Ojos del Salado Area, Various Ascents and Observations. From February to March, I was in northern Chile and Argentina in the area south of Ojos del Salado with a group of seven, all from Germany: Martin Blumenstock, Fritz Felber, Michael Fuchs, Werner Geys, Alexander Hartlein, Bernd Tamosky, and Manfred Unterholzner. Five of us (Blumenstock, Fuchs, Hartlein, Tamosky, and me) climbed Veladero (6436m), a peak near Bonete Chico. We found only a pick ax on the summit, which had probably been left by Johan Reinhard in 1985 or 1986. Two days later, we tried to climb Bonete Chico (6759m) but failed to reach the summit due to a heavy storm. In Jagüe we met Sr. Urriche, who made the first ascent of Bonete Chico with Cicchitti in 1970. In 1954, Cicchitti climbed Pissis, but he thought he had climbed Bonete Grande. He wrote of a mountain with four or five very high summits and he saw a very high mountain south of the mountain he climbed. This means he was on Pissis and what he saw was Bonete Chico. Walther Penck, who said he had climbed Bonete in 1913, most likely reached the summit of a nameless mountain (6222m) about eight kilometers north of Bonete Chico. He came from the east along the Rio de la Tamberia. A sketch in his book, Puna de Atacama, shows the route to a summit north of what is now called Bonete Chico.

Later Felber, Fuchs, Geys, and Tamosky climbed Ojos del Salado (6885m) while Blumenstock, Hartlein, Unterholzner and I reached the summit of Tres Cruces South (6749m), where we found a broken ski-pole, a note of Greg Home’s (1995)—and an old box with Paryski and Osiecki’s calling card from November 26, 1937! So they didn’t climb the central peak on this day as is written in Jill Neate’s A Survey of Andean Ascents, Second Edition.

Alexander von Gotz, Deutschen Alpenverein