Fitz Roy took a remarkably long time to climb — long before El Chaltén existed to make the approach a matter of a few hours’ walk; in 1952 the village was still more than thirty years away. The approach alone defeated most early attempts, and the mountain’s granite walls, rising in one unbroken sweep above the ice, belonged to a category of difficulty the equipment of the day could not reliably handle. When it finally fell, in February 1952, it fell to a French expedition that had spent weeks working for it, and had already lost a man before setting foot on the rock.

The expedition gathered in Argentina in late 1951 under the leadership of René Ferlet, with official backing from the Argentine government and a liaison officer, Francisco “Paco” Ibáñez, attached to the party. The climbing party was French: Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, both already among the best alpinists in Europe, who would eventually form the summit pair, alongside Jacques Poincenot and the guide Louis Depasse. A doctor, a glaciologist and a filmmaker rounded out the group.

They never got to climb as planned. On the approach march in late December, crossing a river swollen with meltwater, Poincenot was swept away and drowned. He was twenty-eight. The expedition continued without him, and the name was given to the granite spire that stands beside Fitz Roy for most of the walk in from El Chaltén — Aguja Poincenot. The camp in the forest below carries his name too.

What followed was a siege in the old style: weeks spent establishing camps, fixing ropes and ferrying loads before the climbing itself could begin. Terray and the others found the weather far worse than anything they had met in the Alps, and progress up the summit wall was slow and hard-won. At least once, dwindling food and fuel forced the party back down the mountain to wait for another window.

The summit push came on February 1st and 2nd, 1952. Terray and Magnone worked up the south-east ridge — the line still known today as the French Route — through cracks that were too wide, too thin, or filled with ice, on a wall that offered almost nothing in the way of ledges.

The climb nearly ended a few rope-lengths below the top for want of a single piton. They had run out of the thin ones. Terray found one still in his pack, kept there by accident after he had used it days earlier to open a tin of sardines — and it was that piton, placed in the crack that mattered, that got them up the last section. They reached the summit at 16:40 on February 2nd.

Terray climbed a great deal in his life, in the Alps, the Andes and the Himalaya. He described Fitz Roy afterwards as his hardest and finest climb, a judgement recorded in the American Alpine Club’s own account of the range.

The measure of what the 1952 party achieved is in how long the mountain stayed quiet afterwards, and in what it took to repeat it.

Thirteen years passed before the second ascent. In January 1965 two Argentines, Carlos Comesaña and José Luis Fonrouge, climbed an entirely new line — the Supercanaleta, sixteen hundred metres up the mountain’s west side — alpine-style, carrying what they needed and bivouacking on the route. They left on January 14th, summited on the 16th, and were back down by the 18th. Five weeks of siege in 1952; four days, start to finish, in 1965. Nothing about the mountain had changed. Everything about how people climbed had.

The third ascent, in December 1968, is the one most people have seen without knowing it: the California team included Yvon Chouinard, who later named his company Patagonia, and Fitz Roy’s skyline became its logo.

In February 2014 Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold climbed the whole ridge, seven summits in five days, every one of the Agujas named above among them. Two years later Colin Haley and Andy Wyatt went up the Supercanaleta and back to the road in just over twenty-one hours, the first one-day ascent of Fitz Roy. The question is no longer whether the mountain can be climbed, but how much of it, and how fast.

Patagonian weather runs the show here, not the calendar. Wind, cloud and rain are the default state, clear skies the exception, and Fitz Roy can disappear behind weather for days at a stretch. November through March — the austral summer — gives the longest daylight, the kindest temperatures, and the best odds of a clear window, but “best odds” in Patagonia still means waiting. Photographers regularly spend a week in El Chaltén for one clean morning, and the ones who stay patient are usually the ones who get it. Climbers wait longer: a summit attempt needs days of settled weather rather than one clear morning, and a week rarely covers it.

Wind especially doesn’t let up, least of all on the exposed ridge up to Laguna de los Tres — trekking poles earn their weight here, and anything loose needs tying down. Check a reliable forecast before every outing — Windguru is the one most people use — and expect it to change.