In August, the Club Andino Bariloche (CAB) will fulfill 91 years. None of its four founding members –Juan Neumeyer, Emilio Frey, Reynaldo Knapp and Otto Meiling– could have imagined in 1931 that all their adventures (not only the creation of the club, but also their legendary journeys through the mountains of the South) would be accessible today on the Internet for free.

the recent digitization of the CAB file allows access to wonderful stories of those pioneers of mountaineering, skiing and climbing. It is an ideal material for those who enjoy diving back in time and experiencing in detail each first ascent, each rescue, each hand-drawn sketch, each opening and improvement of refuges, each feat and expedition.

Thus began, for example, the letter addressed to the members, in the first yearbook of the club: “We are pleased to submit the first annual report of our institution, corresponding to its first year of exercise, from August 13, 1931 to 12 August 1932. In the different sections that are mentioned below, information is given in detail about the main features that characterize the upward march of the Club in all its acts, and that reserve a flattering future for it, in the healthy ends that it pursues”. In addition to flattering, that future would be extensive and would mark the lives of at least five generations of mountaineers.

“The love of mountaineering and winter sports is already embedded in the atmosphere of most of the members. In both cases, the members of the Club have been associated with commendable enthusiasm, who with their presence in the ascents of the numerous hills or in the sky tournaments, in which they actively participated, gave prominence and animation to the Club’s performances. A sincere applause should be given to the sky teacher Don Otto Meiling, who knew how to perform gracefully in teaching the practice of sky, new for most of the many members who diligently practiced this kind of sport”, they added on that first anniversary of the CAB .

In 1932, the institution had just over 110 members. Currently, there are about 3,000, with many honoraries, such as Vicente Ojeda, Hugo Jung, Dinko Bertoncelj, Alfredo Slipek and Pedro Skvarca. They are climbers who are around 80 years old: most of them held positions on the Club’s Board of Directors or were part of the Relief Commission.

Not only the members, but also anyone interested in the history of Patagonian mountaineering you can immerse yourself in the more than 12,000 pages of the digital archive, which contains all the yearbooks, magazines and newsletters that the institution published up to 2011. The reading quality is excellent and access is free. A digital record of all the library’s books was also created, classified by theme, title and author, which will be updated with each incorporation.

The idea of ​​digitization arose in 2019, from the hand of Rolando “Rolo” Garibotti renowned mountaineer and author of Upright Patagonia. The project began to take shape hand in hand with a team made up of Gerhard Rampl, Claudia Posch and Milena Friedburg of Peraltafrom the Department of Linguistics at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. Milena is from Bariloche, she was an instructor at the CAB and she still has her heart there.

In a first stage, those responsible for the project managed to digitize 70 CAB publications, some 7,000 pages containing stories from between 1932 and 2011. During the second phase, the rest of the files that are now available online were uploaded. “This file was created using the Transkribus program, developed by the Digitization and Digital Preservation group at the University of Innsbruck, which also put together the page and the search engine. The project was funded in part by Digitization and Information Processing for the Digital Humanities (DI4DH) within the framework of the HRMS project of that Austrian university”, said Garibotti.

With the digitization plan underway, the search for volunteers who wanted to participate was opened. It was at that moment when Annelise de De la Cruz (87) and María Angélica “Perica” ​​Urtubey de Alder (78) added their contribution.

Annelise has a link with the club “forever”. She is also the mother of Sebastian, Nicholas and Manuel De la Cruz, true “heroes” of mountaineering. “We arrived in Bariloche in 1971 and I enrolled the boys in the club the following year. Since then, there has always been a contact, my children were very active in the boys’ mountain school. Later, Nicolás was a refugee in Frey, Sebastián made the climbs for him in Frey, United States, Himalayas [es el único argentino en haber subido el mítico K2, entre otras hazañas]. And I participated in the Group of Adult Excursionists (GEDA), which today continues to make excursions outside the tourist circuit, very little known”, says Annelise.

This warm-eyed woman was born in the town of Rorschach, in northeastern Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance. “In Switzerland, the mountains are part of everyone’s life, contact is encouraged from school. The mountain is next to the house, when you see one, you have to climb it”, laughs Annelise.

From the Alps to the Andes, that type of landscape would also mark the lives of his three children. Married to a man from Santiago, Annelise was 36 years old when she arrived in Bariloche: “It was 1971. There were barely 27,000 inhabitants, it was a town,” he recalls. Currently, more than 145,000 people live in the city.

Almost three years ago, when she learned that the club wanted to reorganize the library and digitize the archive, Annelise did not hesitate to sign up as a volunteer. She coincided there with Perica. “It was a nice team effort,” she remembers. It took them two years to establish a method that was useful and to classify all the material.

“With yearbooks and magazines it was easier, but with books it was more complicated, because there are guides, scientific books, stories, novels, etc.. But it was good for both of us to be people from the mountains and people from the club,” acknowledges Perica, who arrived in Bariloche in 1967.

“Here I worked and raised my children. We entered the club shortly after arriving, we already had a daughter when we arrived from Buenos Aires, then we had 5 more children. When she was old enough to walk in the mountains, at 6, we became members and then all the boys participated in the club’s activities”, she adds.

Even his grandsons Marcos and Franco Dal Farra are elite cross-country ski athletes. Franco was the Argentine flag bearer at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games. The boys follow in the footsteps of her mother, Inés Alder, who at Albertville 1992 became the first Argentine woman to compete in the Winter Olympics as a cross-country skier. His uncle Guillermo also participated in those games 30 years ago.

Both Annelise and Perica highlight the figure of Don Vojko Arko, which ran the CAB library for 20 years, between 1975 and 1997. Vojko passed away in 2000 and today the room bears his name. “We take as a base the classification that he made, then we update and extend it. Later, with digitization, all this material became a benefit for members and non-members. Students at the University of Comahue, for example, which has a physical education faculty with a focus on mountain sports, permanently consult the archive. There are all the stories of the pioneers, the ascents, the expeditions, the races, it’s very good, “says Perica.

As in the pages that can be read online today, family stories intertwine, go up and down hills, blend with the landscape. It is, in short, love for the mountains in its purest form.