Taking advantage of a brief break in the heinous Patagonian weather, Matteo Della Bordella, Dario Eynard, and Mirco Grasso have completed the best climb of the 2025 season in South America. They did the entire Gringos Locos route on the northwest face of 2,719m Cerro Piergiorgio.
Thirty years ago, two other Italians, Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes, partly climbed this highly difficult line but never completed it.
Last month, the team made it halfway up the route during their first push after waiting nearly a month for a weather window. They then retreated to El Chalten, hoping for one more try before they had to return home.
Last-minute chance
They had nearly lost hope when forecasts announced a mini-break in the weather last week. The three climbers ran back to the granite face and started where they had left off, opening new pitches until they connected with the last five pitches of Via dell’ Hermano, a line opened by Herve Barmasse and Christian Brenna in 2008.
The team had to deal with strong winds and bitter cold as a new storm approached but reached the summit at 3 am on February 27. They quickly rappeled down just in time to escape the bad weather.
Left to right, Eynard, Della Bordella, and Grasso on the summit of Cerro Piergiorgio during a windy night. Photo: Club Alpino Italiano
No obvious lines
The new combination route by Della Bordella, Grasso, and Eynard has 27 pitches graded as 7A and A2 (even moderate aid climbing is remarkable on such a smooth wall). As the climbers later told the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), it was the most difficult climb of their lives.
The expedition was part of the CAI Eagle Project, which puts together seasoned climbers like Della Bordella with promising younger ones like 25-year-old Dario Eynard from Bergamo.
As they told PlanetMountain, the team’s only regret was not having had time to climb the entire route in one alpine-style push. They used ropes that they had left fixed from the first push. However, they did retrieve everything from the wall as they descended.
There is a good reason why the line remained unclimbed since 1995. At first sight, the 900m wall has no obvious lines. Della Bordella describes it as a smooth granite mirror. Legendary climber Michel Piola called the northwest face of Piergiorgio “the perfect wall.” And Gringos Locos is the most direct line up the smoothest part of the face.
Topo by PataClimb shared by ScarponeCAI.it. It shows the 1995/2025 route in green and Barmasse/Brenna’s Via dell’ Hermano, which the 2025 team followed for the last few pitches.
