Cerro Fitz Roy rises 3,405 metres above the steppe of southern Patagonia, a granite tower with a thousand-metre face on its east side and a vertical south-east buttress that has been a benchmark of difficult climbing since the 1960s. The mountain is not high by global standards. It is famous for its weather, which produces, in a typical year, perhaps two or three days of climbable conditions on its upper sections.
The first ascent was made on 2 February 1952 by Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, climbing on a French-Italian expedition organised by the French Federation of Mountaineering. The summit was reached at four in the afternoon after a four-day push from the high camp. The descent took three days. By the time the party reached base camp on the Río Eléctrico on 6 February, both summit climbers had lost the use of two toes each to frostbite.
The expedition is sometimes treated as a footnote to Terray's larger career. He had been on Annapurna two years earlier with Herzog and Lachenal. He would go on to climb Makalu in 1955 and the south face of Chacraraju in 1956. The Fitz Roy ascent sits in his bibliography as one of seven major first ascents he led or co-led between 1950 and 1962. It is, in some ways, the most quietly impressive of them.
The climb was quiet because there was nobody to make it loud. Patagonia in 1952 was not a destination for mountaineering. The closest road to the Fitz Roy massif ended at the small estancia of Río Blanco, sixty kilometres east of the mountain. The nearest town was El Calafate, two hundred kilometres further east, with a population of roughly four hundred. The French-Italian expedition was the third Western party ever to attempt the peak.
The previous parties had been an Italian expedition in 1937 under Father Alberto De Agostini, a Salesian missionary and amateur mountaineer who had explored much of Patagonia in the 1910s and 1920s, and a French reconnaissance in 1948 led by René Ferlet. Neither had climbed the mountain. De Agostini's party had reached a col at 2,400 metres on the east side and turned back in storm. Ferlet's party had reached the base of the south-east buttress and turned back in storm.
The 1952 party's leader was Ferlet, who had returned with a stronger team. The team included Terray, Magnone, Marc Azéma, Jacques Poincenot, Louis Depasse, and a young Argentinian guide, Francisco Ibáñez. The party had been on the mountain for sixty-eight days when the summit was reached. They had been waiting for weather.
Poincenot drowned in the Río Eléctrico on 21 January 1952, three days into the approach, while crossing a swollen channel with a load of climbing gear. His body was recovered downstream and is buried in the small cemetery at the estancia of Río Blanco. The needle adjacent to Fitz Roy, Aguja Poincenot, was named for him after the 1952 expedition. It was first climbed in 1968.
The route the 1952 party found is the south-east face, now called the Franco-Argentine route after the joint nationality of the climbing team. The route follows the south-east buttress to a snow ramp at 3,000 metres, then traverses left to the upper east face, and finishes on a short rock pitch to the summit ridge. It is still considered the standard route on the peak and has been climbed by perhaps three hundred parties in the seventy-four years since.
The climb was made in mixed conditions. The lower buttress was dry. The middle section was iced. The upper face required ice-axe work in conditions of perhaps minus twenty Celsius with wind gusts that Terray, in his subsequent account, estimated at one hundred kilometres an hour. The party climbed the upper face roped together on a single forty-metre length of hemp rope, using ice screws of a design Terray had brought from the Chamonix workshop of François Charlet.
The summit itself is a small dome of rime ice, perhaps three metres across. Terray and Magnone stood on it for ten minutes. Magnone took a single photograph, which has not survived. Terray's altimeter recorded 3,420 metres, fifteen metres higher than the modern surveyed elevation.
The descent unravelled in the way Patagonian descents often do. The party was caught in storm at the top of the snow ramp at 3,000 metres and spent a night in the open with no tent. They came down the buttress in alternating storm and clearing the next day. They reached the high camp at 1,800 metres on the evening of 4 February. By then both summit climbers were frostbitten.
Terray's account of the climb appears in his 1961 memoir Les conquérants de l'inutile, translated into English in 1963 as Conquistadors of the Useless. The Fitz Roy chapter is thirty-eight pages. It is the least dramatic of the book's seven first-ascent chapters. Terray spends as much time on the rain at base camp as on the climbing.
The book's restraint reflects, in part, Terray's view that the Fitz Roy ascent had been substantially a matter of waiting. The climbing itself, in good conditions, would have taken three days. The conditions to climb it had taken sixty-eight days to appear. The skill the expedition required was the skill to remain at base camp without leaving, for two months, in a place where there was nothing to do.
Magnone, the Italian on the summit team, was a member of the Club Alpino Italiano section in Turin and a stonemason by trade. He had been recruited by Ferlet specifically for his rock-climbing skills, which were considered, in 1952, to be the equal of any in Europe. Magnone died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five in his home village of Vico Canavese in Piedmont.
Ibáñez, the Argentinian guide who joined the party for the lower mountain, died in 1953 in a climbing accident on Mount Asplanata, a small peak in the southern Andes. He was twenty-six. The Argentine Mountaineering Federation's annual prize for the best Argentinian first ascent is named for him.
The Fitz Roy massif has, since 1952, become the principal destination for difficult granite climbing in the southern hemisphere. The Compressor Route on Cerro Torre, the Wave Effect linkup of Fitz Roy and its satellites, and the Slovak Route on the north pillar are all post-1990 additions to a climbing history that begins with Terray and Magnone's quiet ascent.
The town of El Chaltén, which did not exist in 1952, was founded in 1985 as an Argentine border claim against Chile and now has a permanent population of roughly two thousand and a summer population of perhaps eight thousand. The town's main street has a brass plaque, set into a granite boulder outside the visitor centre, with the names Terray, Magnone, Ferlet, Azéma, Depasse, Ibáñez, and Poincenot.
The plaque was placed in 2002 for the fiftieth anniversary of the climb and was unveiled by Lucia Magnone, Guido Magnone's daughter, who had travelled from Piedmont for the ceremony. She spoke for two minutes, in Italian and Spanish. She said the climb had not been a heroic act. It had been, she said, a piece of work, accomplished slowly, by men who came home tired and never made a great deal of it afterward. That, she said, was the part worth remembering.
