Maté de los Dioses

All photos and captions by Matthew Tufts

By 2 p.m., the notebook on the tent floor tallying daily maté consumption already stood at a half dozen. The journal was tucked in the damp crevasse between sleeping bags, along with dog-eared playing cards, wagered gummies, scattered tea leaves and a dismembered ski boot.

Thor emptied a torn bag of yerba maté—a casualty of 62 miles of glacial travel in heavy, unstable sleds—into a gourd and filled it with steaming water. He flourished his pen and added another mark to the page. “Seven—a new record!” I shifted around on my leaky sleeping pad and accepted the maté.

The Eagles echoed through a tinny phone speaker for the umpteenth time about a place you could never leave. I sipped the hot beverage as Thor cracked the vestibule, hoping to see our ski objective towering above the Patagonian ice.

Instead … nothing. Just wind and white for the 11th straight day.

I first learned about maté culture while skiing the austral winter of 2019 in El Chaltén, a quiet village set beneath a wall of mythical peaks in Southern Argentina, which has 1,200 to 3,000 inhabitants, depending on the season. Summer among the granite spires is often an annual pilgrimage for climbers, one defined by a rhythm of long storm cycles trapped in town drinking maté and eating asados, and frenzied dashes into the mountains during notoriously short portals of good weather; winter visitation is notably less common. Climbing in Chaltén often turns the world’s greatest alpinists into the most speculative meteorologists.

During a trip in 2022, a ski partner and I glimpsed a striking peak on the Argentine-Chilean border. Cerro Ambrosio, as we learned it was called, commanded a quixotic allure that begged to be skied. The obvious crux was the distance: It was 62 miles across the Southern Patagonian Ice Field—a barren, inhospitable expanse home to worse weather than the already notorious Chaltén Massif.

So, in November 2023, Thor Retzlaff, one of my closest friends and ski partners, joined me for an expedition across the ice.

Historically, our style of ski alpinism is a contradiction of utilitarian and decadent. We cut tags and toothbrushes to save weight; we pack pounds of maté to enjoy a mindset of abundance. We never bring ski crampons, and we always pack a chess set. The dose of excess runs in the face of El Chaltén’s conventional fast-and-light wisdom—a place known for smash-and-grab ascents and strike missions—but an endeavor of this magnitude required a less domineering mindset and a more exhaustive packing list.

More specifically: 18 empanadas, 60 alfajores (sandwich cookies), 10 pounds of maté, 13 pounds of chipas (an Argentine cheese bread resembling a Ping-Pong ball), 3 pounds of butter, 11 pounds of salami, nearly 9 pounds of chocolate, 14 bags of smuggled Trader Joe’s Scandinavian Swimmers, 120 electrolyte packets, almost 9 pounds of trail mix and 60 dehydrated meals—all of which we stuffed into two 100-liter duffels and loaded atop children’s toboggans.

The short-term forecast wasn’t promising and the long-term even less so. But since we couldn’t bring good weather to the ice field, we opted to bring the luxuries of village life into the storm.

Patagonia’s fabled wind, La Escoba de Dios—“The Broom of God”—is the friend that’s always on your shoulder, sometimes whispering in your ear, often shouting in your face. It greeted us gently when we reached the snow line with our overladen packs, but that welcome quickly went from exfoliating to excruciating. We plodded on, fueled by caffeine-induced enthusiasm, wistful optimism or ignorant bliss, shouting through the gale about the best approach to setting up our tent.

Ultimately, it took 2 ice screws, 4 piolets, 4 poles, a 98-foot glacier rope and 2 T-slotted skis to secure our nylon spacecraft before diving in, coated in ice and still in our boots. Ecstatic and delirious, we shared a steaming maté and crumbling empanadas. It was—and still is—the best maté of our lives.

By morning, a carapace of rime encrusted the tent and the storm raged on. Still, the ice ahead was relatively flat, and we reckoned a long push could get us to a rumored research shelter on the northern edge of the adjacent massif.

Psychologically, the human brain doesn’t know how to cope with “nothingness,” a condition known as the Ganzfeld effect. When exposed to a monochromatic field of vision (an ice cap in a whiteout) and a consistent white-noise stimulus (roaring wind), the brain invents patterns and shapes to fill the void. With no depth perception, our minds created slopes all our own. We contoured fabricated handrails, and 12 hours passed in a greyscale blur of subtle side-hilling and rolling sleds, a 40-minute accidental loop, and an icefall that nearly crushed us.

Just after sunset, two orange shapes appeared on a rocky rise: the alleged research station, greenhouse-shaped capsules bolted to rock slabs above the broken edge of Glacier O’Higgins. As our headlamps crested the slope below the refuge, a dozen soldiers stared back at us as if we were aliens.

An older, commanding figure informed us in Spanish that they were a joint mountain warfare team on an “autonomous military training expedition.” He asked where we’d come from.

“Chaltén.”

“Sorry?”

I looked at Thor before answering dryly: “Argentina.”

A few soldiers laughed, well aware of the geography but doubtful we’d covered such a distance in the current conditions.

A young female glaciologist appeared with a Chilean mountain guide, smiling as she explained the soldiers were monitoring the research station for two weeks. They looked equally unenthusiastic about sharing the refuge with 12 military personnel.

“Autonomous, but they arrived by helicopter,” she told us, rolling her eyes. “We didn’t expect them either. You two can sleep in the kitchen.”

The soldiers were kind but suspicious—to be fair, we’d entered the country without passports—though their interrogation ended upon learning we eventually planned to return to Chaltén. They were intent on climbing a prominent volcano to the west but had no desire to expose themselves to open ice without a better forecast. Meanwhile, we eagerly skied a nearby slope and prepared for the next leg of our journey.

“[The military] thinks you’re crazy,” the glaciologist told us over maté. “They think they’re going to have to rescue you.”

An hour before departing, I heard Thor groan inside the tent we’d pitched outside the research station. When I ducked in to investigate, he held his boot cuff in two hands. The plastic had sheared in half in the cold, his upper buckles hanging uselessly.

Thor and I share an equal acceptance and appreciation for the moments when the wheels fall off. Despite the severity of our position, there was never a doubt we’d continue.

“Well, walk mode still works,” Thor said, smirking at my lightweight ski mountaineering boots. “Bet they’re still stiffer than your slippers.”

We told the researchers we’d be back in roughly a week and set out, navigating the final heavily crevassed crux of our 62-mile approach in fittingly whiteout conditions. Finally, we set up camp beneath the peak that caught my eye more than a year prior.

Cerro Ambrosio possesses an ethereal yin and yang quality between its dual summits. The east is an imposing mass of alpine rock and icy chimneys; the west, an elusive glacial gown consistently veiled by clouds. A formidable serac belt saddles its lower flanks, guarding an enchanting steep south face. We hoped to ski the latter, but to do so, we’d have to get through the former.

This wasn’t a strike mission. Thor and I wanted to take the time to introduce ourselves to a distant friend. So, with enough food and gas for roughly a week, we left the language of alpine assaults at the refugio with the military and settled in for the long haul.

Our first morning began with clear skies, but after only an hour of climbing, it became clear our window was simply a crack in the blinds. I squinted through intensifying spindrift. Visibility deteriorated rapidly to the west, but Thor’s lead obscured his view of the impending storm.

“Thor!” I hollered up as a deluge of razor-edged dinner plates shattered around the thin cord tethering us. “What do you think?!”

“I think ice climbers are weird, man!” he called back, loosening another barrage of ice. “Why would you do this if not for skiing?”

I snorted and ducked beneath the lip of the bergschrund as another shower of ice careened past. “Not today,” I thought as Thor descended to my belay, staring up at the teetering seracs above before skiing back to camp.

Over the next few days, we watched as almost 5 feet of snow buried camp. The first person up each morning shoveled 15 inches of powder from the vestibule entrance; by midmorning, it had filled in again. We were the singular orange blip on a flat white surface for miles, and eventually, the snow drifted to the top of our once-seemingly impregnable walls, creating the sensation that our tent was in a 3-foot-deep hole.

Trapped inside except for brief excavational forays, we found comic relief in our trivial day-to-day tasks. We invented a game of bouncing stale chipas between racquets fashioned out of helmets and neck gaiters. Thor fully disassembled and reconstructed his boot cuff using four ski straps and zero buckles.

If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps boredom is its father.

Patagonia is a place where you’re awakened not by the sound of the wind but the jolting silence when it stops. So, when our alarm went off at just before 1 a.m. on our seventh day in the cirque, the weather battering our tent quickly sent us back to our sleeping bags. Six hours of alternating siestas, weather checks and maté proceeded. Then, at 7 a.m. … silence. By the time we finally left the tent, it was a leisurely 9 a.m. and Ambrosio’s summit was hidden in the clouds.

We made quick work of the headwall, serac handrails guiding us through the ether and onto a cruisy ramp of consolidated, froth-worthy powder, before swapping technical leads across a variety of crevasses and cruxes. Chicken-feathered rime on the steepest pitch made for glorious climbing—and promised puckering conditions on the descent.

Socked in with near-zero visibility, we blindly followed the ridge until it flattened and narrowed. Our thin perch dropped off precipitously on three sides; Thor followed up and checked the topo on his phone.

“I think we’re on the summit.”

In clear conditions, we could’ve gazed 60 miles in every direction, likely even catching a glimpse of the distant granite massifs near Chaltén. We could barely see our bootpack behind us. Hugging and laughing, we prepared for the long ski down.

The hop-turns off the summit were soft and mellow, though in whiteout conditions every edge seemed to roll over to the abyss. The slope steepened, and we spoke softly to each other through the entire pitch of bulletproof rime, keeping each other calm as we delicately sideslipped the crux. Sometimes steep skiing feels a lot like down climbing with skis on.

Once off the arête and onto the face proper, we found ourselves atop Valhalla: a series of hanging ramps in perfect powder, like a serac-lined quarter-pipe or true hallway of the gods. We hooted and hollered our way through the best turns of the day, hanging in airy space atop a wall of ancient ice.

Below, three exposed rappels stood between us and home. As Thor descended under ominous seracs, I snapped a couple frames on my analog camera; the familiar process was calming, even as spindrift caked the viewfinder.

As we reached the glacier below and prepared to ski to camp, Thor handed me a bag of sour gummies. It was the first food we’d eaten since we left, some 12 hours earlier.

“After my boot broke last week, I kinda just knew everything was going to work out,” he said with a wink, looking back at the headwall.

I smiled and ate another handful.

The following day we packed up camp and reversed our long approach. For the first time the wind was at our backs, and our relationship with it went from struggle to acceptance to embrace. The friendly gale filled our jackets like kites as we glided toward Chaltén.

The remainder of our journey was a sleep-deprived daze powered by caffeine and sour gummies, navigating labyrinthine avalanche debris, seracs, delicately bridged crevasses and crumbling moraines to the sandy edge of a lake. From there, we could follow a climber’s trail to civilization.

Sprawled in the dirt under a light rain, still hours from the road but back on terra firma, I fired up the stove and put on a pot of water. In Greek mythology, ambrosia is the nectar of the gods—it was never meant to be tasted by humans. Steam danced and hissed as I passed the gourd to Thor, who took a long sip.

Maté, on the other hand, is intended to be shared.