“’Tis crazy, man,” Brian muttered, his smoker’s voice quivering with excitement. He clutched the rock with labor-worn hands and looked around like a nervous owl, out at the South Patagonian Ice Cap and up at the world’s most legendary rock towers: Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre.

Cathy and I had left camp at three that morning and climbed orange granite for 12 hours, following several pitches behind Brian and Mario – two rough-looking Argentineans – up a 600-meter, 5.10b route on Aguja Guillaumet (pronounced ah-hoo-ha gee-sha-may). Brian led every pitch on the route like he’d been strolling through a Buenos Aires mall. Once on the summit though, his demeanor changed – Brian was a crag climber and didn’t know how to get down. As he calmed his frazzled nerves with a cigarette, Mario, Cathy and I got busy preparing the rappels.

First, we rigged extensions for our belay devices and flaked the ropes into compact piles. By combining the Argentineans’ scruffy, 60 meter rope of dubious age with our 9.1 mm, 60 meter Beal Joker, we had the option of making 60 meter rappels. While Brian lit another cigarette, Cathy threaded the red rope through the anchor slings and joined it to the yellow rope with a flat overhand knot. Mario tied stopper knots in the far end of each rope.

Guillaumet is a mountain tower composed of some smooth and vertical walls, but mostly blocky, lower-angle terrain and traverses. The rock is so abrasive it could snag a WD-40’d earthworm, much less a rope. High Patagonia towers, where the wind can switch to hurricane-force in several hours, are a bad place for a stuck rope. We agreed to keep rappels short in case the rope did snag and we peeled snag-prone tape from the rope ends. We also knew that simply tossing the rappel ropes crag-style would create a rat’s nest or, worse, the ropes could dislodge rocks onto climbers below or blow around a corner and become stuck. We’d be epic-ing for the next week. Guillaumet called for saddlebags.

Saddlebags are a common mountain-rappelling technique where the first rappeller carries the rope on their harness and feeds coils into their belay device as they rappel. To prepare saddlebags, Mario and Cathy each butterfly-coiled a rope, starting at the stopper knot and making loops that became progressively smaller. Since I was to be the first rappeller, I girth-hitched a shoulder-length runner onto my right side harness gear loop and cradled the yellow rope in the runner. I wrapped the runner around the coils and clipped the runner back into the gear loop with a biner. In this way, the rope would feed from the top front of the coils and into my rappel device. I set up the red rope similarly on the left side.

With the ropes saddlebagged, I rigged an auto-block as backup around both ropes and then stuffed the ropes into my ATC Guide. Like a pilot fingering the controls before take-off, I fluttered the coils for caught loops and final-checked the system.

“Solid anchor. Knot’s good. Ropes in device. Biner locked. Harness double-backed,” I checked off aloud.

“Pulling yellow,” Cathy said.

“Pulling yellow,” I repeated and unclipped from the anchor and began slithering down the line. Every 20 feet or so I let the auto-block catch and pulled more rope from my saddlebags. Although the saddlebags prevented me from rapping Rambo-style, I kept moving slow and steady, never wrangling with tangled ropes. Luckily, I knew saddlebags themselves are tangle-prone, as I had practiced at my local crag in preparation and had been patient during setup.

At the next rap station I clipped in, yarded some slack through the ATC and auto-block, and yelled, “Off rappel!” up into the building wind. Cathy and Mario rappelled next and last came Brian, shaking and looking less like the rockstar he’d been on the ascent. He had a cigarette lit almost before he clipped in.

“Wow man,” Brian said, smiling and death-gripping the anchor. We had nine rappels to go, but he and Mario still had to hike out to El Chaltén afterward to meet their hiking clients at seven the next morning.

“Work’s very tired tomorrow. Mucho maté,” Brian said, and laughed like Cheech Marin at the thought of all that caffeine.

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