In the austral spring of 2017, Tomy Aguilo and Julian Casanova (guides), Sebastian and Stephen Gallie, and I took a four-hour boat ride from Puerto Natales to the Canal de las Montañas on the east side of the Cordillera Sarmiento. We landed at the valley south of Glaciar Bernal and spent our first day finding a way through dense vegetation to the glacier that leads toward Punta Barlovento.

Once on the glacier, we skinned up to around 600m, where we could then walk with skis until the col between Cerro Tigreli (1,626m) and the small summit south of it. We left the skis at the col and climbed 60° rime to the summit. We also quickly climbed the little summit on the south side of the col. [Cerro Tigreli was climbed and named a year earlier by a party following approximately the same route—see note below.]

We then skied down to the flat plateau at around 1,200m and skinned up to the south toward Point 1,444m, which had a little section of 80° rime climbing to get to the summit. We called it Punta Satya, later learning that a previous expedition had already climbed it from the west.

We slept on the boat and the next day got dropped off in the dark a bit north of Fiordo Hermann. The vegetation was not dense here, but we had to navigate a system of slabs and some steeper scrambling to get to the snow at around 600m. We skinned south to gain a snow ridge and then traversed north on a glacier with big crevasses, for which we had to rope up and travel in crampons. We had to fight very strong winds but still made it to the col northeast of our unclimbed peak.

We climbed the northeast ridge with some snow and rime up to 80°. Not knowing which was highest, we climbed all three high points of the summit ridge. We reversed back down to the col and skied from there to the end of the snow. We called the peak Cerro Gallie (1,596m) after Andrew Norie Gallie, who migrated to Punta Arenas in 1904.

– Caro North, Germany

Cerro Tigreli, First Ascent: On October 23 and 24, 2016, David Sanabria, Jacob Slot, and Cornelia Zamernik made the first ascent of Cerro Tigreli (1,626m) in the Cordillera Sarmiento. The trio took a boat from Puerto Natales into the Fiordo de los Montanas, where they were dropped off about 1km south of the Bernal Glacier. They cut their way through the forest and camped at the edge of the glacier. The next day they skinned up the glacier and the peak above until the terrain steepened below the final summit mushroom, which they climbed on good rime, reaching the top 6.5 hours after they began.