See, I was unemployed, living on a pot farm, missing a front tooth, recently broken up with...

Chris Cowman is a longtime climber. He's the executive director of Friends of Coachmo.

And he's just kind of the classic dirtbag dude who's just been around the scene forever.

He's also now a dad. You may hear his son in the background.

That year, though, he was leafing through an Alpinist magazine.

And my buddy Grant, he and I both read it sort of separately,

but Coach Omoan, that article was described as Eldorado, you know, the golden place.

But sort of more generally, it was, it was kind

of position as the Yosemite of South America. And you can go down there in the winter when it's cold

and kind of miserable in most of the states, if you're not a skier, which we weren't. And you can go

climb big granite domes.

So Grant kind of laid the foundation, and I was like, okay, yeah, let's do it.

Spend what little money I had on a plane ticket and planned to get a new tooth in Argentina. And you get to the town of Cochamo, figure out your taxi to the trailhead, and start hiking.

You're exhausted and you really want to see some granite walls.

Big, beautiful granite.

That's what you've gone halfway around the world for.

And you don't get your first glimpse of anything resembling granite or rock climbing until you've

been hiking for a number of hours. And the number of hours really depends on how much it's

been raining lately. Because if it's been raining a lot

you're going to be going through knee-deep and at times possibly up to waste deep in mud

and you're in the middle of a coastal rainforest surrounded by nothing but greenery

and you go through that for hours and and then you finally enter this clearing,

...