Climbing in Valle Encantado

Valle Encantado appears in a short, documentary-style film built around a concentrated season of exploration and route development. The North Face brought nine athletes to the valley near San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, and the resulting piece foregrounds process as much as peak performance: bolting new sport lines, route-finding on compact granite spires, and the small-group logistics of remote approach and scrambling.

The edit, assembled and directed by Matty Hong, intercuts polished cameras from Mike Call and Ben Nielsen with on-the-ground iPhone footage shot by Cedar Wright, producing a practical, climber’s-eye frame. Viewers see Matty Hong, Shawn Raboutou, Sam Elias, Felipe Camargo, Angie Scarth-Johnson, Brette Harrington, Cedar Wright, Matt Segal and Caro North trading techniques and local knowledge as they establish and sample new lines.

If your interest is less in singular athletic conquest and more in how a mixed international team develops routes and negotiates place, the film’s value is documentary rather than spectacle. Sequences of bolting and approach work sit alongside climbing footage, so the valley’s granite towers and the day-to-day decisions of travel, protection, and line choice are part of the story as much as the moves on the rock that conclude each segment.