'Gringos Locos' on Cerro Piergiorgio in Patagonia finally completed by Matteo Della Bordella, Dario Eynard, Mirco Grasso

Taking full advantage of the small weather window at the end of the season, Italian alpinist Matteo Della Bordella, Dario Eynard and Mirco Grasso have successfully added the final touch to one of the longest-standing chapters in Patagonia: completing Gringos Locos on Cerro Piergiorgio. This stunning route climbs straight through the middle of the enormous west face, and was first attempted in 1995 by Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes who managed to climb more than three-quarters of the face before being forced to turn around.

The line the pair forged three decades ago consisted of 21 difficult pitches, set in an extremely hostile and isolated environment. Despite being described by Michel Piola as "la paroie parfaite" this face has never really received the attention it deserves. Over the past 30 years, only two other expeditions have really attempted it: Maspes in 2006 with Kurt Astner, Hervè Barmasse, and Yuri Parimbelli, and Giordani in 2018 with Hervè Barmasse, Francesco Favilli, and Mirco Grasso. The first attempt was cut short when Maspes miraculously survived considerable rockfall. The second attempt ended due to the prohibitive conditions so typical of Patagonia.

Now the route has finally been completed. Della Bordella and Eynard arrived in El Chaltén at the beginning of February, where they quickly teamed up with their friend Mirco Grasso. By mid-month, the trio reached the base of the wall at the end of the remote Río Eléctrico valley and fixed ropes halfway up the route before returning to El Chaltén to wait for the next weather window.

The weather this season has not been particularly clement by just when all hope seemed lost, a brief weather window appeared. The trio lost no time, reached the highpoint established by Giordani and Maspes in 1995, then added an additional pitch before joining Via del Hermano, opened in 2008 by Hervè Barmasse and Cristian Brenna. The end result is an extremely difficult and sustained climb: out of 27 pitches, only 4 or 5 are easy. The climbers breached difficulties up to 7a/A2, and on the hardest sections, they used a mix of free climbing and aid climbing using skyhooks.

Back in El Chaltén, Della Bordella shared some first details of the climb: "We took advantage of every second of good weather. On our first attempt, we repeated the first 14 pitches. Two weeks later, using a tiny weather window, we returned to the mountain. After nearly losing hope due to strong winds that made the first day of climbing extremely challenging, we managed to find refuge in our portaledge. On the second day — the only day of truly good weather — we started very early despite the cold and pushed on through to complete the route. In order to succeed, we continued climbing after sunset and reached the top at 3 a.m., just before the bad weather arrived. We couldn’t complete the climb in alpine style as we had hoped because the weather window was too short. However, we brought back all the gear we used on the wall, including the 480 meters of fixed ropes."

As mentioned, this expedition is part of the CAI Eagle Team project, and the other team members currently in Patagonia are Marco Cordin, Luca Ducoli, Giacomo Meliffi, Alessandra Prato, and Camilla Reggio, along with their tutors Massimo Faletti, Silvia Loreggian, and Luca Schiera.

"We are truly over the moon," explained Della Bordella, the expedition leader and driving force behind the initiative. "This couldn’t have been a better conclusion to the CAI Eagle Team project. It was a gamble. We carried out a complex expedition that tested all participants during their debut to some of the most beautiful mountains in the world. The expedition had two goals: the first was to learn, understand, and absorb lessons from the extreme environment of Patagonia. Each of the team members learned their own lessons and had their baptism outside the Alps. The second goal was to engage in high-level mountaineering. On the northwest face of Cerro Piergiorgio, we followed in the footsteps of two legends, Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes, and achieved an almost unexpected milestone by completing Gringos Locos they started 30 years ago. In 1995, during the first attempt on the route, Maurizio Giordani teamed up with 23-year-old Luca Maspes. And now it was 24-year-old Dario Eynard, on his first experience in Patagonia, who completed the route. This climb embodies the spirit with which the CAI Eagle Team project was created.”

While awaiting further details about Gringos Locos and the ascents of the other team members, it’s worth hearing the thoughts of Maurizio Giordani, who traveled to Patagonia to witness the final push firsthand: "This result is the perfect conclusion to a historic project, one that will forever remain in my memory as an unrepeatable adventure."