On The Fly: How Dirtbag Climbers Fueled a First Ascent

Some expeditions are years in the making. Others get planned in an airport. Alex Moss's first ascent of El Monstro in Chilean Patagonia was the latter.

Alex is a climbing guide, van dweller, and wilderness therapy veteran who splits his time between Salt Lake City and the North Cascades. He's been climbing since high school, working through every discipline the sport has to offer: competition, sport climbing, trad, big wall, alpine. He lives out of his van for most of the year and works for Mountain Madness guiding in the Cascades when he isn't logging vertical somewhere on the road.

Last winter, he linked up with three other climbers from the wilderness therapy world, Sam, Kenya, and Sebastian, and flew to Patagonia with 500 pounds of gear and no confirmed objective. What they came home with was a new route on a 1000m cliff with almost 4000 ft of climbing, a first ascent they named Aprendiendo Volando. On The Fly.

The Team and the Objective

The four climbers shared a background in wilderness therapy and a similar approach to the mountains: flexible, scrappy, and comfortable in the unknown. Sam, who had climbing, leadership and expedition experience, was the expedition leader. Alex brought the technical rock climbing. Kenya and Sebastian were strong free climbers making their first foray into big wall terrain but leading the team with pysch and energy! Together they made up a team that was, as Alex put it, "just going into the unknown and figuring shit out moment to moment."

The original objective fell through at the last minute. Their Plan B was confirmed by phone in the Santiago airport during a six-hour layover. Within a day of landing, the team was dropped into a remote valley in Cochamo, staring up at a wall none of them had properly researched.

"We knew where the other lines were on the mountain, and that's like all the information we had," Alex recalls.

Three Nights on the Wall

What followed was a month of figuring it out. The team set up base camp below the face, dealt with clouds of biting flies that only retreated during the cooler parts of the day, and contended with stoves that required full disassembly and wire-brush cleaning after every single meal because Chilean white gas was slowly gumming up their fuel lines.

"It was absurd," Alex says. "You had to take it apart immediately when you were done cooking because if you left it, it would solidify and be very hard to take apart."

Despite the logistical chaos, the climbing came together. Sam and Alex led the early pitches, fixing ropes and hauling gear, while Kenya and Sebastian learned the systems on the fly. Sebastian's dislocated rib sidelined him early but he recovered and eventually led several key pitches. Kenya, on her first big wall, was leading technical terrain with confidence by the final day. The team spent three nights on the wall and summited. The next morning they rappelled back in to free the top two pitches they had aided on the way up.

Fueling an Unknown Objective

With weight limits and an uncertain timeline, food planning had to be intentional. On the wall, the approach was clean: calories first, highest protein and calorie density available, no luxury.

"We went full dehydrated bars and RecPaks on the wall," Alex says. RecPak served as the primary breakfast on climbing days, and on movement days when the team needed to cover ground without stopping to cook.

"They're sweet as a breakfast because oatmeal is terrible if you eat oatmeal for most of your life," he says. "And it's quick. When you're trying to get going in the morning and get moving, it's an awesome just, get to it."

700 calories, 43 grams of protein, no stove required. On a wall where the stoves were already fighting them, that mattered more than they anticipated.

Base camp eating was a different story. The team had spent a week in a borrowed house in town eating fresh food before the approach. "We ate pretty darn well when we were in base camp," Alex says. The wall was where things got stripped down.

The Route

They named the new line Aprendiendo Volando A.K.A. On the Fly, and the name holds more weight than it might seem. The whole expedition was improvised: the objective chosen in an airport, the plans shifting daily, two teammates learning to big wall climb in real time, stoves disassembled after every meal, and a team of four strangers becoming a solid crew somewhere on a wall in Patagonia.

"It just gave a way to process all of it," Alex says of the name. "The whole thing was just like, we made a plan in the airport as we landed with 500 pounds of gear. It's just like that."