Hey all, it's Tyler again with an update from my first climbing experience in South America. Currently, I am living in Montevideo, Uruguay studying abroad with Abilene Christian University over the course of 4 months. This past week our entire group took a trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina where we hung out in a hotel, took bus tours, and went to a million museums. On Monday we had the chance to deviate from original plans and have ourselves a free day in Buenos Aires. Three friends and I decided to head to the province of Balcarce to visit the famous La Barossa climbing area about 250 miles outside of Buenos Aires. The account of our journey is as follows...
At 12:05 Monday morning we loaded onto a double decker PLUSMAR autobus, made our way to our seats, and settled in for a 5 hour bus ride to Balcarce. We arrived in Balcarce around 5 AM, where we then unloaded our gear (remember that our packs are full of a weeks worth of luggage for the entire Buenos Aires trip, plus our climbing gear), and hopped into a taxi that would take us to the corner of 55th and 40th street, the base of La Barrosa. Here is a picture of the Sierra,
Throwing the packs over our backs we made our way up a dirt road to the top of a hill where the true expedition began. In my usual over paranoid state I made sure that we checked to be sure we had all gear, maps, and rations for the day. Our climbing friends back in Montevideo let us borrow belay devices, 16 quickdraws, a dynamic rope, and a brand new bouldering pad. Gear, check. Maps of the different areas, not accounted for. Water and food, not accounted for. Oh NO! I left all the maps of the area in the hotel in Buenos Aires, which is not good when your planning to climb in a place that highly recommends a guide. We forgot to pick up water and food at a convenience store, a mistake that would come back and punish us later. A picture of our only water supply for the next 6 hours can be seen below. We decided what the heck and began our ascent of La Barossa, I mean I was confident I remembered what the maps looked like.
I knew there were bouldering areas on the front left portion of the sierra, but my first goal was to get on some sport climbs that morning. I felt that it would be best to hike to the top and make our way to the back left side where I was remembering the sport climbs to be. It took us about an hour to reach the top, the climb being much harder than we expected, and already one of our group members was throwing up. The sun was coming up fast, we had no water, and things would only get worse. We hiked another 45 minutes on top of the sierra before finally deciding to have a little fun on a cool looking boulder. We devised a cool route that was probably a V2/3 and worked it for about 30 minutes. Here is a picture of me making the crux moves.
After a short time here, Colin and I scouted ahead and recognized some trees that looked similar to the ones I had seen in some of the sport climbing pictures over the internet. They were a good ways off and about halfway down the sierra. I convinced everyone to follow me and we loaded up our things and headed out. Making our way down was extremely tough and we were having to take our packs off every couple steps to shimmy down rocks and avoid rolling down the side of this thing. If that wasn't hard enough, we were getting chest deep in bull nettle that was slicing and dicing all parts of our bodies. After about an hour we reached the group of trees to find that it as only nothing. Here is a picture of the group trekking the side of the hill, the bull nettle is hard to see, but it's everywhere. It seemed liked the closer we made it to the bottom, the thicker, deeper, and higher the bull nettle and thorns got.
Realizing that we didn't quite have the strength to get back up the hill, and that we had been out of water for a good while now, we noticed a small ranch house where we hoped we could fill up on water and get the heck off this sierra that was killing us. From the picture above, the ranch house is to the left on the other side of the big groups of trees. After we returned from the trip I took a look at the maps I had forgotten and realized that we were miles from the sport routes I thought were so close. We spent the next 3 and a half to 4 hours making our way to this house, having to back track multiple times because we kept running into massive amounts of chest high thorns. Everyone took a few good falls, Colin busted his knee real bad, Jacob nearly broke his ankle, and I took about a 20 foot tumble straight down the hill before my head stopped my fall on a boulder. By the time we reached the little ranch house we were all badly bloody, extremely scratched up, covered in poison ivy, sore, dehydrated, and crashpadless because the trek was so bad we eventually gave up carrying it and left it in a bed of thorns. I also forgot to mention that Colin and I thought we would make a little shortcut at one point, only to walk straight into giant ant beds and chest high thorns. We both have ant bites as high as our shoulders. A picture of my shoulder shows only a small piece of what our entire bodies looked like after we made our way out of the sierra, you can only imagine what our legs looked like,
A man at this small ranch house gave us water, pointed us on a 2 mile hike back into town, and wished us the best. We spent from 2 PM that afternoon until 1 AM the following morning, sleeping In Tim Bratten's front yard (the only American in town I knew), getting doctored up by elderly ladies in Tim's neighborhood, sitting at a bar, and eventually getting a hotel room for 4 hours before getting a taxi back to the bus station to make our 5 hour bus ride back to Buenos Aires. Our legendary climbing trip turned out to be a wild goose chase through the hell that lingers on the backside of La Barossa because I forgot our maps and we had no water. My apologies to everyone I dragged into this trip.
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