Cerro Torre, Solo, in Winter: An Exclusive Interview with Colin Haley

How the 41-year-old American made the first winter solo of Patagonia’s famed Cerro Torre.

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Colin Haley climbs into a rime-ice tube high on Cerro Torre's 'Ragni Route.' (Photo: Ty Lekki)

It was two hours after sunset but the darkness didn’t make a difference to Colin Haley. He was wedged in a vertical, chest-width crevasse just below the summit of Patagonia’s Cerro Torre, squirming for purchase amid the ancient glacial ice. “It was like [Yosemite’s] Harding Slot, but of ice,” Haley told Climbing. He’d left nearly everything at the base of the crevasse in order to fit inside—his extra jacket and gloves, Grigri, helmet, food from his chest pocket—and still could just barely squeeze through. Even without a helmet, when Haley turned his head, his headlamp would get knocked to the side. By 9:30 p.m., he’d been in that crevasse for over two hours with no clear end in sight. But he was determined. “I thought: either I make it through this crevasse somehow, or my attempt is finished.”

A change of plans

Colin Haley had originally planned to spend the entire summer in Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains, first attempting K7 (6,934m) with partners and then pursuing a solo ascent elsewhere in the range. But when temperatures soared to frighteningly high levels, leading to increased rockfall and challenging travel, Haley realized he would have to pivot elsewhere. “I knew Patagonia in winter was going to be the opposite of too hot and melted out,” Haley said. “Freezing my ass off sounded appealing, in comparison.”

The pivot was notably similar to three years ago, when Haley aborted an unseasonably dry solo trip to the Canadian Rockies. After seeing the sad state of the area’s summer snowpack, he flew to El Chaltén and ultimately made the first solo ascent of the Supercanaleta (5.9 WI4 M5/6; 1,500m) on Cerro Chaltén (Fitz Roy) in Austral winter.

This year, Haley arrived in El Chaltén in early August and immediately began bringing loads of equipment into the mountains. He planned to solo Cerro Torre’s line of first ascent, the Ragni Route (WI5+ M4), which tackles sections of vertical rime-ice and gains roughly 1,000 meters from the start of the technical climbing. The Ragni may technically be the easiest line on Cerro Torre, but it also has the longest approach of any route in the massif—over 45 kilometers of variable mountain terrain. “As soon as I arrived in town my goal became: get as much of my gear as close to the base of the route as possible, as soon as possible,” Haley said. He made four gear-portering trips into the mountains—totalling seven-and-a-half labor-intensive days—to ultimately deposit a large gear cache on top of Filo Rosso, a protected campsite near the start of Ragni.

Climbing the Ragni

Haley departed town on September 4 and skied in to the base of Cerro Torre in one long day. He spent a second, short day climbing from the basin (called Circo de los Altares) up to the top of Filo Rosso, encountering brief sections of mixed and steep ice up to M4, which he had fixed with a short length of rope. From that campsite, the “real” climbing of the Ragni begins: 600 meters of alpine ice, blocky mixed terrain, and the airy, poorly protected rime-ice flutings which the Torre group is infamous for.

On September 6, Haley packed up his bivy and began climbing around 6:45 a.m. He free soloed from his campsite to about one rope-length above the Col of Hope, and then rope soloed nearly everything after. Haley said that with a small pack he would have been comfortable free soloing roughly 50 percent of the Ragni’s terrain, “but due to the weight of my pack, filled with wintertime bivy gear, it was not appealing to me,” he explained.

Haley’s first day on route was a big one. He dispatched all but the final three crux pitches of the Ragni and bedded down around 3 a.m. Conditions had been surprisingly good—”I’ve definitely climbed the route with significantly more rime than it had now,” he said—but even so, the Ragni was in full winter condition, with brittle ice and plenty of excavating to do.

The following day, with just three pitches to climb, Haley left camp at 11 a.m. and prepared for what he knew would be the crux (typically, the Ragni increases in difficulty the higher you climb, with the very last pitch being the hardest). The first pitch went by easily, but the second required a lot of time-consuming digging through rime to reach solid protection and axe placements.

“But the real story is that the right side of Cerro Torre’s southwest face recently had a massive serac collapse some time within the last nine months,” Haley said. As a result, the right side of the final pitch had plenty of blue ice exposed rather than the typically white sugary snow. Haley beelined for this option, sure that the route was now about to get much more straightforward. He climbed securely up the often-overhanging glacial ice, occasionally aiding off of screws as the previous days’ exhaustion caught up to him.

Haley opted for this right-hand line because he’d spotted what looked to be a tunnel through the mountain near its top. “I thought if I could just get there I’d be home free,” he said. “Normally on that pitch you’re aiming for these tunnels formed by the wind, and once you’re inside it’s way easier and more secure because there’s real ice. But the tunnel I aimed for turned out to be an opening into a crevasse in this miniature glacier on the top of Torre.”

Squeezing through

The crevasse was too narrow to give himself a proper self belay with a Grigri, so Haley fixed his rope to an anchor at the start and made a rudimentary self-belay with a clove hitch instead. He’d arrived at the crevasse entrance just 15 minutes before complete darkness, “which was fortunate because I could just barely see blue light filtering through this ice crack, which gave me just enough hope to not completely give up.”

At that moment, Haley gave himself a “15 or 20 percent chance of summiting.” But he wanted to push on until it was 100 percent clear that he couldn’t make it any farther. “I was also taking time to chip ice out a little bit more than necessary in a few places because I was genuinely scared of getting stuck there,” he said. Haley was certain that if he had fallen and become wedged in the claustrophobic slot he would have eventually died there.

“So I spent two-and-a-half hours in this crevasse, chipping and digging and squirming, and at times I thought this was not going anywhere. I was actually not far from finally bailing when I was hacking away at some snow above me and poked my ice axe out into the night sky,” he said. Haley was slightly disappointed to realize he was not yet on the summit and actually midway up some vertical terrain, but after a few meters of stemming through rime he connected with another tunnel—this time appropriately human-sized—and climbed quickly to the top. “It was a crazy experience. The craziest tunneling experience I’ve ever had,” he said.

Haley was satisfied to have finished the route but anxious to descend. He began down climbing almost immediately. Not long into the descent, while rappelling the steep headwall section, Haley rigged his single 80-meter rope with a Beal Escaper to facilitate a longer rappel. “I started doing the pull/release and the rope didn’t move,” he said. “I feel sure I did at least 200 pulls. And it never came down.” The thought of re-climbing the steep ice to retrieve the rope was unappealing to the exhausted Haley, so he cut the remaining rope and descended the rest of the Ragni in roughly 40 short rappels. “I made a lot of Abalakovs,” Haley joked. “A lot.”

What the first winter solo of Cerro Torre means to Haley

Looking back, Haley believes this is one of the top five climbing achievements of his life—no small title for someone who has climbed the Torre Traverse in both directions, including a mind-boggling one-day ascent with Alex Honnold, in 2016. He also thinks it’s one of his best-ever alpine solos, tied for first with his extremely committing ascent of the Infinite Spur, on Alaska’s Sultana, in the same year.

Part of why this winter solo of Cerro Torre was so meaningful is due to the wide range of skills it demanded Haley to refine. Cerro Torre is certainly a technical mountain, but climbing it in winter requires a skillset that is more Alaskan, or Himalayan: dragging a sled across a glacier, being a proficient skier, bivying multiple nights in extremely cold temperatures—in addition to climbing steep alpine terrain efficiently and with great margin.

Add to that Haley’s personal history with the mountain—this was his third solo attempt of Cerro Torre in winter, and his tenth successful summit—and it’s no surprise that this climb felt extra special. “Solo climbing does have a certain beauty to it—doing something extremely hard, all by yourself, does bring with it a certain level of satisfaction. And I have thought, and still think, since I was 12 years old, that Cerro Torre is the most beautiful mountain in the world.”

For more information about Colin Haley’s ascent, and the history of winter climbing on Cerro Torre, check out his excellent blog post here.