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| Brothers Willie and Damien Benegas. The final push. Journal entries by Damien, courtesy of The North Face. We woke up at 3:00 AM and started walking at 4:00 AM. We got to the base, looked at each other and decided on going superlight style. In a push! The climb is the size of El Capitan, and we have done El Capitan plenty of times. We thought this would be no different. We dropped the sleeping bag, stove and some other stuff at the base and we started climbing pitch after pitch, chimney after chimney, hand crack after hand crack. Little did we know that we were getting ourselves into a full epic climb. The weather had been so good for the past 10 days, and we left on an awesome morning with clear skies. Halfway up the face it started snowing very heavily. We are a little hardheaded, so we kept climbing. This was great entertainment. We were climbing Latok in full conditions! As we were reaching the summit, we got cut up with darkness and full whiteout conditions. What to do? Start rappelling down many meters of complicated descent or bivy for the night. We opted for the bivy. Not far from the summit I observed some sort of cave. We rappelled down and quickly set up a spot to spend the night.
By 4:30 AM we had enough light to start going down, but during the night it snowed about a foot and the proposed descent was out of the question. We could not see more than 100 feet. We decided on dropping to the other side of the ridge, straight to a very steep couloir that divides Indian Arete West and East. The ropes we left fixed from the night before were 10mm, but now they had an additional 2mm of ice. Two hundred feet took us about two hours. On the other side of the ridge we were expecting some difficult rappelling but not as crazy and dangerous as what we just did. Willie dropped into the clouds and after few minutes the scream came, “Rappel!” I started rappelling wearing a homemade harness and a single carabineer and it felt like dropping from the top of El Capitan. The wall was as steep and blank as anything I’d been on. I reached Willie and he was hanging from a .75 Camelot and a half-inch lost arrow pin. Not a pretty sight. Down we went, rappel after rappel, some under a waterfall, some under overhanging rock. We reached the face at the end of the rope. Willie and I were soaked and just about hypothermic, but we made it to the couloir, where we expected to find some easy ground. We did one more rappel at the couloir, and once the snow was less than 45- degrees we decided on a butt slide all the way to the base of the climb. This was an awesome experience. The Indian Arete. Sixteen pitches. A1. 5.I0a. 28 hours with a bad bivy included. Today we are at base camp, feeling like lions after some big battle, licking our injuries and laying low. We don’t have any other choice. It has been snowing for the past 48 hours. Food, tea, playing cards. No ice cream or couch, but we have DVD. The movie for today will be The Aviator. It’s the process, not the summit. That’s the Benegas mantra. And the process continues. Plans for a second attempt are underway. <<< Back to earlier journals: The lay of the land .
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We had only one Gore-Tex jacket between the three of us, but we also had three optimums and one space blanket. One person was just fine on the end of the rock slot. The one in the middle was under some water drip from the cave. Whoever was using the Gore-Tex was outside. And as with any bivy, the slow wait for the sun to come up started and minutes went by like hours. We were at 17,000 feet without proper gear under a complete whiteout. By any means we were some happy campers.
