Alone now, we looked up at the sky and saw brooding rain clouds approaching from the North. Clark, our host in Cochamo, had warned in his typically frank Germanic way: "If the clouds come from the North stay in the tent boys." He called us boys since that is the way we must have seemed to him a man who had sailed round the Americas, worked for Geo magazine, produced his own book and now ran a really neat tourist camp just outside the village of Cochamo. We had hired the horses through him and respected what Clarke said. After all if he had lived here for 6 years than he probably knew what he was talking about.

Neither of us fancied walking up a small winding muddy path in the pissing rain with 30 kg haul sacks strapped to our backs. So with approaching darkness we pitched camp. That evening as we sat around a fire under a little awning that Leo had set up under a tree, we decided that this was pretty close to paradise and that the only thing that was missing were two minxy chicks. "Why the fuck were we going to half kill ourselves carrying those pigging sacs up that hill tomorrow," I thought, "when we could hang out at the bottom, fish, read and listen to music." But that's not what we had come here for. Maybe on another trip we decided. Next time we would return with wine, women and horses and enjoy the beautiful scenery of the valley in comfort.

The next day we had set off up the hill and found a distinctive path though the forest with white plastic markers tied to the trees and machete marks on their trunks marking the way.

Noel's description of how to find the base of the crag had been typically vague: "Go straight up, then keep going up, then go up some more until you think you are nearly past the crag, then go up some more. Keep going until you're at the top of a sort of ridge thing, then walk left and drop back down left to the crag." This description had worried me somewhat but luckily a path had now been worn by the one or two parties that must have made their way up there. As we struggled higher and higher up the muddy path, thrashing and complaining about the weight of our sacs, we imagined what it must have been like the first time Crispin hacked his way through this forest.

Story has it that Crispin Waddy had discovered the place after meeting an ex- US airforce pilot during a train journey in South America. Apparently he had flown over Yosemite many times and then later the Cochamo Valley noting the similarity between its faces and those of El Cap and Half Dome. Psyched by these descriptions Crispin immediately set off for Cochamo. Armed with only a grid reference, a local map and a machete Crispin quested off alone into the Chilean jungle. Three days later Crispin hacked through the final few meters of forest to stand on a small pebble beach at the base of the impressive 2500 foot granite dome of Mt. Trinidad.

As we crawled higher and higher up through the forest, the track winding wildly, the forest slowly changed in nature. Lower down it had been more open with deciduous trees and vines. There was still evidence of a forest fire. This must have been the fire that Noel Craine had had to run away from to avoid getting burnt to death. Higher up, the forest became denser with more bamboo and Alerce trees. Some of these majestic trees lived as long as three thousand years. They were like no other tree I had ever seen before: a thick trunk with flaking bark, stubby little branches and broken tops. One of the trees we saw had rotted away from the inside so that only half the trunk remained. "Look it's dying," said Leo. "Yeah it's only got 300 years to live," I laughed.

After two hours we could see glimpses of a granite wall through the dense forest. After several minutes slogging up the final steep path we stepped out onto a small pebbly beach at the base of Mount Trinidad. A two thousand foot wall soared straight up in front of us. "

Hello," I said. There were 5 or 6 climbers hanging out in what looked like a pretty long term type of camp site. We had expected to be alone at the cliff but had secretly hoped that there would be another team there since it was quite likely that we would have ended up murdering each other when we had got sick of each other's company.