After two years and 70 total nights on one of Patagonia’s biggest walls, Miles Moser, Trevor Anthes, and Harry Kinnard of the U.S. have completed a new route on the East Face of Torre del Paine.
The team has named their 36-pitch route Paradigm Shift. It is a completely new line along 29 of its three dozen pitches and is entirely free-climbable. On the upper, less difficult pitches to the summit, the line joins 1963’s Bonnington-Williams Route.
Capsule style
The climbers spent 41 nights in capsule style (plus 29 more in 2025) on the Patagonian wall. “What a battle [that] wind, rain, gravity, and snow can create when you’re walking the line,” Moser wrote. They estimate the difficulty as Grade VII (5.12+ A2).
“Paradigm Shift represents a new era of modern climbs being established — a dedication to living a detached life in the alpine, [with] hard free climbing and bolted belays, plus extensive cleaning [that will increase] the safety for subsequent parties,” one of the climbers, Trevor Anthes, posted on Instagram.
The team’s portaledges, their home on the wall for 41 nights. Photo: Miles Moser
Open debate
Anthes’ remark shows the style in which they opened the route. On the one hand, it differs from the no-bolts, alpine-style criteria, but on the other, the equipped belays will make the route attainable to a larger number of teams.
Anthes mentioned that the trio climbed in a tight budget, thanks to some discounts at gear shops and friends offering cash or pieces of their own gear. A salty footnote at the end of his report raises the old issue of excellence versus sponsorships. In Anthes’s own words:
Most outdoor brands we approached ultimately ignored our request for support. A major climbing company told us that pitons and a replacement haul bag for our portaledge weren’t in their budget, a clothing company that appropriated their name and logo from the region responded by saying they don’t sponsor expeditions, and the major American mountaineering club decided that our vision doesn’t fit their criteria for “cutting edge” and essentially suggested that we should go play in the sandbox.
As long as influencers and followers continue to trump real innovations and feats, we will increasingly fail to observe significant climbs established by some of the truly dedicated alpinists that push boundaries into the future…
