BURST
Cerro Piergiorgio is just down valley of Cerro Torre and Chaltén (Fitz Roy), but, in terms of climber traffic, it might as well be on the moon. Chaltén sometimes receives dozens of ascents a season. Piergiorgio might see one. And Piergiorgio’s giant west face, standing sentinel over the vast Southern Patagonian Ice Field, hardly ever gets climbed.
The reasons for Piergiorgio’s unpopularity are plenty: its west face requires a full extra day of hiking to reach; due to its remoteness, volunteer-based rescue is next to impossible; and its cracks—unlike the clean splitters of the Franco-Argentina—are woefully discontinuous. The west face demands serious commitment and physical prowess to top out. Falling is frequently not a viable option.
The Italians Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes conceived of this beautiful line in 1995, a direttissima smack in the middle of the west face, 1,000 meters from glacier to summit. The pair encountered sheer slabs and few continuous cracks, and after climbing roughly three quarters of the wall they retreated due to Patagonia’s famously persistent high winds and destructive storms.
Only two other expeditions have tried to complete the line since: Maspes with Kurt Astner, Hervè Barmasse, and Yuri Parimbelli (the team bailed after Maspes was hit by a landslide but miraculously survived); and a second attempt by Giordani, in 2018, with Barmasse, Francesco Favilli, and Mirco Grasso, who were again plagued by storms.
Now, 30 years after the first attempt, Matteo Della Bordella, Dario Eynard, and Mirco Grasso have completed a brilliant new line: Gringos Locos (7b/5.12b A3; 1,000m).
The trio based themselves in the small town of El Chaltén and began working their line in mid February. Climbing the pitches first established in 1995 were an alarming brush with the past: protection was difficult to place, scarcely reliable, and mainly psychological.
The team climbed and fixed rope on the first half of the route over three days, then a storm blew in and they bailed back to town. High winds shook the mountains for most of February, preventing them from returning to Piergiorgio, but when a small weather window appeared just before they were scheduled to fly home, they raced back into the mountains.
Compared to other walls in Patagonia, Della Bordella says that the west face of Piergiorgio is much less featured—“more of a vertical slab with crimps” than the classic hand and fist cracks. After 14 trips to the area he calls the west face “radically different” from anything else he’s climbed, especially since he strived to maintain Maspes and Giordani’s ethic of extremely minimal bolting. The Gringos Locos team often would switch from sky hooking to free climbing—and back to hooking—in order to piece together this improbable line.
Perhaps the most interesting element of this ascent is not the climbing itself but the team who made it happen. Della Bordella and Eynard in particular are not longtime climbing partners. They haven’t even been friends for all that long. Their partnership is the culmination of a two-year course sponsored by the Italian Alpine Club, which pairs veterans like Della Bordella with young, psyched alpinists to develop their skills. Eynard, born in 2000, was a member of the resultant “Eagle Team” and eagerly pitched himself to join the Piergorgio project. “It was a big gamble,” Della Bordella says, “[but Eynard] turned out to be a great partner. [His] was the spirit I had in mind for the Eagle team.” Two other members of the Eagle team were supposed to join on Piergiorgio, but when both became injured Della Bordella called up his friend Mirco Grasso, who was also in El Chaltén, and invited him instead.
“In the end, we really took advantage of every little moment of good weather,” Della Bordella says. “[After ascending our fixed lines,] we spent a night on the wall, in the wind, in a portaledge, and we reached the top at 3 in the morning. … A huge satisfaction!”
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