The Horn of the Liberator: Weiss and Peña Conquer Pico Bolívar in 1935

The Unconquered Tooth of Mérida

Soaring into the thin Andean atmosphere above the red-tiled roofs of Mérida, Pico Bolívar (4,978 m) was long regarded by Venezuelan mountaineers as an impossible precipice. Unlike the gentle, rolling firn domes of Pico Humboldt to the east, Bolívar was a savage, dark pyramid of fractured metamorphic gneiss, guarded on all sides by vertical rock buttresses, sheer couloirs, and hanging glaciers.

Several expeditions had probed its lower ramparts during the 1920s and early 1930s, only to be turned back by rotten rock, terrifying exposure, and sudden paramo storms. To stand atop the Liberator’s peak required a rare fusion: the disciplined rope techniques of the European Eastern Alps and the supernatural mountain instinct of a native Andean baquiano.

That fusion arrived in late 1934 when Austrian alpine engineer Franz Josef Weiss partnered with Domingo Peña, a forty-eight-year-old native of the isolated mountain village of Los Nevados. Peña was a legend in the Sierra: a man who walked the high ridges wrapped in a woolen ruana, gifted with an uncanny ability to find safe passage through freezing fog and loose scree.

“Without Domingo Peña, the mountain would have remained closed to us. He read the rock and the mists like an open book.” — Franz Josef Weiss, La Conquista del Pico Bolívar (1936)

The Assault of January 5, 1935

In the first days of January 1935, Weiss, Peña, and companion Herlindo Molina departed the high paramo, rounding the glaciated shoulder of Pico Espejo to reach the frozen shores of Laguna de Timoncito (4,600 m). Directly above them rose the formidable south face of Bolívar, its black gneiss buttresses rimmed with glistening frost.

At dawn on January 5, the trio roped together and began ascending the narrow, shadowed couloir known as La Garganta (‘The Throat’). The climbing was cold and treacherous: their boots slipped on frozen scree, and melting ice dripped continuously from overhangs above. Weiss led the technical pitches, hammering steel pitons into hairline cracks to secure their belays.

Emerging from the couloir onto an exposed rocky col, the climbers faced the final crux: a 50-metre wall of sheer, fractured rock dropping thousands of feet into the abyss of the Chama valley. Weiss carefully worked his way up delicate handholds, while Peña followed with effortless balance, testing every block of stone before committing his weight.

Standing on Venezuela’s Crown

At midday on January 5, 1935, Franz Josef Weiss, Domingo Peña, and Herlindo Molina scrambled over the final summit crest. They were standing on the highest point in Venezuela at 4,978 metres.

The panorama was breathtaking: to the north and west, the mountain dropped away into ocean-like cloud seas rolling toward Lake Maracaibo, while to the east, the ice-capped domes of Pico Humboldt and Pico Bonpland gleamed against an azure sky. Weiss assembled a summit cairn and deposited a tin canister containing their names and date, cementing Venezuela’s supreme mountaineering milestone.

Their return to Mérida triggered widespread national celebration. For Domingo Peña, it was the start of an extraordinary legacy: over the next forty years, the master guide from Los Nevados would ascend Pico Bolívar more than fifty times, permanently revered as the grand patriarch of Venezuelan alpinism.