back down into the glacial valley, the sun illuminated the safe path between the very few exposed crevasses lining the ridges ahead. Untethered and unafraid for at least that brief moment, we silently arced big hero turns, side by side. Snow-capped peaks, jagged volcanoes, and cerulean ridges extended out in every direction.?

Nothing more than a few hours, some sun rays, a shoulder to lean on, and a few sips of instant coffee separated an incredibly low moment and an incredibly high moment. We were in awe. Our little ice box suddenly looked like home. A Nalgene of herbal boldo tea mixed with Pedialyte powder became the best drink that I have ever sipped. We were delirious for sure.?

As the established pattern throughout our mission would suggest, our plan to summit the Pico Internacional the next day did not go exactly to plan. A face that should have been a two-minute ski turned into two hours of ice traversing. Exposed crevasses and deep wind slabs littered the lower half of the face, which overhung a 5,000 ft drop into the valley below. We had started walking upright, taking careful steps across the top ice shelf. The route became steeper, the ice became harder, and pretty soon we were hanging from the points of two ice axes and crampons, moving methodically, one limb at a time.?

We didn’t talk about the fact that that was my first time ice climbing. We didn’t talk about how tired our forearms were, or how much our toes hurt from jamming them into an impenetrable wall. We didn’t talk about the fact that we were two hours behind schedule; the sun warming the cliff bands above us. There was no space for any thought outside that moment; for getting across that face safely.?

After bootpacking up one more steep, wind-scoured slope, we paused at the top of a cliff band that sat just 1,000 ft under the summit, and made the decision to turn around. We had been growing more and more concerned about the wind-loading that occurred in the aftermath of the last storm cycle, and now we knew for sure: we didn’t want to go anywhere near the north side of this mountain.?

As Jim stared up at the turrets of the summit beckoning above us, he suggested that we continue to wrap around the last west-facing part of the approach to fully get eyes on the north face of the summit.

I was also tempted to keep moving forward, to confirm by sight what we already knew. “Do you want to keep going because you truly think that we might unearth some new information, and you think we’ll gain something by it?” I asked slowly. “Or do you want to keep going because you’re frustrated that we made it so close to the summit and we won’t be able to get there?”

Jim’s answer was instantaneous. “I’m frustrated,” he said, already turning back down.?

I can’t quite put into words the feeling that comes from the absence of fear. Every step that we took throughout those next 48 hours—from the moment that I pulled off my crampons and transitioned onto the skis that would take me back down over the glacier, back to our little hut of ice and night terrors, to the moment when Jim and I stumbled up to where Gerardo waited with our horses, tears welling in the corners of my eyes at the sight of his two floppy hunting dogs running out to greet us—every one of those steps brought us further away from fear, pain, and hunger.?

The last day of bushwhacking exists in flashes for me now: waking up under a tree after sleeping for 14 hours, the dry warmth from the ground seeping into my bones, the crumbles of our last remaining granola bar melting in my mouth, the ungainly, drunken walk that Jim and I had both adopted at that point, ping-ponging ourselves off of thickets and brambles, staggering with the weight on our backs, chanting my new mantra in my head, “stay on your feet, just stay on your feet.”?

Small mistakes no longer meant unspeakable consequences. My backpack got lighter as the weight of fear and stress on my shoulders ebbed away. A light headache throbbed behind my temples, but it didn’t scare me the way that it had at 7,000 ft, where I needed to trust my body for survival, and any kind of physical failure exposed a staggering layer of vulnerability and weakness.

And when we finally swung back up onto our horses, I began to understand an entirely new sentiment behind the saying, “back in the saddle.” Nothing had anything felt as good as it did to off-load our insane backpacks onto another creature, sliding rubber-booted feet back into the stirrups.?

I’m still processing this journey, and I think I will be for a while. We disappeared into the Valle Esperanza for ten days, and we came back out several lifetimes later. We traveled back in time, trod on paths where no human had been for at least several years, crossed the River Styx into the Underworld, and came back to the land of the living ten pounds thinner, a whole lot dirtier, and with a cowboy stamp of approval.?

These things are tangible, and they will disappear with time. Many of the intangibles—the staggering pain of my migraine, the bitter fear of freezing to death in a sleeping bag, the dull ache of five long days on less than 1,000 calories, the sharp quality that life takes on while hanging above 5,000 feet—I would imagine that these things may stay with me for longer. The human brain is incredibly good at protecting itself though, and the sharpness of these memories has already started to dull with each re-telling of the story, becoming ideas rather than feelings.?

Why do we do these things? A friend once remarked,”Well, Adele loves a good sufferfest,” and for whatever reason, that stuck with me. I turn that statement over in my head every time I’m out “suffering,” and so far it still doesn’t resonate. Although I won’t deny that there were moments of pure, undiluted suffering that happened on our quest to Tronador, the suffering itself was not what I was seeking. Suffering doesn’t drive me; I didn’t choose this mission because I wanted to punish myself.?

For me, this adventure was human connection stripped down to its core: human connection in an elusive corner of this world, to a place unexplored and inaccessible to so many, and to generations of a tradition slowly being left behind in the haunted houses of the lost valleys of Patagonia.?

It was solidarity with the hundreds of individuals who scrawled their names and messages on the walls of our ice box prison/sanctuary; the bond I felt with these people who would never know my name, and yet undoubtedly sat shivering on that very same wooden bench, driven to that place by a similar recipe of awe and stubbornness and wonder.

It was the utter joy of sharing life with another person. How many different insane places did we lay our sleeping bags next to each other? How many emotions did we experience in each other’s company? These experiences were shared—they won’t disappear in the folds of my brain, or in the folds of time—there is someone to hold my memories accountable.

And above all, it was the desire to know my own strength— to have the space to strip myself bare of all external influences, to burn myself down to the pure essence of me. It is a gift to live so unequivocally present, if even just for a few days. I can’t imagine a more potent backdrop in which to explore and expose my own vulnerabilities if not the River Styx; thrown in, pulled back out, and choosing to step back into the Overworld with a new knowledge of how strong I am, how unbelievably unbreakable this body and soul of mine has been forged.