Picking Our Way DownBen Williams advises you all not to try binge mountaineering in ArgentinaDan and I had a pretty major night before leaving Buenos Aires to climb –I was living in the school sanatorium at the time – and as such we weren’t in the best state to handle the inevitable Andean weather when it did arrive, even much later on.I had been living in the san’ while my Palermo flat was being refurbished, and when Dan arrived from the UK he quickly took to college life. The school was shut for the summer and we spent a week in the cricket nets, swimming in the outdoor pool, and drinking, in what would have been a parody of the colonial dream – were it not in fact rather too close to the colonial dream. Each night we retired to trolley beds among dark wooden specimen cabinets and outmoded medical equipment.I knew that Dan had run a few marathons, so I figured that he could handle a couple of days in the mountains. Like me, he would be a spirited amateur, and we agreed to head off to a high Andean region I had visited already that year.It was a long night’s journey – the width of the whole country – and it felt doubly long following our all-day session the day before, but by mid-morning I could point out a sparkling line of peaks through the window of our Pullman bus. In Mendoza, we arranged transport to the foothills of the Cordón del Plata, really a sub-range of the Aconcagua massif, which peaks at 6,962m. I knew that there was a pizzeria – or rather a well-equipped mountain refuge – at 3,000m, and our van cranked its way up a bad track to that point.But the refuge was full, so we pushed straight up to camp on a high plateau at around 3,500m. From this point it was possible to view a vast cirque of mountains. Luxurious as our campsite was – we shared alpine meadows with wild horses – we could not escape the imposing, flat-black wall of Vallecitos that dominated the end of the valley. Ribbons of ice snaked down its face. Behind it there was an even bigger mountain, in excess of 6,000m… But we could have no real designs on these peaks.After all, we were very poorly equipped, having rather rushed our way from Buenos Aires, and in the morning our schoolboy banter was much reduced. Altitude sickness, together with lingering hangovers, sent us scuttling down to the comforts of the pizzeria.Here we were at home among a cosmopolitan crowd of alpine pretenders and grizzled mountaineers, lounging in the sun and sharing stories over cold beer. We may well have stayed there, had it not been for the intervention of an older Argentine climber, whose unassuming manner spoke strongly of his authority in the mountains, and who we sought to please and emulate. I was still complaining about my health, but he took my pulse and pronounced me fit. We had run out of excuses and determined to get back on the hill the next day.But that wasn’t all. He also told us a story about his first time on Aconcagua, in the 1960s, when he had befriended a group of British sailors whose ship was moored at Buenos Aires for repairs. In the meantime their captain had suggested they climb what is the highest peak outside of the Himalayas, to keep in trim. Our man had been at a high camp with them, but was a little late starting and, while behind them, he had witnessed the roped party of five simply blown off a ridge. He swept his palm across the table to illustrate the totality of the wind.But we were not climbing Aconcagua, and the following morning we left the refuge early. We carved up a broad rocky couloir behind the hut. We had no map – in such epic, open landscapes you can navigate by sight so long as it is clear – and we headed into increasingly barren terrain. Ten hours of climbing moved us from friendly pastures to a moonlike landscape devoid of all consolation. Above us we could hear the unsettling, humanoid cries of the guanaco –a camelid, which is to say it is of the same biological family as the camel, the llama and the alpaca. It sounded like screaming, which was of little comfort given our frame of mind. But we were driven on by rest and good legs, by the positive pulse readings of our Aconcaguan mountaineer and our clean, rhythmic breathing, which suggests you might go on forever.By 8pm, however, we had had enough. We were still well short of the snow patch we had earlier earmarked as a source of water, and there was no flat ground for our camp, so we set about excavating a few rocks and putting up our tent the best we could.It was growing cold but, after dinner, we sat up to take in the view. Cloud was neatly inverted in the Mendoza valley beneath us, and our private mountain world seemed to float independently. We were permitted a view into previously unseen hanging valleys, with compact glaciers and wisps of clouds adhering briefly to vast ridges, before scuttling on. We were silent for the first time in days, appreciating what was to me an entirely novel palette. The range was sketched out in chromed colours, which merged and separated endlessly in the fading light. But at dawn, and after an uncomfortable night on the stones, the picture was not such a pretty one. Fog had crept in and welled ominously among the rotten buttresses beneath us; our view was as if through a smeared window.BENEATH US, MOUNTAINEERS EMERGED TO LOOK FOR WHAT I AM SURE THEY EXPECTED TO BE FALLING BODIESAggressive fatigue made this appear yet more hostile, and only now did it we realise that we had gone ‘all in’ the day before. We were also very low on water and the snow patch we had counted on reaching had disappeared into the weather. Wordlessly, we decided to head down the mountain.After packing up the tent we stumbled, dry mouthed, across deteriorating slopes – the rock here is a kind of rubble – with packs that now felt heavier, and without much sense of joy. A vague path led between crumbling towers and we picked our down way by instinct – neither of us knew what we were doing. After a few hours we thought it wise to each find our own, independent way down. It took me about five minutes of foundering on increasingly steep rock, now running with water in parts, to realise the potentially suicidal folly of our separation. I cried out meekly to Dan: following only the sound of his yodelled response, the traverse to find him – like crossing the tiles of a wet roof – was fairly hazardous and I still shudder to remember it. We had no rope and no gear and Dan was climbing in a sleeveless fleece.This shambolic progress was pulled up suddenly by a sheer cliff that we could certainly not descend with our packs, so we threw them off and watched them bounce off down the interminable scree slopes below. The cloud now drifted away above us and we could stare down on our belongings, which had been scattered over a square kilometre of mountainside, in warm sunshine. Beneath us, mountaineers emerged to look for what I am sure they expected to be falling bodies. We down-climbed the short, easy wall and sat shamefaced, unable to face what we imagined to be withering looks.By evening we were checking in to a five star hotel in Mendoza, our ragged appearance at odds with the other well-to-do guests; but they took our money all the same. Something had changed since I was last here and I was shocked by the routines of the city and viewed the scuttling people with an inhuman detachment, as if they existed in another element.I refused to leave the hotel room for 24 hours, taking solace only in repeats of Miss Marple and minibar vodka. When we finally emerged, the world was more as I remembered it, and we had resumed our proper place among the fawning tourists, wannabes and wine drinkers struggling with the Spanish language.