Raised Beneath Cerro Torre, the Odell Brothers Are Poised to Leave Their Mark
This story appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.
At 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 8, 2023, the graduating class of Secundario No. 28 Nancy M. Arco was flush with excitement. The boys shrugged on boxy suit jackets and wrestled ties into place. The girls carefully applied eyeliner and zipped themselves into sparkling dresses. In just one hour, they would convene at El Chaltén’s local gymnasium and receive their high school diplomas. A summer of parties and part-time jobs in the small Argentine town stretched out in front of them—the last summer of their youth—before university or full-time employment or new and foreign cities pulled them elsewhere.
At the same hour the day before, Tomas Odell mantled onto the summit of Cerro Torre—which is always a mind-bending place, but particularly so late in the evening. The sun sits low on the horizon, glazing the boundless Hielo Continental a deep yellow. To the east, the ragged shadow of Cerro Torre is etched across the Cerro Chaltén skyline, which in turn casts its long shadow on the little town of El Chaltén, Patagonia. Tomas smiled, thinking of his classmates so far below, preparing to collect a diploma on his behalf.
Two days earlier, Tomas, 18, and his brother Pedro Odell, 20, had hugged their mom and hiked away from their home on the edge of town and into the Torre Valley. The brothers spent a full day hiking to Noruegos Camp and then another day climbing up to a snowy saddle beneath Cerro Torre’s famed Southeast Ridge (5.11d C2 WI 5; 800m). They raced up and down the route in one extremely long 25-hour “day,” connecting splitter cracks with runout face climbing and vertical ice tubes. High on the headwall, the crux of the ridge, Pedro plugged gear behind a large loose flake and punched it seven meters into wet 5.11 terrain. Quaking from the effort, his loaded pack nearly pulling him off the wall, Pedro screamed and sucked his core tight, squeaking through the crux sequence while his rope draped lazily through space below. Tomas followed frantically behind.
The summit of Cerro Torre has cell reception, so when the brothers pulled onto the flat, floating island of ice, they called their mom. An experienced alpinist herself, she was proud but anxious. Her boys were about to rappel through the night on a testpiece of alpinism. She wished them luck and hung up the phone.
Pedro and Tomas Odell are members of the first generation of climbers born and raised in El Chaltén. The town has existed since 1985, but it was merely a collection of wind-blasted cabañas and basic amenities for many years—not the easiest place to start a family. Chicago-born Max Odell, the boys’ father, first visited El Chaltén in 1997, chasing a perpetual winter between the United States and Argentina. He spent an incredible season in town and moved there permanently. At the time, El Chaltén had roughly 150 residents, hand-cut dirt roads, and a few hostels and restaurants. A bus would come once a day in the summer and once every two weeks in the winter. “They would cut off the electricity at midnight every night,” says Max. “It was pretty wild.” Visiting climbers spent the majority of their time hanging out in dingy hand-crafted camps in the mountains and hiked down to El Chaltén only periodically to restock on bread, wine, and meat.
Coincidentally, Max moved to town at the same time as his old friend from Bariloche, Marcella Antonutti. Marcella had been climbing in the mountains above El Chaltén since 1990 and made the first all-female ascent of Aguja Guillaumet—the northernmost peak in the Cerro Chaltén skyline—with a girlfriend via the Amy Couloir (5.8 65˚ snow; 300m). “Living was very simple back then,” Marcella says of staying days and weeks at Campo Rio Blanco. “We would hang out in camp, look at the clouds, and try to find a calm time to climb.” Max and Marcella were dating by the end of the year.
As more climbers and trekkers began to visit El Chaltén, the town gradually expanded to greet them. Grocery stores, internet access, paved roads, and plenty of restaurants were good reasons to consider bedding down in town when the infamous Patagonian storms ripped through the mountains. The small local school, originally serving just 15 students, was growing too (it now serves roughly 500), and Max and Marcella realized that El Chaltén was the perfect place to raise an adventurous family. Pedro was born in 2003, Tomas two years later.
The great benefit of growing up in a small town is the tight web of community stitching it all together. Every new baby becomes, in effect, a widely cherished nephew or niece. Pedro’s first experience with rock climbing was at the local boulderfield at age 3, where he watched his parents and their mountain-guide friends lurch up granite blocks and lounge laughing in the long grass between attempts. Before long, Pedro and Tomas’s many “uncles” were carefully asking Marcella if they could take the boys climbing or skiing in the hills above town.
“My dad liked to say he had a training program for me,” Pedro says of his father, a fantastic alpinist who has climbed Cerro Torre five times, guided it twice to the summit, and made numerous first ski descents across the range. That meant, for his sons, bouldering at age 3, lessons at the climbing gym at 5, backcountry skiing at 8, mountaineering at 11, technical alpine climbing at 13. By their early teens, the brothers were bouldering outdoors up to V9, standing on podiums in indoor-climbing competitions across the country, and learning how to place cams on the Chaltén skyline peaks.
Pedro has taken 20-meter whippers from the summit block of Cerro Torre, led all the crux pitches on a winter ascent of Cerro Standhardt’s Exocet (WI 5+ M5; 500m), and split a granola bar four ways for breakfast on a strung-out alpine climb in Peru. But his ascent of Aguja Guillaumet, by far the easiest peak in the Cerro Chaltén Massif, at age 13, remains his toughest experience in the mountains. Max had picked out the classic Brenner Ridge (5.10d; 300m) for his eldest son’s first technical alpine climb. The pair hiked five hours up steep talus slopes to a basecamp below the mountain and woke at three the next morning to begin their ascent. They hiked and scrambled for three more hours to get to the base of the ridge, and then took turns jamming splitter golden cracks. It would have been a dream route for an experienced climber, but young Pedro was gripped. And exhausted. He was out of his league. On the summit ridge—merely exposed walking—he realized that any stumble could send him swinging down the mountain’s steep west face. “I was so afraid at some moments,” he admits. “I was probably too young.”
But Pedro put on a brave face for his dad and didn’t let on how uncomfortable he was. It seemed to work: even now, looking back, Max beams. “Pedro was a natural. He was already strong from competing, and he moved really well on the rock. It was a fantastic day. Just incredible.”
Back in town, Tomas listened jealously while his brother regaled him with stories of the high peaks. His time would come soon enough—at age 13, per the training program—when he, Pedro, and Max teamed up to climb Guillaumet again via the seasonal ice route the Amy Couloir. “I was having a really bad time,” Tomas remembers. “My hands were freezing and I was super scared of rockfall.” He was mainly a fair-weather boulderer then, and the 20-hour push completely wrecked him. Tomas grows serious when asked if his experience on Guillaumet dampened his desire for alpinism.
“It took me a week of rest to get motivated for the mountains again.”
Since 1997, El Chaltén has grown from 150 to 3,000 residents, but locals have always had some sort of climbing gym. It’s a good thing. The weather in El Chaltén is notoriously violent due to its place at the bottom of South America. Storm systems can travel long distances across the ocean without crashing into any landmass—until Patagonia blocks its way. With winds in the mountains known to exceed 100 miles per hour, there is plenty of time to get fit in the gym or on the world-class boulders around town. That’s exactly what the Odell brothers did; racking up an impressive list of bouldering ticks and comp results between alpine bouts. Pedro liked competitions because he rarely got nervous. He could see himself separate from his climbing performance and acted accordingly. He didn’t question whether he could commit to a glassy dualtex smear. He just did it. He didn’t worry if he was about to edge onto the podium. He performed like he had nothing to lose. “I wasn’t a stronger climber than my friends,” Pedro says, “but I was the better competitor. I could stay in my own head.” Pedro realized that his mental strength applied pretty easily to alpine climbing, and by the time he was climbing with Tomas and his dad on Guillaumet, he was leading pitches. Alpine climbing no longer felt quite so foreign.
Climbing with Max was safe and dialed, but it lacked the stumbling spontaneity and hindsight-learning the brothers typically get when out with their peers. It was in these contrasting moments that both Pedro and Tomas started to understand the true tenets of alpine climbing: self-reliance and maximum adventure. At 16, Pedro climbed the Guillot-Coqueugniot on Guillaumet, another ice couloir just a bit harder and steeper than the Amy, with two teenage friends. They had open-bivouacked below the route and started up it the next morning with little information about its grade or reputation. They climbed quickly despite the unknown terrain, following their intuition and reveling in the isolation they felt in the couloir. Topping out, they met more climbers on the rocky summit ridge, then followed an established rappel line down the mountain in a building snowstorm. “We were feeling good at that moment, like we belonged there,” Pedro says. “But we were also realizing how much we still had to learn.” As they slowly rappeled the icy chute, a French team zipped past them, admonishing them for not wearing crampons despite having them on their packs. The boys sheepishly strapped their crampons on and continued over the bergschrund.
The Odell brothers climbed less and less with their father during the start of the 2020/21 season; they were excited to confront their home mountains with partners of an equally inexperienced skill set. “The first time I climbed with just Pedro—no Dad—was when I was 15,” Tomas says. They returned to the scene of Pedro’s first alpine climb, the Brenner Ridge, and raced up it in less than a day from El Chaltén. As the brothers amassed more experience and strength in the mountains, Max eventually rejoined the rank of teammate. From January to March 2021, the trio climbed almost exclusively together, racking up ascents of Aguja Poincenot’s classic Whillans-Cochrane (5.9 M4 70°; 550m), a link-up of Chiaro di Luna (5.11a; 750m) on Aguja St. Exupéry into the upper Anglo-Americana (5.10d; 200m) on Aguja Raphael Juárez, and the massive Afanassieff (5.10c; 1,550m) on Cerro Chaltén (also known as Cerro Fitz Roy). “That season was a changing moment for us because, previously, Tom and I felt like we were being guided by my father,” Pedro says. “But then, even though he still had more experience than us, we were leading most of the pitches. I was feeling a lot more like I was a part of a team.”
Patagonia has always been a place to visit—not a place to be.
The brothers caught up to their dad that season and then eclipsed him. “We’re not really climbing together any more,” Max says. “They’re just too strong.” In February 2022, Pedro teamed up with Horacio Gratton and Esteban Degregori for his first truly newsworthy ascent: the FA of El Zorro y la Rosa (5.11c C1; 600m) on the South Face of Aguja St. Exupéry. Gratton had been one of the local uncles to the brothers, and he was initially unwilling to let Pedro take much of a leadership role. “I was trying to take care of him,” Gratton explains. But Pedro soon impressed Gratton with his ability to move swiftly up loose, blocky pitches while seconding with an overloaded pack. Gratton had to accept how far his nephew “Pedrito” had progressed. A few weeks later, a visiting Thomas Huber—one of the strongest and most renowned rock climbers of the late ‘90s and aughts—asked Gratton if he thought Pedro would be a worthy partner for the Moonwalk Traverse (5.11b 70°; 3,600m), a south-to-north enchainment of the entire Cerro Chaltén Massif.
“I said, ‘Go for it. Pedro is totally ready. He’s going to be a great partner.’”
The grades that Pedro and Tomas and every other world-class alpinist climb in Patagonia are not particularly hard. The vast majority of the routes in the area are 5.11 or less. What makes even the easier routes in this area difficult is their remoteness, the decrepit rappel anchors, the unfathomable scale, and the horrific wind. Wind that makes climbers weightless on free-hanging rappels. Wind that plows hikers over and snaps their legs between boulders. If you are high on a wall in Patagonia and you are caught in a storm, you are inconceivably fucked. None of this is hyperbole. Visiting climbers know this. And because of this fact, and the lore, and the climber banter at every pre- and post-window asado, the only climbers brave enough to venture to the bottom of the world have historically been extremely experienced alpinists. This demographic is changing, thanks to better weather forecasting, lighter equipment, the carrot of social media, and climate change turning the summer months into less of an icy alpine venue and more of a pure-rock paradise. Regardless, Patagonia has always been a place to visit—not a place to be. Climbers from Canada and the United States and Germany and Slovenia train all year—sometimes for multiple years—for a chance to dance among Patagonian peaks. These visitors are hawkish with weather models—their plans perfectly outlined. When a weather window arrives, they dash in with their heads down and climb as fast as they can. There’s a term for the storm system that appears on the western skyline of the Hielo Continental, marking the end of a weather window: The Wall of Hate. Windows don’t close in El Chaltén; they slam shut.
But Pedro and Tomas Odell are part of the first generation of climbers to wake up to the towering Cerro Chaltén Massif every day of their lives. They’ve watched boiling lenticulars race across the skyline and turn El Chaltén’s main drag into a howling wind tunnel. They’ve staggered across glaciers when those same storms arrive earlier than forecasted. Visiting climbers may whine about their two-month “alpine-climbing” trip turning into a dejected bar crawl—but the Odells have perspective. When summer ends and the tourists leave, they’ll still be in town, waiting patiently for the next spell of calm, clear weather. “These guys,” friend and frequent climbing partner Augustin Perez Aguirre Aloyz says, “their mental strength comes from going out into the mountains—these mountains—from a very young age. They feel so comfortable here.”
Teaming up with Thomas Huber—for any climber—is a dream opportunity. He and his brother Alex were two of the hottest climbers at the turn of the century, making multiple early free ascents on El Capitan and the first free ascent of Eternal Flame (5.13a; 650m) on Pakistan’s Nameless Tower (6,286m). For an onlooker, the idea that Thomas Huber might team up with Pedro Odell to try one of the great prizes of Patagonia sounded slightly absurd, or like charity. The two were spaced 30-plus years and a lifetime of elite alpinism apart. But Huber recognized the talent Pedro had inherited from his mother and father and the obvious comfort he felt while strapped to Patagonian walls. His is a coolness impossible to fake.
The pair made fast progress early in the traverse, hiking in from town and climbing Aguja de l’S before bivouacking. Day two brought more rapid progress, flowing over Agujas St. Exupéry and Raphael Juárez just as Pedro had done with his brother and father. “We were having such a great time,” Huber says. “It didn’t feel like I was climbing with a young boy. Of course, he and Tomas went to the best climbing school you can have: El Chaltén.” Pedro was in his element but also felt like he had something to prove. He climbed 20 meters between protection on splitter 5.10 before Huber called him out. “If you have gear on your harness, use it! Don’t try to show me how good you are—I already know you are amazing.” They climbed Aguja Poincenot on day three and, at the col beneath Cerro Chaltén, received an updated weather forecast. Their weather window was going to close sooner than originally planned. Pedro and Huber had the food, fuel, and motivation to continue, but they had no desire to charge into the Wall of Hate. They rappelled down to the glacier that afternoon.
Back in town, Huber continued to get to know Pedro and Tomas. He was impressed by their traditional climbing ethics and prowess across myriad disciplines. The brothers were polite and subdued at the boulders but routinely hiked problems that sponsored professionals struggled on. No one would have been surprised if Pedro and Tomas had developed outsized egos—these hotshot teenagers climbing impressive routes throughout the range—but they didn’t. “They are super humble,” Patagonian veteran Colin Haley says, “but I think they also have a unique perspective growing up in Chaltén. Even though they’re from a small town with a small local community, they’ve grown up seeing climbers like David Lama in the boulders, and chatting with people like Alex Honnold and Ermanno Salvaterra.” It’s hard to be cocky when the world’s best climbers flock to your hometown each summer.
A few months later, Huber invited the Odells to his home in Germany where he recommended they receive the prestigious Paul Preuss Advancement Award. A few days later, after the brothers accepted the award and its cash prize, the trio ran into the team manager of Huber’s main sponsor, Adidas Terrex. Huber made introductions, then walked away. “I wasn’t going to sell the brothers,” Huber said. “I just showed the boys the door. They had to open it by themselves.” The Odells signed on to the global team later that year.
While Pedro and Tomas have climbed with some of the strongest alpinists in the world, they remain each other’s favorite partners. There is an unspoken simplicity while climbing with blood—an understanding of each other’s mood and motivation and willingness to go deep. “Sometimes we don’t even have to talk to make decisions,” Tomas says. “There is a lot of trust.” Climbing with friends is different. Risk tolerances vary. Verbal communication takes time. “But with Pedro, we have the same tolerances. We want to take the rope off at the same time. I don’t need to ask.”
Many climbers spend their entire lives searching for partners so aligned. Pedro and Tomas have spent no time wasting theirs. In November 2022, they teamed up for an early season ascent of the Cerro Chaltén’s Supercanaleta (5.9 M5 WI 4; 1,600m), and later that season established Yacaré (5.11c A0; 550m) on Aguja Raphael Juárez’s East Face, their free ascent blocked by a nasty offwidth. Pros Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll and Pete Whittaker repeated the line at 5.12 soon after and were impressed by the brothers’ effort through some seriously loose, dangerous terrain. That March, cold and autumnal, Pedro and Tomas partnered with Augustin Perez Aguirre Aloyz for a late-season attempt of the wild rime-ice route Via dei Ragni (90˚ M4; 600m) on Cerro Torre. Their ascent ended on the final pitch, mere meters from the summit, when Pedro fell while leading overhanging snow, pulled out his lone piece of protection, and rocketed 20 meters out of sight behind a fin of rime. Pedro hauled himself back over the fin and they bailed.
One of their biggest successes was in July 2023, when they made the fourth known ascent of the Italian Pillar (VI 5.9 A1; 900m) on Peru’s Taulliraju (5,830m) with Aloyz and Pedro Navarro. Adidas Terrex partially funded the trip, the brothers’ first international expedition. It was a bold objective. The East Face of Taulliraju is a jumbled mess of detached flakes held together by skiffs of aerated snow. Solid belays are infrequent. Since the Italian Pillar’s first ascent in 1985, it had received only two repeats, both by absolutely legendary pairings: Alex Lowe and Jeff Lowe (no relation), and Marko Prezelj and Steve House. But the young team took what they had practiced at home and carefully applied it to Taulliraju’s precarious flanks. They made good progress until late on day two when Tomas whipped out of sight on a steep mixed pitch. He eventually righted himself and rappelled back to the belay 20 minutes later, a little worse for wear and bleeding, but otherwise OK. He said the pitch didn’t go. It was too steep and hard and void of protection. Pedro gently took the reins to see for himself. He agreed that supportive snow or seasonal water ice would be required to climb the otherwise featureless granite. They were out of luck.
Pedro took stock of their position: balanced high on the mountain, on a ridge too hard for them to climb, surrounded on both sides by loose rock and seracs. He spotted a planar sheet of ice 100 meters to the left, blocked by a blank-looking slab. The ice provided a clean shot to the summit ridge and would have been a great option if it weren’t for the volleys of loose blocks and ice that ran down the narrow feature at regular intervals. “We were in a tough situation,” Aloyz says. “But at that point, we had no other option.” Pedro balanced his crampons precariously across the slab and into the icy chute, then climbed straight up as fast as he could. The team spent a stressful few hours in the feature, not daring to look up. “That was the scariest moment of the whole trip,” Aloyz said.
When Max Odell began taking his sons alpine climbing, he knew they would develop an unmatched comfort and familiarity with the range. But he didn’t know if they would want to stay around home once they were old enough to leave. Many teenagers tend to take their hometown for granted, no matter how many visitors lust for the place. “All I know is they love these mountains,” Max says. “And even though they see them everyday, they find them super special. We’ll see what happens when they start traveling and climbing elsewhere.”
So far, not much has changed. The brothers eagerly returned from Peru and dove headlong into their home projects. They have much to choose from: stunning boulders, pumpy sport routes, ephemeral ice lines, and some of the proudest alpine objectives on planet Earth. But Gratton says Pedro and Tomas will only find what they are capable of once they’ve learned the inside baseball of “Yosemite tactics.” These speed-climbing methods—including short-fixing, hauling, and speed-aiding—were popularized in the Valley and then applied to other proud rock faces around the world. The brothers employed the basics on their ascent of Cerro Torre in December, but Gratton believes the best alpine climbers are those who use Yosemite tactics regularly. So the three of them have tickets booked to Yosemite this May. Pedro and Tomas’s are one-way.
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