Part 2: Aguja Guillaumet – Disfrute la Vida and Comesaña-Fonrouge

When: January 21–28, 2026 

Where: El Chalten, Argentina 

Who: Koby Yudkin and Nate Lynch 

Getting there: Taxi from hostel to Rio Electrico Bridge.

The mountains had handed us a short and swift education over the previous three days. First lesson: north and south faces are reversed in the southern hemisphere. A north face drinks in the sun almost all day, a south face almost none. East and west, as Nate pointed out with a wry smile of barely concealed amusement, work the same everywhere on earth. All that is to say, climbing a west-facing route is not the move after a prolonged storm. Second lesson: cache your gear in the mountains. Third lesson: don't leave an open chocolate bar sitting in the top of a warm tent.

All these lessons were implemented almost immediately. The melted chocolate situation probably could have been avoided entirely, though.

The morning after returning from the Torre Valley, Nate and I settled into the Chalten morning ritual. Make coffee, eat breakfast, lose a game of cribbage to Nate, check the weather. Usually all of this happened more or less simultaneously. We ran through the ritual as usual, we drank coffee and I lost cribbage, but the whole process screeched to a halt when we refreshed the forecast. Three solid weather days, beginning tomorrow.

Nate and I looked across the table at each other. We were cooked from the previous push on Chiaro di Luna, but we weren't about to sit on our hands through a three-day window. The problem was that we'd gone all out during the short window right before the big one. We needed another day to recover, which meant hiking on day one of the nice weather, climbing on days two and three, and hiking out on day four, which probably would not be as nice. A team with more Patagonian seasoning might have seen it coming and held back during the first window for the longer one. The sucker window. Fourth lesson learned.

I decided to call my friend Zack for advice. His experience climbing in Patagonia is far too extensive to include here, plus, I’m sure he would prefer it if no one ever knew. I walked him through the highlights of the Chiaro di Luna attempt and could feel his excitement through the phone. His advice: pick a basecamp with a couple enticing routes around it and just focus our attention there. That way we could cache gear in the mountains. The last thing he said before I ended the call was don't pull your cache unless your flight is leaving the next day, and even then, check the weather first.

We inventoried our gear and discovered we'd left almost an entire set of nuts and a full cordalette on Chiaro di Luna. After a bit of reshuffling, we settled on Disfrute la Vida, a route on the west face of Aguja Guillaumet. The description promised hard climbing, cracks of all sizes, bolted anchors, and a first free ascent by our heroes Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll and Siebe Vanhee. It was settled. 

We spent the rest of the day eating empanadas and working through the cafes in town, trying to establish our go-to spots. We'd been in Chalten for less than a week and three of those days weren't even in town, so the empanada and americano research was still ongoing.

There are a few options for getting to the Rio Electrico bridge, which sits 10.5 miles from town and marks the start of the trail to Piedra Negra and Aguja Guillaumet. Hitchhiking, bus, or taxi. A friend had passed along the number of the cheapest taxi driver in Chalten. He sent me a picture of a phone number. No name, just a blurry photo of a picture on another phone. I sent a message over WhatsApp asking for a ride at 11 AM the following morning and didn't expect much. Two minutes later my phone lit up. "Ok Koby! I'm available!" Then again: "See you tomorrow! Thanks! I'm Ricardo."

Alrighty then we’re in business. We're going climbing!

Ricardo showed up at exactly 11 AM, right in front of the hostel. I hadn’t even finished the morning ritual of losing cribbage when he pulled up. He had the lean, sinewy build of a lifelong climber but swore he had never climbed; he just liked hiking around the mountains. Ricardo bumped the best playlists I've ever heard in a taxi and told us to text him on our InReach when we needed a pickup. Solid guy.

We slung our packs on and crossed the bridge across Rio Electrico striding with confidence until we realized we were heading in the complete wrong direction. A bit of backtracking and we were on our way. We checked the map this time.

The hike to Piedra Negra feels casual compared to the Torre Valley approach. The first 4.5 miles follow the flat riverbank along the Rio Electrico until you reach Piedra del Fraile. An established camp that consists of a small cluster of structures around a communal area with a picnic table and a slackline. We took a long lunch there and goofed around on the slackline until we felt ready for the 1.5 mile, 3,000-foot moraine climb that lay between us and Piedra Negra, the basecamp below Guillaumet and the north side of the Fitz Roy massif.

We found a solid tent site in the quieter edges of camp, just downhill from the main area. We weren't looking to get woken up by headlamps and climber shuffles all throughout the night. Once we were set up, we strolled into the main camp to look for our friend Kai, who had told us he was going to climb the Comesaña-Fonrouge. No sign of him. We knelt down and filled up our water bottles in the stream.

"Koby?"

I spun around. "Hannah?"

Hannah McGowan! She is the person in my life who appears everywhere I go, no matter where I am. Hannah is an IFMGA Mountain Guide but that is the least of her accolades, she is an all-around rockstar. She introduced us to her climbing partner Dan, and just like that Nate and I were no longer gringos perdidos, we were part of a crew. We traded stories of deep powder skiing, splitter crack climbs, and memorable days guiding on Mt. Rainier together while we boiled water for dinner. We all lounged around on our sleeping pads and played farkle until the sun went down. 

Our alarms blared early. I fumbled in the dark for the lighter, got the stove going, and crawled back into my sleeping bag while the water boiled. Nate was already tearing into his breakfast alfajor.

We scrambled up the approach to the Giordani saddle with Hannah and Dan, who were going to climb the Giordani extension to the Comesaña-Fonrouge. Before Nate and I dropped down to the west, we stood at the saddle and stared out into the endless sea of slabs leading up the intimidating west face of Guillaumet that crested like a granite tsunami above us. Crossing the slabs seemed improbable. We discussed climbing the lower Giordani ridge to a higher saddle, but ultimately pushed out into the slabs and almost immediately found a line of fixed ropes encouraging us across to the glacier on the other side.

An hour later we stood below a crack that split the right side of a massive roof. The line cleaved the entire face in half as it wound through bulges and around buttresses, and from below it looked like the mountain had simply been pulled from either end to create this seam straight up the middle. Nate grabbed the rack and launched up the steepening face to a cruxy step-around move. The cracks were shallow and insecure, and upward progress was slow. I stood in the shadow of the west face and tried to fight off the growing chill by bouncing up and down at the knees.

I forced my cold toes into my climbing shoes and tucked my mountaineering boots under a rock at the base. The first pitch moved through a steepening crack system past a couple of roofs, then a slab traverse through a wet spot to the anchor. I grabbed the rack from Nate and pushed into pitch two. A stunning Yosemite-esque left-facing corner, perfect hand jams giving way to offwidth, back to hands, the crack wavering back and forth with the undulations of the face beside it. It was absolute glory until the upper section, which went through the base of a waterfall fed by melting snow high above. I reached the single-bolt anchor soaked, backed it up with a cam, and belayed Nate up through the downpour.

Right off the anchor, the crack tapered to nothing. Leaving a blank section between us and the next crack system. Nate stepped up to the steep bulge, his foot slipped on the mantle, and he was caught by the black Totem just below. Gotta love the black Totem. He yarded himself back up, pulled the move, and clipped the first bolt. A clipped bolt always feels good.

We had a lot of climbing ahead of us, so we made the quick call to aid through the crux. We didn’t know it yet, but there would be a lot more aid climbing for us that day.

The next pitch looked like something out of a dream: another clean left-facing corner, starting shallow and awkward before narrowing to perfect hands and growing to an offwidth, then pinching further into what appeared, from below, to be the most glorious finger crack imaginable. A straight plumb line splitting two otherwise blank faces. I burned through my rope before I reached it and built a hanging belay in an uncomfortable position, belaying Nate up with a salivating jealousy for what he was about to lead.

The jealousy evaporated as soon as I watched Nate fighting his way through tenuous jams in the flared crack. He ultimately resorted to aiding, although that was also a nontrivial effort as the entire crack was packed with dense mossy turf that had to be excavated move by move in order to wiggle fingers and gear into it.

Above that, a giant chockstone forced us into a chimney system. At this point, we barely registered that we were in a chimney at all. As we climbed through the next few pitches the chimney slowly pinched down around us and culminated in a hanging 5’s crack. Too wide to hand jam, too narrow to get your body into for any real security. The perfect size for suffering. I alternated between stuffing my thigh into the crack and bumping the number 5 cam higher to yard on, so I could restuff my thigh. It felt like wrestling a bear in quicksand. I screamed profanities at the mountain, the cam, and the specific geometry of the situation. Every upward move I watched the rope sway below me in the wind, running to nothing but an aluminum pin hammered into a disintegrating flake in the left wall. Clipped purely for, well, no reason at all.

The chimney spat me out onto a luxurious belay ledge. I fixed the rope and yelled for Nate to start climbing. It felt like washing up on a beach after eons adrift at sea. The effort left me panting flat on my back while the ache worked its way through my hands, arms, legs, knees, and feet. Nate pulled over the lip with micro traxions running on the rope. I felt a tickle of pride through the pain. You know it's genuinely hard when Nate decides to jug rather than climb. 

We continued to trade leads through a couple more pitches before I arrived at the base of the final pitch. A pair of vertical twin cracks running with water. DAMNIT! We'd been climbing a plumb line beneath the summit snowfield all day without quite registering it, and now every bit of afternoon melt was funneling directly down the final cracks. The closer to the top we climbed, the harder it flowed. It was nearly 6 PM. We had chosen this as a free climbing objective and instead had aided most of the route. I felt totally defeated and increasingly hangry. I didn't want to aid through another waterfall just to say I'd touched the summit.

I brought Nate up to my high point. He looked at the water spitting out of the cracks and then looked up at me. There was nothing to debate.

The guidebook had mentioned bolted anchors but it had neglected to note that only the first three pitches had them. We built anchors or reinforced old tat with our cord and nuts, burning through two cordalettes and a rack of nuts on the way down. If we continued leaving gear at this rate, we’d be ending the month with nothing to our names.

Lower on the route, our rope jammed while pulling it down after a rappel. Nate ascended the full sixty meters to unwedge the knot. A true hero. Aside from all that, the descent went smoothly, and we didn't turn our headlamps on until we touched the ground.

We were crawling into our sleeping bags sometime around midnight. We didn't say it out loud, but we both knew we were sleeping in.

The next morning Hannah and Dan eventually popped over the ridge and we swapped stories. They'd summited and rappelled the ridge instead of descending the Amy Couloir, making it back to camp even later than us. Nate and I cached most of our gear under a big rock and and we all hiked out together. I pinged Ricardo on the InReach and four hours later we rolled up to the Rio Electrico bridge to find him waiting, cool as a cucumber, with something excellent playing on the stereo.

A few days of bouldering and more empanada research later, a one-day weather window popped onto the forecast. We'd been in town just long enough to get restless. Two attempts and no summits. We schemed up a lightning strike mission back to Guillaumet.

Our gear was cached at Piedra Negra, but we'd decided we wanted to move it east to Paso Superior, the basecamp for Fitz Roy, which was the last major camp we hadn't yet visited, and a good position if another window appeared. The Comesaña-Fonrouge seemed like the right route for a carryover climb: an elegant ridge with moderate climbing, rising straight from Piedra Negra to the summit of Guillaumet. We'd rappel the Amy Couloir, traverse the Piedras Blancas Glacier to Paso Superior, cache our gear, and hike back into town via Laguna de los Tres.

I messaged Ricardo for a midnight pickup, somewhat skeptical this one would get a response. A few minutes later: "Hi! Yea Koby! Excellent!!"

That's service.

Midnight came sooner than expected. I downed a coffee, threw snacks in my bag, and got in the car. I hate waking up this early, if I ever truly sleep at all, but I truly love setting off into the mountains while the rest of the world is still tucked into the calm of night. The crisp night air is filled with the electric current of freedom.

We ran the winding riverbank to Piedra del Fraile, filled our water bottles, and rocketed up thousands of feet of moraine to Piedra Negra, passing another team of climbers huffing and puffing in the dark. We arrived at our cache, repacked our bags, and not quite ready to push on, kicked around camp looking for any excuse to delay for just a few more minutes. We found none, so we shifted back into gear.

By the time we reached the terraced rock ledges on the east side of the Comesaña-Fonrouge ridge, the sun had just risen enough to see properly. We pulled the rope out and began simul-climbing through the blocky terrain.

Nate ended the first simul block at the base of the 5.10+ pitch. A beautiful right-facing corner with perfect hand cracks leading to a cruxy step-left mantle onto a large ledge. I took the rack, put on my climbing shoes, and took it to the top. Then we were simul-climbing again, up through weakening terrain to the base of the summit snowfield. It sure was nice to be standing on top of the melting snow this time, rather than climbing underneath it.

We left our packs at the snowfield and huffed to the summit. It was barely 10 AM and we were eating alfajores in the sun on the summit of Guillaumet!

Two climbers topped out on the Brenner-Moschioni just as we were returning to our bags. They were heading down the Amy Couloir too, so we decided to team up because, honestly we did not want to be below them in the couloir. The Amy is usually a low-angle ice chute but we'd heard it was more melted out than usual, meaning serious rockfall exposure. We waited for Daniel and Klaas to reach us, tied our ropes together, and made six full-length rappels to the Piedras Blancas Glacier.

Daniel and Klaas, still in climbing shoes, glissaded back toward the col. Nate and I roped up and traversed the opposite direction toward Fitz Roy and Paso Superior. It was getting hot, and we were postholing to our calves with every step. The glacier rolled away in a convex bulge ahead of us, cracking in all directions. We adopted a new crevasse crossing technique that we deemed the starfish glissade. Laying out full spread to distribute our weight, we committed to the slope and slid down the steep roll, over the thinly bridged crevasses. Innovation is the mother of necessity, as they say. It got us down to the flatter glacier below, where all that was left was an arduous trudge to Paso Superior.

We hit the descent trail in the early afternoon. In El Chalten time, that's happy hour. We ran as fast as we could without colliding with the steady stream of hikers heading up for the view of Fitz Roy from Laguna de los Tres.

We rolled into town around 6 PM after eighteen hours, twenty-something miles, and nearly 10,000 feet of elevation gain and loss. We didn't stop moving until after a burger and beer at Fresco Bar and an ice cream at Domo Blanco. They were on our way home, after all.

N.B. Many of the photos, and all of them that are of Koby, were taken by Nate Lynch.