![desmo]( "desmo")
On Christmas eve – just as a four day high pressure system set in — I found myself drinking vino tinta and trying to recite ‘Twas the Night before Christmas’ in the Polacos Bivouac with eight awesome friends…
The upshot of all this is that we slept through the alarm and I spent Christmas day nursing a hangover and watching as my partner Dave Sharratt pinkpointed the impressive 5.12+ crack splitting the Polackos boulder. He’s soft spoken and cuddly, but we don’t call him “Monster” for nothing. The 26th we went climbing: Dave, Taki Miyamota, Paul Turecki and I established a new route on Torre Innominata. we named it Via Sin Nombre. It follows the first continuous crack system left of the northwest arete. All but two pitches were freed by the leader at 5.11+. We later learned that we had missed a summit rendevous with the female contigent of our team, Janet Bergman, Sarah Garlick and Kirstin Kramer, by only an hour. Special thanks go to Turecki, self proclaimed “big-wall janitor” who installed bomber, equalized 60 meter rap anchors down the route. He brought us safely down to the packs by dark. The easy-bail factor should make this route a popular choice.
A week later, Dave freed the two aid pitches at 5.12 in weather cold enough that the DAS parkas never came off. “I guess I’ve climbed at Rumney in weather worse then this” was his only comment. We rapped in sporty conditions three 5.10 pitches from the top. Not the perfect free send, but a dazzling show of strength and cajones on the part of Mr. Sharratt.
On January 21st, with two days left before our bus ride to Calafate, Dave and I made the trudge up to Polackos one more time. We had spent most of the last month obsessing over a new line on Desmochada, a beautiful crack/corner system left of the Dieta del Lagarto variation to El Facon. Unfortunately I flubbed a forecast and told everyone in camp it looked good (Dean, Marko, Stephen: I’m sorry about that bivy!), consequently putting us out of position when the good weather actually came…. Anyhow, this was our last chance and Dave was convinced we had to go down swinging.
It was raining when the alarm went off so we slept in and didn’t leave camp until 10 AM. We fired up the approach to Desmochada and started the proper climbing around one. Pitch after pitch of perfect granite cracks passed by. After weeks of psyching for the climb, to finally be up there was just surreal. Darkness broke our trance three pitches from the top. Luckily, this was why I had brought Monster with me. Dave deftly navigated us around left of the final chimney section and on to the summit in total darkness. The weather was definitely turning and we started to rappel immediately. My memory of the descent is a flickering collage of stuck ropes, single-point anchors, and tandem rappelling down snowy slabs. What counts is we made it, safe and sound, back in Chalten by midnight after 40 hours on the go. Of course we missed our alarm and barely made the 6 AM bus the next morning…. We named our route “The Sound and the Fury”; it is 14 pitches long and goes at 5.11 A1.
This summary was published in the 2006 American Alpine Journal. For more beta, check out: Patagonia Unplugged.
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