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 Athlete to Athlete Interview
 Mark Synnott with Willie Benegas April 2001 Each month, A North Face athlete will interview another member of the athlete team and recount their individual stories and accomplishments. This month, Mark Synnott poses the questions. As a member of The North Face team himself, Mark will use his unique perspective to get the insider's view as to what makes our athletes tick. His mission is clear: discover who they are, what they do, and what lies ahead in future endeavors. Recently, I was lucky enough to catch up with Willie Benegas during a brief window between expeditions. You may have already heard that Willie had an extremely productive season in the southern hemisphere this past winter. He spent most of his time guiding on Aconcagua, reaching the summit five times and also making an astonishing one day ascent of the peak. Before heading home, he and his brother Damien found themselves in an unexplored "Yosemite-like" valley, complete with many unclimbed big walls and peaks. Two days after this interview was conducted, he was off again, this time for Everest. Mark: What kind of craziness have you been up to lately? Willie: I just recently returned from exploring a totally untouched valley in Patagonia, South America. All I can tell you is that it's located south of Bariloche, deep in the rain forest, near a place where two rivers join. This is the southernmost rainforest in the world, located around the 42nd parallel. I'm afraid I can't give you too much specific information or else you and a lot of other wall climbers will be heading down there. We estimate that only seven or eight people have ever visited this valley. People have known about it since the 1980s, but no one made it in there until 1992. Ours was the next visit. The place is literally untouched. We found out about it from a group of Argentinean climbers. One of the reasons this area has not seen more traffic is that there is a lot of superstition surrounding this place. The locals think it is the third dimension, filled with ghosts and stuff like that. Even though they live fairly close to the valley, not a single one of them has ever been there. And even if you do want to visit this place, it is very difficult to approach. It is very remote and serious and you have to deal with a lot of logistics. Mark: Tell me more about what it takes to get in there. Willie: The first two days of the approach we did on horseback, so it wasn't too bad. The horses carried all of the gear and we walked. Picture yourself heading deep into the rain forest, then suddenly you come upon a very narrow gorge filled with a dense, almost impenetrable bamboo forest. We had to hack through this stuff for about 12kms, all the time trying to establish a trail, to leave markers, etc. You don't want to get lost in the bamboo because it is so thick you literally cannot move. It rains so much there that sometimes the water gets under the dirt. You'll be walking through mud up to your ankles and suddenly you fall in up to your waist. But the hardest and most dangerous part are the river crossings. We had to do six or seven of them. On most of them the water was waist deep, but there was one that was too deep to ford. Luckily we had thought to bring with us a Kmart raft. We used it to ferry ourselves across the river, then we set up a tyrolean traverse for moving the gear across. Mark: What is it like when you finally arrive in this valley? Willie: After six hours of hacking through the bamboo and crossing all these rivers, you pop out into an open valley like Yosemite. There are big walls everywhere of Half Dome size, about 2000 feet. At the head of the valley is a large glacier. There are about 12 peaks and all of them are glaciated on top. Eight of these peaks have never been climbed before. The other four were climbed by our Argentinean friends. Nothing real technical has been done yet. There is huge potential for new routes. Mark: So did you guys get to climb anything, or was the trip purely for exploration? Willie: We did climb one 400 meter wall. It was no big deal - the climbing was about 5.9. We didn't have a lot of time so our deal was mainly just pure exploration. We didn't try any big technical climbs, that's for next time. We spent a lot of time mapping and documenting the entire area with photos. Mark: Any cool climbing objectives you've got your eye on for the future? Willie: The biggest wall is way in the back and we call it La Mariposa -- the Butterfly. It's probably 2400 feet tall and is likely the best climbing objective in the valley. However, just getting to the base is another full blown adventure. It's guarded by this glacier lake and the only way to get to the base of the cliff is to cross the lake by boat. It's actually quite challenging because the weather there is particularly bad, even by Patagonian standards. For example, my friends were there for a month and a half and they only had three days of good weather during that time. So if you did cross this glacier lake and the weather got really bad, raining for days on end, it might not be possible to get back across the lake. You could easily be stranded for a week or two. It would be a really crazy project. Mark: There's no way to walk around the lake? Willie: I know its hard to believe, but no way. The left side is bordered by a cliff so you'd have to climb about five pitches of very difficult horizontal face climbing to get across. Pretty close to impossible. The right side? No way, it's a death wish. You have boulders the size of a house dropping from this rubble/moraine wall. You wouldn't want to go anywhere near it. Mark: What is the rock like? Is it good for climbing? Willie: The lower part is a lot of what we call "jungle" climbing. The rock is highly vegetated and it's not until you get about 3000 feet above sea level that you get into the good granite. From the 3000 foot level up, the rock is beautiful Patagonia granite, some of the best stuff around. The summits are all about 10,000 feet. The peaks are pretty low, like they are all over Patagonia. The base of the first valley where you start the trip is at about 900 feet. The valley itself is at about 2100 feet, so there is a lot of elevation gain to get to the summits. There are some long scree and talus slopes leading up to the base of the walls. It's like being in Yosemite 50 years ago. We want to go back and pick off the most classic lines. We're probably not going to try the blankest most difficult faces because it doesn't make sense to do these until the more obvious and easier stuff is done. Just keep in mind that launching an expedition to this area is a major undertaking. You'd need at least a month to get anything done, and of course it's going to be a lot of work to carry in all the gear for big wall climbing. There are no porters in this area so you have to ferry all of your equipment on your own. The only problem with this area is that because all of the walls are capped with glaciers, there is a lot of runoff. It wouldn't be worth going if there is a lot of snow in the winter because there would be some avalanche danger as well. Mark: Were there any major epics to report? Willie: Well, we did have a wild adventure on the way out. Instead of hiking, we decided to try and raft out on the river, since it was all downhill. The raft was actually the same Kmart special we had used to get across the river on the way in. These things are really cheap and rated too hold about 200 pounds at best. We needed to beef it up so we built a wood frame and tied it onto the raft. To give it extra flotation we tied on a bunch of dry bags, Thermarests, basically anything that would float. We were five guys with 300 pounds of gear, homemade paddles, the whole deal. The ride out was 40 miles of class II whitewater and we did the entire trip in a combined total of seven hours. Amazingly, we only fell in once. That was definitely enough because the water is cold and really deep and we didn't have life jackets, only climbing helmets. It was magical, because otherwise it would have been at least a week of ferrying loads through waist deep mud to get back out. We stopped overnight near the end and bought some fresh meat from a local that lived just outside the valley, near the end of the journey. We had a big barbecue and then the next day we floated down another hour into a big lake and the adventure was over. Mark: It sounds like you don't really have to be climbing to find true adventure. Willie: This was one of those trips where it didn't really matter that we didn't get to do much hard climbing. Yes, this really was true adventure. We didn't bring that much food because we figured we'd be able to fish, and man did we catch a lot of fish. Just picture camping in this beautiful untouched "Yosemite-like" valley, fishing for trout and cooking it up over an open fire every night. We ate a lot of fish, pretty much breakfast lunch and dinner every day. It was really good. Mark: So I guess I'd sound pretty dumb if I asked whether you're going back? Willie: Oh yes, of course, but there are really a lot of other areas we are interested in exploring. Right now Damien and I are trying to set up a trip to another unexplored climbing area that is located on the northern tip of the Patagonia Icecap. You can look for it on a map, but you won't find anything because it's very obscure. It would be a great place to bring a group of skiers and climbers. There are unclimbed 2000 foot rock spires up there. I kind of think of climbing and exploration as this romantic activity where you are better off without a guidebook. In this time of our evolution as climbers, the sense of adventure is disappearing. You can still find it if you want to go for crazy routes where you might get killed, or you can grab some obscure photo and just go, having no idea what you'll find. This is what true adventure is all about. That's what we do. We find out about an obscure area and we say, "Let's see if we can put a trip together." |
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