Location: South 25.15781, West 066.03631 (GPS at the summit)
Argentina
Difficulty: YDS class 2
Climbed: Februaary 11, 2022
Information:
How to get there:
The city of Salta is a good point of departure. Salta has good flight connections
with Buenos Aires.
Drive Hwy. 68 south to El Carril. Take Hwy. 33 more west. The road will
climb a spectacular valley before reaching the pass Piedra del Molino.
This location has parking, a tourist viewpoint and several information
signs.
Continue, the road now descends gently towards the base of Tintin.
Finally, you will drive with Tintin up on your left hand side. A good
starting point may be a small turnout on your right hand side
at location S25.13712, W065.99769, elevation about 2965 meter.
Route description:
Head directly towards the mountain, that is, aim for the distinct ridge that comes directly down towards you.
Ascend this ridge (easy), keeping right whenever there are obstacles straight ahead. Higher up, this ridge
connects nicely with a slanted shelf that one may traverse (left) in order to connect with the distinct gully that
starts from the col on the main crest. Stay on the right hand side of this gully in the beginning, then cross it when
this can be done conveniently without any real loss of elevation.
What remaains is a pretty long route along the main crest, avoiding several local tops along the way. The best
line still involves a bit of up/down, some (local) gain/loss of elevation is unavoidable.
A local summit (location S25.15234, W066.03374) that you
will have on your left shortly before you reach the summit, is quite close in elevation.
Comments:
Here is a quick overview of the peaks climbed on this trip in Argentina.
We had decided to climb this (major) mountain as a first acclimatization trip. The big crest would imply spending
several hours between 3500 and 3700 meter. We stayed in Payogasta the night before and Franco drove us
to the planned starting point the next morning. We started hiking at 0700.
After about 30 minutes we started up the ridge. I was not in great shape, a bad stomach had bothered me since the
first day in rgentina. Still, we proceeded uphill with reasonable
progress and reached the top of the ridge in only slightly
more than one hour. We were both happy to see that our ridge connected nicely into the top part of the valley that
ran on our left side. Thus, no need to climb the local summit above us. Quite a nice little traverse, signs of (animal)
trails that we followed.
Reaching the main crest meant that we had gained most of the elevation, but with several kilometer distance remaining.
We arrived at the summit at 1015.
A good break in near perfect weather. All other tops were checked with the
hand level, we were at the top of Tintin. Leaving after 30 minutes, we followed the same route back, except for
a few small improvements along the main crest. The return took 2:15 and a total trip time of 6 hours.
