Cochamó Tips

While blogging about a climbing trip seems about as fashionable as delivering a slideshow to a group of men in club ties, I was recently pleasantly surprised to learn that someone had gone on a trip to Tenerife having been influenced by a piece I wrote about it, so I am encouraged that the longer form of online self-publication is not dead. The last time I wrote a blog there was no sidebar tool offering for AI to generate it for me, so in respect of tradition this will not be titled

"Uncovering the Epic Climbing Secrets of Cochamo Valley: A Thrilling Adventure Awaits!"

In fact the basis of this, far from dialling up hype, is a ploddingly practical list of tips, written down partly as advice to someone interested in going and partly for myself in case of a 'next time'. The preeminent piece of existing 'how to' literature for Cochamó in the UK-based climbosphere is Robbie Phillips' UKC article, which should be read before reading this by anyone actually planning a trip, and to which this is only an addendum and a different perspective. Most of what it says in there still seems to be true seven years later, though I would advise not to expect any particular 'Madness' other than that which you bring with you, and I'll only nod to the tired reference point of Yosemite to say that it's not that much like Yosemite.

Cochamó is obviously a bit different to Tenerife too, in that you won't be buying a budget flight on a last-minute whim, or chucking in a rope and draws to nab a beach holiday bonus climb. It's the sort of place you have to have a specific desire to go, being both far away and far from convenient. I was in the privileged position of arriving in Chile at no personal expense, having been working for BAS in the Antarctic, and I was lucky that Kev was keen to make the long hop down to join me. So I suppose the biggest question for a climber based in Europe is: why go to Cochamó, as opposed to somewhere else?

First, because it's in the southern hemisphere. If you want summer during our winter, combined with big granite instead of southern European limestone or northern European ice, there aren't loads of places that offer something comparable for climate, scale and climbing style. Kev and I initially talked about El Chaltén, that being the obvious and quintessential Patagonian destination, but having only two and a half weeks, the potential (likelihood?) for getting very little done swayed us towards a safer bet - no glaciers, no iced cracks, no meaningful altitude, less wind, a far higher chance of good weather and pleasant climbing. The other major South American destination that Euros know about is Frey (which we could see in the distance from the summit of Cerro Trinidad), which looks great, but Kev suggested Cochamó and I didn't have to look at too many photos to give a double thumbs-up.

The essential reason to go of course is if you love this sort of thing - big sustained routes in spectacular surroundings. Even from a non-climbing perspective, the place is idyllic, combining old-growth forest pencilled with huge alerce trees, neck-craning sweeps of clean granite, water so clear you can step in it by accident. Hummingbirds, condors. The climbing style is varied in a way that is not unusual for granite, with the major routes tending to follow strong features - cracks of all widths, grooves, flakes, dihedrals - but with face and slab climbing to link them. Often, on the routes we climbed, these linking sections formed cruxes, but usually with a bolt where you wanted it. It also tends to be a deceptively helpful sort of granite, with small rough edges for fingers and toes where from below it looks blank.

So here we go, top tips interspersed with some piccies for anyone who stumbled in...

Stay at La Junta, and book early. From what I saw of the other campgrounds, and admittedly I didn't look at them all closely, La Junta is the best. In the others the tents seemed to be tightly packed in peak season early February, whereas La Junta is beautifully planned with dispersed sites scattered amongst trees with options of sun and shade. It's also right next to Trawen, which has a mini market for basics like bread, eggs and fruit (very pricey, as in £1 per egg, but handy) and Starlink wifi if you need it (also pricey). I haven't checked but I doubt the other sites are cheaper than $7000 (about £6) per night in any case.

Take a tarp. La Junta has covered areas for cooking and hanging out in bad weather, but it's also nice to have some shelter immediately outside your tent. We managed to borrow one after the first rainy day and it made the second rainy day much more pleasant. Bring some cord to suspend it too, obviously, and for hanging stuff to dry.

Plan food carefully. This is just generic expedition advice, but if you were going somewhere properly remote there might be less of a chance you'd fail to do so, like us. We had quite a tight turnaround between my arrival in Puerto Montt and getting the bus to Cochamó and didn't have a lot of time to shop, and it didn't help that I was feeling shattered from a few nights' bad sleep on the Drake Passage and couldn't be arsed with calculating the weight of lentils. We also didn't find a very good supermarket nearby. With better planning we could easily have got everything we needed for two weeks, but as it was we had to hike out for a day in the middle and hitch to Cochamó town for supplies. This was definitely not welcome, though it did mean we could get fresh things that might not have kept too well, as well as some treats like street empanadas while we were in town. It also wasn't that easy to hitch, as there wasn't much traffic going down from the trailhead late morning, and the turnaround to get a bus or lift back up before the trail 'closes' at 3pm (which I'm not convinced it really does) is not that leisurely. If I was going for much more than a fortnight, I would definitely just factor in a couple of days out of the valley for a break and resupply, possibly in Puerto Varas. A further generic food tip is to bring lots of ziplock bags for repackaging, and also a collapsible bladder with decent capacity as water sources at the bivi sites are sometimes a few minutes away.

Reserve two horses (maybe). We got one and made do, but our packs for the initial hike in were heavier and more awkward than was ideal. The hike up the valley only gains about 300m in height, but it's rough and muddy and took 4 hours with heavy bags (more like 3 when we did it for a second time with lighter bags). For the weight of stuff that you can bring within standard airline baggage allowance plus food for two weeks (see above), you're going to have to shoulder a lot of weight if you hire only one caballo. One will do for the way back, as you'll have eaten your food. The price per horse was $40 000 (a bit less than £40).

It's all about the legs. Both for the walking and for the dominant style of climbing, which is usually more intense on the calves than the forearms, though I definitely got worked in parts of my upper body too. The hikes up from the campground to the walls of Anfiteatro and Valle Trinidad are pretty hard going with heavy bags - comparable to the highest Scottish mountain crag approaches for elevation gain and duration, and you're normally going to be carrying bivi kit too as the climbs themselves are much longer. We didn't climb on the likes of Cerro La Junta or Arco Iris, which have shorter approaches and also look good. There are also smaller crags closer to the camping area which look to have some decent routes for shorter days or iffy weather, but they're probably not what you travel all the way to Patagonia for.

Bring toilet roll, don't bring wet wipes. Or rather bring wet wipes if you want, but don't chuck them in the compost toilets, as the hand-drawn signs in the campground implore. There are simple drop toilets near the main bivi sites in Anfiteatro and Valle Trinidad too, which is a great effort by the locals and one from which a few other places could take inspiration...

The water is exquisite, but cold. Kev claims the water in the pool below los toboganes, which is basically the Fairy Pools but with a four-hour approach (Chileans are willing to walk further than Brits for their Insta opportunity), is colder than Loch Vaa near Aviemore in winter. I don't believe him, or maybe it's just that the air is much warmer. Anyway the swimming/dipping is delicious, and a lot more appealing to me at least than what our friend Will described as the 'prison shower' in the campground for a measure of de-filthing. In fact not all the water is cold - we found a spot at the base of a drainage stream down the slabs at the back of Anfiteatro which had been properly warmed by a day's ferocious UV.

It's more 'forest' than 'jungle', virgin temperate rainforest in fact, with the associated benefit that there aren't many things trying to eat or poison you. We got one or two insect bites, but it wasn't a major issue. There were a pleasing number of bees, which is nice.

Print some topos and maps. There is a folder in the campground and also at the main bivi sites, but having a paper copy beats a phone photo or screenshot, especially as some of the topos are pretty poor and indistinct. Expect to spend a bit of time in your first forays working out what's what, as you can't always see the walls above the trees until you're quite close.

Options balloon around E3. I think you could have a great couple of weeks in Cochamó climbing low 5.10s or E1, but there doesn't seem to be an abundance of the top quality routes at those grades. Around .10d or .11a options increase significantly, though it's worth noting that some of the classics would get a pretty low 'obligatory' grade - i.e. if you don't mind pulling on a few bolts or cams, you could make them more like E1.

Bring clothes for all weather. Hot, cold, wet. It can get roasting on sunny afternoons, but was barely above freezing at the bivi one morning. Full waterproofs were welcome on our first day, which had near-tropical amounts of rain. The paths became a bit of a slither in slick approach shoes, though on balance I was happy enough to have made do rather than use up baggage space lugging boots. Weather forecasts were chalked up on the noticeboard at La Junta, but updates were not predictably regular and on one day in particular the forecast was totally wrong - luckily we'd both opportunistically checked different forecasts on devices.

Consider taking some extra cams. The standard recommended rack is a double set of cams from micro to BD#4, plus one BD#5, plus a set of nuts and micro-nuts including offsets. We took 6 standard quickdraws and 6 alpine draws. For most things this was about right (not always carrying the big cams) but for some specific routes, unless you're comfy running it out, a third set would be welcome. Specifically, it would have been nice to have at least one more small silver and an extra red or green on Surfing for Stone, and we didn't do Todo Cambia because we felt under-gunned for reds and greens (and to a lesser extent big blues - but at least those are easier to shuffle).

A pair of 60m triple-rated ropes was the right stuff, with quite a lot of pitches and abseils over 50m. We mostly led on one rope and hauled a little bag on the other. Some people were using one rope and a tagline, but having heard from Jake and Connor from New Mexico about getting their rope stuck in descent and having to re-lead a 5.10 pitch in the dark on a 6mm tagline, this technique gets a double thumbs down from me. I'd be 'totally mentally bonking, dude'. Plus, if you trash your rope on the first day of your trip you have a spare.

Fast-drying route recommendations that were given to us for a day immediately after heavy rain were Onomatopeya and Sweet & Bitter Fruit (which are each only 4 pitches and right next to each other), Mister M, Homo Santa and El Filo la Leta de Tiburón (the Shark's Fin). These also all happen to be some of the more amenably graded things, so there are presumably harder lines that dry fast too. In general most things seemed to be pretty good after a couple of decent drying days, with slow-drying sections such as on the second pitch of EZ Does It or the final pitch of Al Centro y Adentro easily aided if necessary.

We climbed six routes, which given the length of approaches and so on felt like a decent haul from a thirteen day window in which two days were written off by rain and one by our supply run. Frothingly psyched people could have done more, but we enjoyed a couple of proper rest days basking and bathing and shooting the sh*t. The highlight was Al Centro, which is a bona fide banger with a bit of everything, but EZ Does It also gave a very memorable day with an amazing summit and an amazingly close encounter with a condor, and No Hay Hoyes was a great selection box of cracks. EZ was the only route where we had issues with other parties, with a frustratingly inefficient team of three holding us and and the Catalan pair ahead of us up for what must have added up to at least three hours. On other routes there were either one or no other teams, and nobody slow.

Would I go back? Definitely. I just need another attractive offer of work in the Antarctic...