Climbing Mountains ... In The Dark

On our final day in Bariloche we decided to indulge in a bit of training for the fast approaching Inca Trail, and set off to climb a mountain called Cerro Lopez. We had a bus to Mendoza to catch that day at 4.30pm, so had to finish the majority of our climbing before lunch time. According to the Lonely Planet (our Nemesis once again...) the climb was only supposed to take 3 hours. If we started early in the morning, we reasoned, we would have ample time to get up and down, and even have some time to chill out in Bariloche before our afternoon bus.

The bus from Bariloche city to the Cerro Lopez trail head takes 1 hour each way and only goes at very select times. We decided to play it very safe and get the 5.30am bus, hoping to start the trek at 6.30am and be back at the bus stop in time for the midday bus back. That gave us 5 and a half hours to do the walk, and given our experiences at the Torres Del Paine national park, we thought this would be easy enough.

We got up unreasonably early on the day in question and got the 5.30 bus. The problems began when the bus dropped us off at the trail head. It was pitch black. I mean pitch pitch pitch black. No light whatsoever. I had considered this possibility and had brought a torch, and after a bit of searching we found the sign signalling the start of the trail. It said the trail was marked with red paint so we wouldn't get lost, and so gamely we set off into the woods.

We got lost within about 100 yards of the start of the trail. The red paint just did not show up in the torchlight, and there were hundreds of other potential trials splintering off the main one. We decided to give up for the moment, head back to the road and wait for daylight.

It was then we realised how unbelievably cold it was. We spent the next hour, huddled together, shivering and sleep deprived, by the side of a deserted road, praying for daylight. It was a very long hour.

Finally, at around 7.45 there was enough light to walk by, and we began our trek at a furious pace because of our limited time. The walk itself was great, if very steep, taking us through dense forest, then up above the tree line to some challenging scree slopes, affording amazing views of the cloud covered lakes below.

We reached a pink house called Refugio Cerro Lopez at around 10.30, and assumed the top of the mountain must be very close, since we'd been walking quickly with few breaks for nearly three hours by then. So we continued up the very steep slope, almost rock climbing at some points, hoping to reach the summit within the next 15 minutes ...

We didn't. We kept coming to false summit after false summit, and after about an hours worth of walking/climbing reached a sign pointing to a path marked Cerro ... something. I've forgotten what it said, but the point is, it definitely didn't say Lopez. We have since come to the conclusion that the walk the Lonely Planet was describing was not actually to a summit called Cerro Lopez, but to a pink house called Cerro Lopez halfway up another mountain called something else. It just failed to mention that. This was annoying.

It was almost midday by then, so deciding to make the best of it, we climbed to a rock that provided fantastic views, and pretended we'd reached the top. After a few photos (including the recreation of Rio's Christo Redentor statue at the beginning of this post) we began to descend at breakneck speed hoping to make the 2pm bus. Since the ascent had taken 4 and a half hours, this was a little optimistic - and so it proved. We took a wrong turn on the way down, missed the 2pm bus by 15 minutes, and were forced to get an incredibly expensive taxi. It was actually a good thing we did, because what with all the packing we had to do, and the fact that the long distance bus station was 3k away from our hostel, we only made our bus by 5 minutes. Very stressful!

We have since decided never to try and climb a mountain on a day we need to catch a bus.