¨ICEBERG DEAD AHEAD¨

We arrived in El Calafate, returning to the Province of Santa Cruz (which is the same province that Rio Gallegos is in but the other side of the province).  After getting in to town, around noon, we decided to spend the day at the hostel talking to people about different things to do in the area and different treks.  Also because almost everything to do you must catch a bus pretty early in the morning it was impossible to do much that day anyway except to walk around the one major downtown street in town and walk through the way over-priced camping stores (which we happened to run in to some Irish friends from our travels in Paraty, Brazil, and later in the night met up with them for some beers).  One nice thing though was because the hostel knows everything to do here you must leave early in the morning, they start breakfast at 6:30am (normally most hostels don´t start until 8am at the earliest, most the time around 9am).

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Map of the Region

In reality there is very little to do in the town of El Calafate but it has grown and adapted tourism because it is the main hub to go to 4 major places.  Two of which we have done (and will talk about below) and the other two we are planning on doing.  The first thing we did from El Calafate was a day visit to Los Glaciers National Park.  This part of the park is about an 80 minute bus ride from town, and you must also pay admission in to the park.  The main attraction here is the Perito Moreno Glacier, which the Argentinians have built an extensive/elaborate amount of walkways (which we have seen Argentinians are very good at doing at Iguazu Falls and now here) to view.  This glacier is one of a series of glaciers (I don´t know how many are officially in the park but there are 48 glaciers in the Southern Patagonia Ice Field) which make up the national park and are all kind of connected along Lake Argentino.  Surprisingly you can get very close to the glacier, and see both little pieces fall off the glacier probably every two or three minutes and also during the high-noon period of the day we witnessed 3-4 large chunks come collapsing off the glacier causing small tidel waves in the lake.  These larger collapses would leave hundreds of small chunks of ice and also always a very sizeable iceberg in the lake, which you could see a few dozen from previous days throughout the lake.  You might think because of all this activity the glacier is shrinking yearly in size, but according to the Park Rangers it is a pretty stable glacier because in the winter it almost completely expands back to its original place.

Great Overview of the Glacier

View of the Glacier through the eyes of Emily

Emily stop trying to lick the Glacier...that is dirty ice

That is a tall glacier

The next day we took an afternoon bus to about 3 hours away to a town called El Chaltén to begin 2.5 days (which ended up being 2 really quick days) of trekking in another part of Los Glaciers National Park (this part of the park, because it is less touristy then the falling glacier, is free admission and camping).  The bus in to town took a little longer then we were told because of a few stops along the way (one at a hotel with a cafe which is semi-famous because Butch Kassidy and The Sundance Kid hidout there for several months after they robbed the banks in Rio Gallegos) so by the time we arrived in town and had to take care of a few other small things it was to late to hike up to the first campsite within the National Park (a 3 hour hike).  The original plan was to hike 3 days for about 3 hours a piece a day.  So instead we decided to find a cheap campsite in town and setu camp there for the night and headout the next morning and just do about 5 hours of hiking one day and 4 hours the next day.  So the next morning we woke up and after a good breakfast of  hot oatmeal we packed camp and headed out towards the closest overview of Cerro Torre (which was right next to the campsite we were suppose to stay at the night before).  When we reached the overview area which was from the otherside of a lake from a glacier and then the Cerro Torre Mountain in the background it all of the sudden got extremely windy (strong enough to even make me lose my balance) with a light rain.  We kind of assumed this was just because we were near the base of the mountain and glacier but as we began to back track to hit another trail to get to another campsite the rain kept getting worse and worse.  We began to book it across this trail in horrible pouring rain and extremely strong winds which more then one time threw us off the trail.  Because it was so wet we tried to do the trail as quick as possible completing what was marked as a 3:15-3:30 trail in 2:05.  Pretty impressive but lets just say we were pretty wet (clothes and boots) and exhausted by the time we hit the campground that we setup our tent as quickly as possible trying to keep the inside as dry as possible (which we weren´t that succesful at doing) and didn´t even try to make dinner just passed out for 12 hours (and yes the really bad rain/wind storm continued the better part of the night.  Even though at one point I woke up to go to the bathroom and the storm stopped but it was lightly SNOWING!!).

(Note: to check out trail maps of what we hiked go to the bottom of this post)

Top viewing point for Cerro Torre (to foggy to see the mountain) but you can see the glacier in the background.  When the picture was take the wind was way over 40mph.

Evidently English and Spanish speakers need one line to tell them to pick up their garbage...ISRAELIS NEED TWO!

The next morning when we woke up we were lucky to find that we setup in a pretty good dry-zone in the campground.  Only our clothes from the previous night and boots really got wet and needed to dry.  Luckily for our boots emily had her book with her and was already done reading well over 500 pages so we began ripping out what she had read from the book and stuffing our boots which after two rounds of stuffing finally dried out our boots.  So around 1pm we decided to hike the little over one hour trail up to FitzRoy Mountain.  The trek was a great complete uphill which we saw icicles, had some snow fall, and when we got  to the top an amazing view of the FitzRoy Mountain covered by snow.  At this point it was around 2:15pm and we had to book it into town to make a 6pm bus back to El Calafate.  They say you need about 3:30 hours from the mountain top to get back in to town the only problem was we had to go back to camp breakdown our campsite and make it in to town.  We hit the town just after 6pm and made it to the bus station just to see our bus pull off (with my pack on I tried to chase the bus down but the driver didn´t notice me).  Luckily another company had one more bus for the day at 6:30pm, so we paid (even though we already had paid for the bus we missed) and made it back in to El Calafate around 9:30pm.

Emily ripping up her book, good thing she had finished so much of it already.

A view of FitzRoy from the top of the hike

View of C. FitzRoy and C. Torre from the valley

Today we have decided to take it pretty easy catching up on somethings and getting ready to leave for Puerto Natales, Chile tomorrow which we plan on doing a great 5 day trek in Torres del Paine National Park.  (Note: Like I said in a previous post, this portion of Chile is several hundred miles away from where the earthquake occured and as we have heard from other travelers there is no problems in this region).

 First Day Hiking is in highlighted in the Red.  We left from El Chatén.  When we hit the Lake at the end of the trail is when it started raining.  We then hussled back down the trail to that cross trail that heads directly north (not highlighted) and finished the First Day at the campsite at the end of that trail.

(Hiked between 11:00-19:00, included long breaks to enjoy the views)

Second Day of hiking we started at at Camp Poincenot and headed West toward Lag. de los Torres (extremely uphill, but worth the pain).  We then hussled back down to the campsite packed our gear and hussled back down to El Chatén, barely missing our bus. 

(Hiked between 13:00-18:10, pretty quick pace with out many water breaks and about 20 minutes to break down camp)