Andes Azul Round - Round One
Deep in the canyonlands of the Round project, late 2018. Photo Matt Maynard
We woke up on the doorstep of the country chapel at 3:45am. It was a full moon and the Virgin Mary was staring down at us from an overgrown pedestal in a nearby espino tree. We’d got dropped out here yesterday at sunset with our overnight gear in order to beat the Corona curfew in Santiago. No-one is allowed out the house in the Chilean capital between midnight and 5am. But this way, we could begin well before dawn, and no one would be the wiser.
We’d spent the night at La Ermita – about 15km into the Andean foothills from the outskirts of the city – to make a first attempt on the Andes Azul Round. For the last year I’d been calling the project the Chilean Bob Graham Round, in reference to the 24 hour fell running challenge in the English Lake District. But in reality, it has little in common besides the basics of climbing a specific number of peaks in any order you choose and returning to your start point within 24 hours. When chucking the idea around with Chilean friends about creating a fell running challenge in the Andes, the concept perhaps came across as loose and unstructured. Outdoor events here come with big expectations by competitors for merch, sound systems, course markings and inflatable start-finish gantries. This project however began with a mouthful of cold porridge and a nervous crap behind a cactus. It also wasn’t going to be named the Matt Maynard Round. It had to be about the place, and the experiences you might have when venturing into the blue-copper tinged and almost barely explored summits on the outer reaches of the Andean foothills.
At 5am exactly we started out from the empanada shop at La Ermita, passing the vacant police checkpoint, quickly disappearing into the night and rush of river in the Covarrubias Valley. There’s 14 peaks on the Andes Azul Round. You can climb them in any order you want. We were heading south first, up a 1700m climb to tick Covarrubias and Terremoto. These peaks sit behind the Sierra de Ramón range that dominates the eastern skyline from Santiago. I’ve never seen anyone else on this second range during my previous four recce ascents. 10 years ago you could perhaps have said the same about Cerro Provincia in the Ramón Range on a quiet week day. But in the last decade I’ve seen the Chilean outdoor scene explode; especially in the year of Corona. In this vast capital city, rampant with inequality, the average citizen has just 3.9m2 of green space per person. The WHO recommends 30. Outdoor recreation still remains a pursuit largely for the privileged in Chile. But regardless of where you lived in Santiago this July, after more than 100 days of strict lockdown with outdoor exercise entirely prohibited, it seemed that the mountains were the antidote.
After 4kms run, René found a way across the first river crossing without getting wet. This was the end of the dirt road, and after another 300m, the end of the trail. For the next 17hours we would be off-piste, linking the occasional trod from wild horses, foxes and pumas between the first six peaks. René was carrying the lion’s share of the equipment. More water, almost all the food and the first aid kit. René is one of the most seasoned 100mile runners on the South American continent, and the most understated. Last year he had let me into his low-key running group that bucks the Chilean trend for flashy watches and running shoes, and instead prioritises long runs and lots of beer afterwards. He named the group Los Débiles – The Weak Ones.
Some top dad dancing to the “terremoto” (earthquake) chorus of the South American classic “Shakey shakey” by Daddy Yankee on the summit of Cerro Terremoto. See Andes Azul Round Rule No6. Video René Castel.
After four hours we dropped down from the Terremoto peak into a valley of bird song and improbably balanced boulders. Five months ago on the turnaround point of a six hour training run I had stashed 2.5 litres of water behind a particularly unwieldily balanced tower of rocks with my German pal Hans. The bottles were still there, and the water was fresh and cold. The heat was rising now but but we were about to keep climbing out of it towards the next two peaks Alto de los Bueyes and Boquerón.
We were moving into the heart of the Round. These two peaks sit on the watershed between the Mapocho and the Cajón del Maipo valleys. In the 1930s they were climbed much more frequently when the German Club Aleman Andino de Santiago (DAV) made raiding missions from their remote club hut, accessed by the local train to El Manzano. The trainline has been dismantled and the now abandoned refuge sits in the middle of a 350km2 wilderness, hidden behind the Ramón Range and out of sight of Santiago. Access issues from La Ermita further complicate ascents of these peaks, and our journey out here today already felt like a frontiersman effort into a long forgotten territory. Bands of blue rock shimmered through the heat haze. Occasional condors cast long whistling shadows. And an ochre horse with a streaming blonde mane paced the quick alert steps of a wild animal well unaccustomed to man.
It was a long two and a half hour effort to the next peak Cerro Durazno. We ran the second half of this section onsight. Two years ago I had hiked out here with my friend Jon in early November, camping high and cold with a bad forecast on the second night, hoping to reach the summit the next morning. We woke to two feet of snow and the four season tent straining against the Andean winds and slapping into our blue-lipped faces. We were lucky to get out of there that day, hiking for 12 hours back down to La Ermita through a gradually relenting storm. But here we were now, on a single day push. Dropping in to hidden canyons and clambering out through waves of scree. Hopping across improbable rivers fed by late season snow melt (unimaginable in the drought-stricken mountains closer to Santiago) and then picking our way around a golden buttress with stegosaurus flakes and gargoyle crenelations. It felt wild, and remote and like everything I had ever hoped for from a self sufficient running challenge accessible from the doorstep of 7million people in the nation’s capital.
Zoe and Claudio were waiting for us on Cerro Durazno. They had smiles and fajitas, pasta and 8litres of water that they’d hauled up the peak especially for us from Alfalfal. Zoe the week before had even dropped off an extra 1.5L of water, accessed via an eight hour ride along a backcountry mountain biking route, some 5km earlier on our route. Using her coordinates and photos we’d managed to find it. This was the kind of companionship, rather than competition, that I’d hoped the Round project would inspire. Loads of people mucking in. Getting excited about an ultimately big game with funny rules yet heaps of opportunities for participation regardless of whether you were taking on the full challenge or not. Chile is a whopping 63% mountainous territory. Yet its mountain culture is almost non existent. Seen from Santiago, the Cordillera de los Andes can seem like a two dimensional wall, opening to the imagination only when occasional snow in the lower foothills shows its depth and layers; or if you’re contracted by a mining company and driven on those coaches with blacked-out and thick curtained windows to work for a week at a time at the copper-face.
Andrea Lopez (strong candidate for the first person to complete the Round) heads north from Cerro Durazno on the approach to Sargento del Quempo (the shark-fin top-left of shot) and the Capitán del Quempo (centre shot), during a recceing fastpacking trip in November 2019. Photo Matt Maynard.
From Cerro Durazno, the next logical peak to climb was the Sargento del Quempo. It was 11km of canyon-broken grasslands then scree and scrambling and snow-field skirting towards the 3808m summit. The route borders the 1,420km2 British Peak District sized territory known as the Fundo Rio Colorado that a local grass roots campaign Queremos Parque, supported by Earth Rise Productions, seeks to convince the Chilean government to declare a national park. The Quempo mountain range still has unclimbed peaks, waiting only Andinistas with the right skill set and motivation. The Round, as I explained it to the first interested Chilean friend, Tomás, who became pivotal in its creation, would be hopefully about bringing on those skills of navigation, route finding and grit necessary to push in to the lesser explored quarters of our outdoor playgrounds. We wouldn’t be doing any first ascents. This was a running challenge. But on a recce last November, when a group of five of us first climbed Cerro Sargento del Quempo, we found the scantly signed pages of a log book on the summit. We were making the tenth ever recorded ascent. But the book, with its first signature, had been there since the first ascensionist had deposited the time capsule in 1943. By inventing reasons like the Round to encourage people to venture a little further, I hoped you could play a small part in breaking down that psychological wall presented by the Andean skyline. Campaigns too like Queremos Parque are essential in bringing Santiago’s citizens closer to that delicate tapestry of glaciers and ecosystem services that provide the water in their taps. The alternative is to leave them out of sight and out of mind until the unregulated expansion of the Chilean mining industry, compounded by climate change, means the water runs dry.
We summited the Sargento del Quempo at 6:45pm, looking east to the highest peak in the range. It’s called the Capitán del Quempo, of course; a magnificent cloud-carving pyramidal 4158m summit, streaked by snow gullies most of the year and worried by raging Andean winds. It’s a proper peak for a proper challenge. Looking across at it with only two and a half hours of daylight, and at least three hours of climbing ahead of us, I decided to pull the plug on the attempt. I was already two hours behind schedule. The Capitán del Quempo is the crux of this challenge and of the three previous times I’d been on its flanks investigating the fastest route to the summit, I’d only reached it once. Besides the Capitán del Quempo, there were another seven peaks of albeit lesser altitude accessed by intermittent trails still to run on this Andes Azul Round attempt. As energy levels and motivation from being behind schedule declined, I conceded that today (and tomorrow and potentially the next) was not the day I was going to get them all done.
Post script
René and I ran 53km, accumulating 4600m of total elevation gain as we linked the peaks Cerro Covarrubias, Cerro Terremoto, Alto de los Bueyes, Boquerón, Durazno and Sargento del Quempo over a total of 18 hours. From Sargento del Quempo we descended an alternative ridge (opposed to the classic gulley approach recommended by the excellent site Andes Handbook that has been instrumental in the creation of this project) into the Cepo Valley that I’d scoped a year and a half earlier with Joseph Cossey, before climbing out to the Valle Nevado road where my friend Peter had set up an incredible aid station.
Hans and Tomás were both there to run on but were happy to drink a beer and run back to Santiago respectively instead. Huge thanks to the three of them for their commitment to supporting this aborted outing. Big shout out too, to Zoe and Claudio for the resupply; Jon, Andrea and Seba for the offer of the Sunday pacing duties that never happened; Emma for lending me the watch; Ricardo for the replacement trekking pole; René for his incredible pacing (he could probably have gone on to finish the entire Round despite having carried the heavier bag all day) and also Sof, for everything.
Reaching the Valle Nevado road on Sunday night would have put me just about half way round the Round in distance and time if I’d climbed the Capitán del Quempo. Obviously the Chilean Round needs a huge amount of more respect, time, training, nutrition (energy gels really perhaps are better than butter with a little bit of sandwich attached) and perhaps more than anything else – mental preparation. I’m here for the long haul in the Chilean mountains though. And they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. With all that help already received, I’ve definitely drifted to the top of the draft list for pacing duties. There’s plenty of stronger women and men chomping at the bit to give it a try.
Sign me up.
Full info on the Andes Azul Round here.
Matt Maynard on the climb out of the bird-song valley on the approach to Alto de los Bueyes. November 28th 2020. Photo René Castel.