Whatever else the journey takes you Traveling through the mountains across the world have always felt a bit 'of homesick, sometimes I like a lot has happened in this expedition. Nostalgia especially the people I love and who are without a doubt the most precious thing I possess.
And nostalgia was always larger the higher was the danger and difficulty of the mountain wall face.
I know that this feeling is also linked to the state of tension that brings with it a risky and climbing away from home but even years experience and have managed to ease a bit 'this unpleasant sensation.
In some shipments have seen comrades return home early, a little 'to blame someone in severe environment was not prepared but also and mainly because it did not close their loved ones.
E 'curious, sometimes we look tough without anything or anyone but for our freedom, but often have just started we can not wait to come back, even with the top or the wall already in his pocket.
In fact after the first days of emotional upheaval we will soon learn the new rhythms of life that all aim at one goal: to climb, climb and climb again. For us mountaineers
this finally reduces our activities in this place our hopes, dreams and ambitions. The way we go and look at the world that we keep apart then our value as human beings. From time
I stopped mythologizing the figure of 'mountaineer who in reality is not that a man like everyone else and therefore reflects its strengths and weaknesses of the society in which they live.
E 'no doubt, however, that we met in Patagonia climbers who then also became a true friend. I have the distinct feeling that in some areas of the world as for example in the Himalayas, this is not possible. Perhaps in these mountains to the south of the mountaineers of the world look more human remains and balanced than elsewhere and this is probably also due to the warmth and friendship that the character of the Argentine brings with it and ends with "contaminating" even those who from outside.
On this trip I went alone and with my Argentine friend now I try to climb a beautiful tower of granite in the group of Cerro Torre.
The mountains are spectacular, was up only once and the desire to open up a new route linking these names so our walls are a really strong motivation and makes us endure great hardships.
The long periods of inactivity that the Patagonian climate forcing, however, often thought to refer home. I try to force me to thinking about how many months if not years away have endured generations of explorers, climbers and sailors of our past. I think people who have been away from home for the war, emigrated to the imprisonment or because in some distant land to seek work.
I do not think I have to complain, I'm here with the rare chance to chase a dream of mine voluntarily and not at all this is granted.
I think back to one of the greatest mountaineers of all time, then Renato Casarotto extreme that he worked for companies in remote areas and often without climbing companions. But during several expeditions to the base camp below the mountain with him his wife Goretti. It 's amazing what can sometimes make strong the love of another human being.
try to exploit these early days of decent weather to below the wall carrying all the climbing equipment, food, stoves, gas, tent and all that will be useful for hiking days. A wild storm
moments of alternate flashes of blue sky and beautiful mountains.
glacier where we put the base camp is not a trace of animal or plant life, only ice, rocks and avalanches. No more smell of southern beech trees and greenery of the Piedra del Fraile, that green thing that enters your lungs.
With nearly all the material under the mountain we go to rest in the village of Chalten.
From here we'll wait if there is an acceptable time window of at least a day or two to try to climb the tower.
I wonder if this will be the mountain of my dreams, we often think. A tower of granite with the top snowstorm, a street aesthetics and logic that goes to the summit and then passes on hard granite cracks and channels and around the icy white glaciers and deep blue sky.
The moments of waiting in my sleeping bag, her hands peeled for the work on the rock, the joy of the summit and the fight in the middle of the storm. How many ingredients used to make up a perfect and make that dream come true!?
spent a few days in the village and waited.
Among the country's local meeting Bellunesi climbers who are here to climb the tower, among them Manrico dell who told me to be a guest in the house that has Gusmeroli Egidio in the country. Egidio
knew ten years ago here in Patagonia. Fed up of its business had moved out here giving up all his previous life to find something that he knew not well defined.
few years later I received news of her by a mutual friend came down here to cross the Hielo Continental skis. It seemed that the unrest was a bit of Giles' place and had found what he sought.
Now in his house here to live Chalten Italian daughter who is married to an Argentine gaucho, Giles has left us a few months. Amazing Stories
cross in Patagonia, it seems that in the village of Chalten the destinies of many men are driven by some dark force and remain imprisoned here forever.
The storms on the mountain have continued for days and the forecast does not predict any improvement. Many climbers have finished their time available and must fall.
Who had the material under the walls must be specifically traced back to retrieve it. This is mountain climbing in Patagonia, now it's up to this work and the Swiss Karstenz "Ragni di Lecco" Lorenzo Lanfranchi. David Lama is waiting for months to climb the tower for free Salvaterra and even managed to climb on "his" mountain.
So far this has been a year that has really left little room for dreams of climbing all.
Next on the list shall we?
Patagonia, a land of broken dreams Cesare Fava said the true discoverer of the Tower. Although climbers were not related solely to the climbers' dreams, but dreams of a better life for thousands of men and families who settled in these lands and desolate lonely dream that their Estancia could grow and prosper. For many, however the chance never came, only long and lonely years of hard work without ever finding peace.
Compared to their non-life ascent of a peak can only make one person smile with a minimum of objectivity.
then take it easy these days of bad weather, after all, patience is the first quality required of a Patagonian mountain climber.
The only fact that really leaves us sconcertai is the tragedy happened a few days ago with Fabio Giacomelli and Elio Orlandi. Erred in its assessment, the strength and experience, a company almost failed. Full climbers, very strong and wise but has not spared the mountain to hit with an incredible violence. A mountain guide
of Chalten, Viamonte Lorenzo showed me pictures of his night made two days before the death of Fabio in a rare window of good weather. You see the profile of Cerro Torre in the night, the stars that shine in the sky and a small light with two-thirds of the overhanging wall. The tiny pop
lost in the darkness of the infinite tower emitting a glow like a distant sun.
These days closed in the tent in the middle of the storm I read these words from Hesiod's "Works and Days": "... Zeus' father, a third race of mortal people did, bronze, created by ash, powerful and terrible. Their loved ones they had the works of Ares and violence, they ate bread, but the dauntless heart of adamant they had ...". A
Fabio turn this thought.
Days become weeks and soon we are always closed in tents, buildings under fire of endless storms. In the head the thought of a climber who is gone, people who are at home waiting for me and the days that pass that immobility leads to apathy.
Days, weeks, months, units of time that the mountain will not even consider that for us it seemed like an eternity, and that put a strain on even the strongest motivation.
At home, think of spending so much time locked in fragile canvas tents without doing anything seems an unbearable thought. Yet even here we adapt to that.
In a few brief moments when the wind seems to not want to break up the tent stakes are attempts to try to rise, but without hope arise only from the boredom and inactivity in some moments it takes for the stomach is unbearable.
Time seems unstuck from us, like the skin of our hands that falls after being torn up this granite cutting.
That which we are immersed in a world of giants and minerals that can climb walls with only the imagination or the price of hard work at times nonsensical.
do not understand how we manage to fall asleep at night, seeing all day and for several days in a row we only feel lying staring at the canvas of the tent flaps to fifty inches from my face. Probably thinking all the time is exhausting and sometimes fatigue scale that seems so great that it seems almost as if someone pours directly into the sleepy eyes.
go down in those conditions is not a betrayal of our dreams, but a necessity for the mind. In
country seems to be suddenly back in paradise. Green grass and trees give us more comfort that the heat and see other human beings.
The sun warms us here in a different way. On
climbing routes near the village and in the "chocolate" find some of the strongest climbers in the world and we stop with them to exchange news about our goals, weather and advice on the best breweries in the Pueblo.
brothers Hubert with their team, Tommy Ponholzer, Rolo Garibotti, Colin Haley and David Lama, Max Odell and we all gathered to romp on the tables in the room. It seems almost a return to life after days and days of nothing in between the white of the glaciers.
Tourists now come in droves to Chalten, seeing it as a group look at us strange, but have no doubts about what we are here to do. We are mountaineers climb mountains and harsh and beautiful, and our shirts dirty, matted hair and a concentration of arms much more muscular than normal are there to witness it.
For us, however, is primarily feel that perhaps we are not crazy lonely. So there is someone who sacrifices his career for several months and work away from home and suffering from the suffering to come to live here without moments of uncertainty, moments away from it all so hard and that sometimes seem almost happy. In
strong handshakes, in the eyes of these hard men I see the sweetness and sense of brotherhood that binds us together and that comes from seeing so much wonderful mountains, as in asking the same questions about why our wanderings through the world, for the love for our home and our families, our mates that we understand and support despite criticism of an increasingly bourgeois and an idiot.
We climb again and again, lashed by storms that leave no hope, and then wait ... to allocate more time just seems to improve just a little '. We do not make time to get to the advanced field when we see a huge shell of snow, as we have seen a few times in recent years, which is pressed and pasted the URL to the tops of the wind. Just a ray of sunshine or a small rise in temperature with dismay to see entire buildings collapse of ice on the rocks that we have to climb.
Let's go anyway, but we will not find the summit this time, no new charting the way we dreamed of as we well know. But perhaps that is why we must try to rise again.
It 's a very beautiful and rewarding part a journey in pursuit of a dream and is a great gratification to find or create what was hoped.
But it's a great thing and maybe you even more open mind on not finding what you thought anything else but the journey takes you and that you would never imagine in your dreams. This
said Siddhartha Hermann Hesse in this and then perhaps, let us try, and tomorrow in the midst of those clouds up there!
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