After spending a few days in Mendoza with my friends from Lake Tahoe, it was time to finally get some climbing in. Our first stop was to get to Arenales, supposedly a crack climbing mecca a couple hours south of Mendoza. Luckily, I found a pretty cheap rental car online and after paying $720 US for 16 days, we were on our way!
After traveling south on highway 40 from Mendoza to Tunuyan, we headed west towards the Andes. After 30-40 minutes of paved road, it turned into a nice gravel/dirt road. Along the way there are military checkpoints and we were hoping to get passed the 2nd one, Refugio Portinari. By now it was 11pm or so. We met the refugio host and he didn't speak a word of English; we had to explain who we were, what we wanted to do, what gear we had, how long we were planning on staying there, all in our best Spanish. Pretty intense to speak Spanish to military guys at 11pm at night!
Fortunately, they could understand us well enough and they let us crash in the breezeway instead of trekking our stuff up to the refugio at Arenales proper. It was definitely around 35 degrees F or so that night as well! Chilly! That next morning, we awoke at 7:30 am for the guys to open the gate and let us through to Arenales and were driving by 8:30 or so. We were so excited!!!!!
From Refugio Portinari, we had about 4 km of driving up hill to the parking lot. From there, 1 km of walking to the refugio up the valley. When we got to the parking lot, you could see why everyone who has been there talks so highly of the place. There were granite spires and cliffs everywhere on both sides!
We hiked all of our gear, food, and beer up to the refugio which was nestled amongst huge granite boulders; one was specifically used for aid practice (nothing but hooks Andrew!). It was time to start climbing! We went to a short sport cliff to feel the rock and wake up our muscles. The rock looked a lot like Cabrillo in San Luis Obispo; orange, rounded feathers with random edges and seams running through it. It felt sturdy enough though. We definitely were psyched.
Climbing here gave you the feeling that you were down in Patagonia; the weather was ridiculous! Cold temperatures mostly (hovered around 40+ degrees each day), winds were pretty high, and the approaches were pretty long (1 hr +) and uphill! The cracks were spectacular though; it felt like we were in the High Sierras. The rock is bombproof and there's tons of places to put in protection.
We were able to summit one of the spires, roughly 3400m tall called Aguja Campinelle Alto. The route was called Armonica, 5 pitches, 6a. It was super windy, super cold, but we made it up and back down safely... WOOHOO!
After 4 days of climbing here (1 rest day due to weather), we felt it was time to move on to another area. Our hands could only take so much of trying to climb 5.10+ multi-pitch at ~45 degrees F! We met some great people while we were there; Rodrigo and Macarena from Mendoza, and Cierul and Nicolas from France. If you love alpine granite cracks and summiting spires, you GOTTA come check this place out; totally worth it.
We originally planned on going over to Santiago, Chile with our rental car but turned out that the paperwork wouldn't be ready for a long time AND the highway over the Andes was closed due to snow. Change of plans!!! While researching different things to do in Mendoza, I came upon a blog post about an amazing road just north of Mendoza called 'The Road of 365 Curves.' Since we had a car, we definitely went to check it out.
We were sort of skeptical about whether this was legit or not, but after we got there, everything was reassured! It was spectacular!!! As we were going up, there was cloud cover keeping the sun from warming us up. The road went up so high that we got over the clouds and could see only a blanket of white over Mendoza.
Alex and I had an Andes liter beer to split, along with some cheese, bread, and avocado... MMmm! :) Quite the rest day activity! Our Chevy Spirit was stick luckily so we got to play around plenty.
We heard from a group of Argentinians at Arenales that if you want the best sport climbing in Argentina, you need to go to San Rafael to the place called La Frazada. We took their advice and are now in San Rafael; just got into town about 4 hours ago and plan to head out there on Monday. Apparently, there are over 300+ routes that have been developed in less than a couple years! We are super psyched for slightly warmer temps and a higher concentration of hard climbs. Wish us luck tomorrow and tune in next time to see if La Frazada lives up to our expectations.
Ciao,
Top Rope
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