Fitz Roy on Fire

Campamento Poincenot sits about three hours’ walk from El Chaltén, next to a clearing among lenga on the valley floor, a steep hour below Laguna de los Tres. It is the basecamp — the place you sleep so that you can be at the lake when the light is worth something. From the camp itself you cannot see Fitz Roy at all. There is one gap in the trees that shows you the summit, and that is all.

The trail to the camp climbs steeply out of the village and then relents, passing the Mirador Fitz Roy, where the whole massif opens at once — spires and ridges sharp against the sky, ice on every face. A stiff wind pushed at us the whole time we stood there. The sun was strong enough to burn and it was still cold, which is Patagonia doing two things at the same time, and we did not stay long.

From the lookout the trail drops into the valley and runs parallel to the Chorrillo del Salto upriver, over open rocky ground and low ñirre. Roughly halfway to the camp it comes down to the water — a run of rapids with Fitz Roy rising straight above it — then leaves the water again and runs out flat. For most of the way Fitz Roy is straight ahead of you, and you walk at it without getting closer.

Near the foot of the massif the trail divides: one way toward Laguna Madre e Hija and Laguna Torre, the other toward Laguna de los Tres. Boardwalk bridges cross a slow river there — deep, almost still water. Then pebbly ground along the edge of the trees, and then the forest itself: lenga for the last stretch, the light going green and dim after all that open ground, roots across the trail, small birds, the smell of old wood, and the wind moving somewhere up in the canopy where it cannot reach you. You can hear the Río Blanco down to the side, and then you can hear that you are getting close to the camp. I walked that last part faster than I needed to. Everything I had come to Patagonia for, was an hour above the trees, and I had spent so many months imagining what it would look like that I had stopped being able to tell the imagining apart from a plan.

When we finally reached Poincenot, there were fifty or sixty tents in it. I stopped at the edge of the camp and counted them. Nobody counts what they are glad to see. Whatever number I had been carrying around for all those months, it was not this one.

I want to be accurate about my reaction, because it was not admirable. It was not disappointment at overcrowding, or concern about impact, or any of the respectable versions of that feeling. It was closer to having been robbed. For two months I had been working my way south from Peru along a route that thousands of people travel every season — the gringo trail, more or less, and never entirely my cup of tea — telling myself the whole way that the crowds were simply the fare you pay to reach somewhere that has none of them. Then we walked the W in Torres del Paine, which was its own kind of full. Somewhere across all of that I had assembled a private idea of what Fitz Roy’s basecamp would be — the one place at the end of it that would not be like the rest. The idea did not include a village of nylon.

Underneath that, if I am honest, was something simpler and worse. I did not only want quiet. I wanted the place to be mine — not to share it, but to own it for one evening, on the grounds that I had wanted it longer than the people already camped in it. Nobody had informed them of this.

They came from all around the globe. Some were climbers with serious equipment and a serious plan. Some had obviously bought their boots for the trip. Both kinds had every right to be standing there, and the only person in that camp with a problem was me. So I pitched the tent, nodded at my neighbours, and kept going.

It would make a tidier story to say I climbed to escape the camp. That is not what happened. The climb had been fixed in my head for months, long before I knew how many people would be down there. Photographs of this exact view had started turning up on the forums I read at the time — the lake, Fitz Roy, that light — and I had looked at them long enough to arrive at a question I could not answer from a chair. What is it actually like to stand up there? And could I come away with anything of my own? That was most of the reason I was in Patagonia at all.

What I could not make sense of, walking up, was the trade everyone else was making. I passed people coming down the whole way. Down toward dinner, toward their tents, toward a somewhat more classic sundowner — a beer, a stove going, whatever was already starting up back down at the camp. The light I had come for was ninety minutes out, and they were walking away from it. I remember being genuinely unable to understand it — how do you come this far and not care about being up there for sunset?

It did not occur to me that this was the same reflex I had had down at the camp, wearing better manners. Down there I had decided who deserved to be in this place. Up here I was deciding what they ought to want from it. Nobody had asked me either time.

The final section is four hundred metres of ascent in a little over an hour, steep almost the whole way. I had camera gear and one warm layer and nothing else, and I was soaked through by the top. There were two Canadians at the lake when I arrived, sorting through their gear. They were going to sleep up there. Not at Poincenot — up here, at eleven hundred and seventy metres, in the open, with nothing between them and the mountain. I remember thinking that was insane.

We talked for a few minutes. Then I went down to the shore, set the tripod on the stones, and the light started.

I have written about the photograph itself elsewhere: Rise of the Dark Knight is the same frame, reprocessed three years later, and it covers what the light actually did and what I later decided to take away from it. What matters here is simpler. The wind that had pushed at us all day dropped to nothing. It was unexpectedly warm for the hour. And by the time the sky went, there was nobody left up there but the two Canadians and me. That is the part I did not understand until much later.

Laguna de los Tres is not remote. Fifty tents an hour below it are proof that it is not remote. What it has is a window — an hour or two in the evening when everyone who came to see it has gone back down to eat — and at a place like this, solitude is not something you find. It is something you make, by still being there when it has stopped being convenient. I stayed well past sunset and walked down in the dark.