Two years after the first free climb of the legendary Riders on the Storm route on the Central Torre del Paine, Stefano Ragazzo has achieved the unthinkable: the first rope solo of the route. The Italian spent 15 days alone on the wall, overcoming life-threatening incidents, highly technical sections, terrible weather, and frostbitten toes.
Ragazzo climbed between February 21 and March 7, but has needed some time to process the entire adventure before announcing it today.
“For the first time in my life, I fought for something more than a summit: my life, or better, a fixed thought, the wish to go back in my girlfriend’s arms,” Ragazzo admitted on social media. “This thought kept me alive, and it has probably been the main reason why I can write these words.”
Monster route
Riders on the Storm, opened in 1991 by Germans Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Baetz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Guellich, is a 38-pitch, 1,300m route up the East Face of Torre Central del Paine, in Patagonia. Its difficulty is graded as VI 5.12d (European 7c), A3. Frequent ice and rockfall significantly increase exposure.
The route includes a hard aid-climbing section followed by a big pendulum across a blank face on pitch 16, and a huge roof on pitch 26. In the 35 years since its first ascent, it has only seen three repetitions. It took several attempts and the powerful team of Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, Nico Favresse, Siebe Vanhee, and photographer Drew Smith to finally free climb the route. All this is to say, the route is hard enough to deter any elite team. A solo climb was out of the question, or so we thought.
Riders on the Storm. Photo and topo by Drew Smith
Close call
To make things worse, the typical Patagonian storm hit the face during Ragazzo’s climb. At a certain moment, the worst happened. A gust of wind hit the portaledge, flipping it upside down. It left Ragazzo, who was sleeping inside, dangling in the void with his legs twisted around its sling, watching as part of his gear and food fell out.
“I thought that I was finished, for real,” he wrote. The rest of the night was epic:
I spent all night bivying on a little ledge, hanging onto the rope, waiting for the storm to pass. I kept moving my feet [against] the cold and grabbing the upper part of my sleeping bag to keep it close.
No possibility to go up or down: All my gear was on the fixed pitches above me. My sleeping bag was so wet that it was more like a sheet.
He survived, continued up, and summited the following day, at 12:40 pm. Ironically, the weather cleared, and Ragazzo stood on top on a windless, bluebird day.
The climber is currently resting in Puerto Natales, Chile. He has promised he will post a series of longer reports with the details about a climb that took two weeks and nearly his life. In the end, however, he has permanently etched his name in the climbing history of Torres del Paine.
In 2024, Ragazzo also made the first rope solo of Eternal Flame on Nameless Tower in Pakistan.
