Twenty Hours in the Sky: Colin Haley and Alex Honnold's Single-Day Torre Traverse

Among the extreme mountain massifs of the world, few skylines present as terrifying and complex an architectural labyrinth as the Torre chain in Patagonia. Rising like vertical stone fangs out of the Southern Patagonian Icefield, the ridge links four distinct, world-renowned summits: Aguja Standhardt (2,730m), Punta Herron (2,780m), Torre Egger (2,685m), and the crowning granite monolith of Cerro Torre (3,128m). When Colin Haley and Rolando Garibotti completed the first full traverse of the ridge in January 2008, it required four days of grueling, continuous battle through storms and hanging bivouacs.

By January 2016, Colin Haley, having spent a decade mastering the peculiar rime ice, route-finding quirks, and fleeting weather cycles of Patagonia, envisioned taking the traverse to an extreme frontier: completing all four summits in a single calendar day. To realize this vision, Haley teamed up with the premier rock soloist in history: Alex Honnold.

A Symphony of Complementary Talents

Haley and Honnold represented an alpine partnership of peerless synergy. Honnold possessed peerless rock-climbing speed and psychological endurance, capable of floating up 5.12 granite pitches without placing gear or hesitating. Haley, meanwhile, possessed encyclopedic knowledge of Patagonian ice chimneys, tricky rappel lines, and the fragile snow mushrooms crowning the towers.

Carrying a single skinny rope, a tiny rack of cams and nuts, two ice tools each, and light daypacks, the pair crossed the bergschrund at the Col Standhardt precisely at midnight on January 31, 2016. Moving simultaneously on a short rope, they climbed in a blur of motion. Honnold led the steep rock pitches wearing sticky-rubber approach shoes, while Haley led the icy mixed gullies.

Spires Falling in Rapid Succession

By dawn, the pair had already summited Aguja Standhardt, executed a series of breathless rappels to the Col dei Sogni, and charged up the sheer granite of Punta Herron via the Spigolo dei Bimbi. Moving without pause, they abseiled into the notch and climbed Torre Egger, standing on its summit mushroom before midday.

The final obstacle was Cerro Torre itself. Dropping down into the Col de la Conquista, they launched onto the North Face of the tower via the route opened by Ermanno Salvaterra. As late-afternoon sun warmed the icecap, Haley led through rotten rime ice, using his ice tools to hack through overhanging rime daggers while Honnold followed with effortless speed.

Summit in Twenty Hours

At 20:40 on January 31, 2016—exactly twenty hours and forty minutes after leaving the Col Standhardt—Colin Haley and Alex Honnold stood together on the wind-carved summit plateau of Cerro Torre. All four summits of the Torre massif had been linked in less than a day.

After a few photographs in the fading golden light, the partners began rappelling the Southeast Ridge (Compressor Route) through the night, arriving safely on the glacier at dawn on February 1. Their single-day traverse transformed international perceptions of Patagonian alpinism, establishing a high-water mark for alpine speed, efficiency, and brotherhood on extreme granite.