Colin Haley climbed the landmark 5,000-foot route last week, alone, in winter. Sitting in El Chaltén with a bad case of existential doubt just 5 days beforehand, he didn’t think he’d do anything but sport climb for the rest of his trip.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Explorersweb.
Under a blazing sunset on the Patagonian winter evening on Sept. 19, Colin Haley stood on the summit of Fitz Roy alone. Recalling the moment later, after the conclusion of a mind-bending solo effort that almost didn’t happen, he wrote that he “felt very, very far away from everything.”
Understandably so — no one had ever done what he’d just done.
That night, the American alpinist became the first climber to solo Fitz Roy’s “Supercanaleta” (1,600 m, 5.9, WI4, M5-6) in winter. The iconic route charges the deep gash in the 3,405m tower’s West Face. The climbing is not overly difficult, but the route length and potential for rock and ice fall introduce serious overtones.

So do the last several hundred meters, where a series of gendarmes guard the summit.
If you want to know how gnarly the “Supercanaleta” can be — especially climbing it alone in winter — just ask Haley. As he wrote on his blog, he has tangoed with it several times throughout his long career, achieving varying degrees of success.
He first climbed it 15 years ago with Canadian alpinist Maxime Turgeon. That outing resonated in Haley’s memory due to a “miserable” forced bivy. But it didn’t stop him from making the second-ever solo ascent of the route 2 years later in 2009.
Finally, he speed-climbed it with Alan Wyatt in 2016, capturing the first one-day ascent of Fitz Roy in the process.
So Haley arrived for his objective this year on the “Supercanaleta” prepared, or as close to it as he could get. The psychological aspect of the challenge also weighed heavily on him. He was intimately acquainted with the grave consequences of a mistake.
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