The Ice Spear: Fonrouge and Comesaña's 1965 Fitz Roy Supercanaleta Masterpiece

The Great Ice Couloir

In the summer of 1964–1965, the sheer granite monument of Cerro Fitz Roy (3,405 m) in Argentine Patagonia had been climbed only once before: the historic 1952 French siege led by Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, which required hundreds of metres of fixed rope, supply chains, and weeks of heavy base camp operations. To the international climbing community, Fitz Roy was an indomitable fortress that demanded massive resources and prolonged military-style logistics to survive.

Two young Argentines from Buenos Aires held a daringly different vision. Twenty-two-year-old José Luis ‘Pepe’ Fonrouge and nineteen-year-old Carlos Comesaña believed that heavy siege tactics robbed mountaineering of its purest spirit. Looking up at the terrifying, direct southwest face of Fitz Roy, they were drawn to the Supercanaleta—an unbroken, vertical 1,600-metre cleft of ice and mixed rock that pierced straight from the glacier to the upper granite crest like a frozen spear.

Light and Fast Into the Chasm

Rejecting fixed ropes and intermediate camps, Fonrouge and Comesaña packed only two small rucksacks containing two days of dehydrated rations, a single lightweight kerosene stove, and minimal ice screws. On January 14, 1965, under a fragile clearance in the weather, they crossed the gaping bergschrund and stepped into the shadowy chasm of the couloir.

The climbing was unrelenting. For a thousand continuous metres, the ice varied between 60 and 85 degrees, flanked on either side by vertical granite walls that funneled occasional spindrift avalanches down onto their helmets. Moving in continuous running belays, the young climbers worked with ruthless efficiency. By dusk, they reached the Bloque Empotrado—a massive boulder wedged inside the couloir at 2,900 metres. Using ice axes, they carved a narrow, shelf into the ice and spent an exposed bivouac huddled together in a single sleeping bag.

Summit Triumph and Legend

On the second morning, the couloir narrowed to vertical granite chimneys plastered in brittle rime ice. Switching from crampons to rock shoes in freezing winds, Fonrouge took the lead across sustained UIAA V+ granite pitches along the exposed southwest ridge. The exposure below their heels was staggering: two thousand metres of empty space plunging sheer down to the Rio Blanco valley.

At midday on January 16, 1965, Fonrouge and Comesaña surmounted the final granite ramp and stood atop the 3,405-metre summit of Fitz Roy. They were the first Argentines to stand on the peak, and the first mountaineers in history to climb a premier Patagonian big wall in pure, unsupported alpine style. Their 1,600-metre masterwork remained one of the greatest alpine achievements of the 20th century, inspiring generations of alpinists to climb light, fast, and bold.