A seven-​member team of young Ger­man alpin­ists suc­cess­fully returned from their six-​week expe­di­tion to the remote west­ern part of Chile’s Cordillera Dar­win on Feb­ru­ary 15. Over that time three of them, Daniel Groß, Markus Kautz and Robert Koschitzki reached the mys­tic and rarely seen sum­mit of Monte Buck­land (1746m) by a new alpine style route, Sil­berkon­dor (Con­dor de plata), 65 degrees/​D, on the peak’s vir­gin north­east face. 

The nasty weather, impen­e­tra­ble rain for­est and scarcity of infor­ma­tion couldn’t stop them from explor­ing this fas­ci­nat­ing wedge-​shaped moun­tain located in the arch­i­pel­ago of Tierra del Fuego. The archipelago’s Cordillera Dar­win range is renowned for its atro­cious weather. In 1998, a South African expe­di­tion to the range aban­doned their attempt on nearby Monte Sarmiento (2246m) after twenty-​nine days of rain. They saw the sum­mit of their objec­tive for a cumu­la­tive six hours over the course of their month long stay. Three years prior a pair of climbers attempt­ing the same peak were blown off the sum­mit ridge by extreme winds. While Monte Sarmiento has been attempted over thirty times, activ­ity on its neigh­bor Monte Buck­land has been nonex­is­tent. Indeed, there is no record of any activ­ity on the peak since its first, and (prior to Sil­berkon­dor) only ascent by a strong Ital­ian expe­di­tion lead by Carlo Mauri and Casimiro Fer­rari in 1966. At that time the Ital­ians approached the peak from the south­ern Agostini-​Fjord and made the first ascent via the mountain’s south­west face.

On Jan­u­ary 29, Gross, Kautz and Koschitzki started their twelve-?hour ascent from a high camp (1100m) on the north ridge, climb­ing mostly through ice and mixed ter­rain to reach the upper glacial plateau below the sum­mit head­wall. It had been decided early on that, should the moun­tain „show [the team] a cold shoul­der,“ the three most expe­ri­enced climbers would attempt the peak. Pass­ing a dif­fi­cult bergschrund (WI4), their line fol­lows the obvi­ous cen­tral couloir (mostly mod­er­ate, up to 65 degrees) to the nar­row sum­mit ridge. In near white­out con­di­tions, they then turned to the south­west, climb­ing the icy peak con­sid­ered to be the high­est point at 1746m.

The team ascended two other minor peaks in the area around Monte Buck­land before they finally returned by a Zodiac to civ­i­liza­tion. Kautz believes that, „there is a huge poten­tial of climb­ing in Cordillera Darwin.“

The team is grate­ful for the sup­port they received from the Ger­man Alpine Club and all their other sponsors.