Mountaineering is an obsession, the eternal aspiration of absolute or simply personal conquests.
It is, many times, a psychological torture, especially when one cannot approach a target for reasons beyond his control.
Marc Toralles and Bru Busom have waited since 2019 to return to Siula Grande where they began to open a new route on its virgin, huge and repulsive east wall.
A rock slide then hit the third member of the team, Roger Cararach, forcing them to abandon when they were about a third of the way down the wall.
Later, the pandemic froze everything and three years of illusion, doubts, impotence and uncertainty followed: will it be possible to reach the top or will it be so risky that the wait will have been in vain?
Catalan mountaineering maintains an idyll with the Siulas (both the big one, in this case, and the small one), a 6,344 meter mountain located in the Peruvian mountain range of Huayhuash, and universally known thanks to the survival epic carried out in 1985 by the Brits Simon Yates and Joe Simpson after achieving the first ascent of the west face of the mountain and suffering a nightmare during the descent.
In 2007, Jordi Corominas and Oriol Baró signed an impressive opening on the west face of Siula Chico (6,265 m) in impeccable alpine style.
In the case of Corominas, it was his third attempt at the wall, which he went to in 2003 and 2005, always with Jordi Tosas.
The latter would confess that his attempt had gone beyond what was psychologically acceptable, given the objective dangers that constantly threatened them.
Bru Busom ascends the Siula Grande.
The Siula Grande was climbed for the first time in 1936 by an Austrian couple who climbed its northern ridge, and in 2016 the French Max Bonniot and Didier Jourdain masterfully scored the east pillar... The much-desired east wall remained, as attractive as it was intimidating .
The east wall of the Siula Grande is a 1,100-meter sea of rock where the frequent fall of rocks and ice makes the undertaking of climbing it a highly committed and random affair.
Marc Toralles, from the Black Diamond team, Bru Busom and Roger Cararach have participated in the best moments of national mountaineering in the last decade, in scenarios as varied as the Alps, the Himalayas, Alaska and the Andes.
All three are high mountain guides and live day to day, accumulating piecework days to save and be able to go on an expedition.
Their new route, baptized as Ánima de Corall in homage to "all the friends who have stayed in the mountains", has high difficulties in rock, ice and mixed that they solved in six days (five nights on the wall between 11 and July 16) in alpine style.
Namely,
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“We were scared, very scared, but what remedy”
The commitment of a route is measured according to an agreed graduation, but what Toralles and Busom experienced seems to have gone beyond any rational scale, so much so that neither dares to quantify in a cold figure the tension experienced to escape with wall life.
"In many moments, the fate of the group has depended exclusively on luck," explains Marc. To escape the constant rain of rocks and ice, the couple devised a strategy that made them progress at night, when it was coldest.
But the difficulties in the lower part of the route did not allow them to advance quickly and, only in the second half of their route, did they manage to progress more agilely but on "much more broken and compromised" terrain.
All the tension accumulated during the ascent, all the doubts handled for three years exploded at the top, reached in tears under a perfect sun.
Gone is the “most demanding route we have ever climbed”, says Toralles.
Marc Toralles and Bru Busom in the Siula Grande.
The descent was just as stressful as the ascent;
the couple decided to leave the mountain by the same route they had just started.
According to Marc Toralles, "the poor quality of the rock did not allow us to place reliable anchors for rappelling, and at various times the one that did not rappel would become unanchored so as not to perish if everything fell apart."
Toralles and Busom have already made an ascent in terrible conditions to Denali, by the Slovak Direct: where others would have given up, the two Catalans achieved their goal, narrowly avoiding avalanches that swept the wall.
Their unconditional motivation makes them one of the couples of the moment on the international mountaineering scene.
“I don't think there has been any Spanish activity at a six-
thousander
as outstanding as this one”, observes Jordi Corominas.
“The wall, extremely far away, requires several portages to reach it, and the alpine style they have used has been impeccable.
In addition, it is a desired objective: some Italians were also looking for the first one, but they had to withdraw.
And other international roped had the wall in their sights.
Without a doubt, a great activity”, emphasizes one of the best mountaineers this country has known.
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