Patagonia – Los Glaciares National Park

This is the third in a series of posts on our January 2020 trip to Patagonia. Ah, good old January, just eight weeks ago when we only had to avoid impeachment news instead of other human beings and global economic catastrophe.

When last seen, Bev was determined to sneak a penguin out of Tierra del Fuego, name him Ferdinand (after the Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan), and provide him a good home with no threat of predators.

Meet Ferdinand.

At least he doesn’t bray like a donkey or smell like raw fish.

So, penguin in tow, we left Ushuaia and flew to El Calafate, a gateway to the Los Glaciares National Park and the Fitz Roy Massif, where the hiking was about to get real. But before that, a little background on why Mount Fitz Roy has been revered for hundreds of years. It is a huge granite monolith, formed when large tectonic plates collided about 100 million years ago. It stands 11,073 feet high and for thousands of years was called El Chaltén, a Tehuelche word meaning “smoking mountain” because the natives believed it was a volcano. What they thought was smoke is actually steam formed by cold water from the ice field hitting the sun-warmed granite and carried upward in a channel between peaks, making it appear like smoke coming from a chimney. The Argentine explorer Francisco Moreno saw the mountain in 1877 and, in the tradition of naming stuff after white people, proclaimed it Fitz Roy to honor the captain of the HMS Beagle. Today, a small mountain village founded in 1985 (within the national park and near the base of Fitz Roy) is named El Chaltén. It is considered a mecca for mountain climbers and Fitz Roy is rated as one of the most difficult mountains on Earth to climb. The town was full of people anywhere from 35-50 years younger than any of us, which meant only one thing: lots of brew pubs. For that, we were more than willing to tolerate all of the millenials.

Halfway through a four-hour drive from the airport to our next lodge, our guides stopped the van and excitedly insisted that we get out to see Fitz Roy, explaining that visibility is highly unpredictable. We poured out of the van, braced ourselves against the Patagonian winds, squinted toward a mountain range MILES AND MILES away, and collectively snapped hundreds (thousands??) of photos, worried that we would never see it again and that this would be our one and only chance to prove that we actually laid eyes on it. Here’s one of the gazillion photos, visual aid included (if you squint really hard you can see something that resembles a sawtooth):

A couple of hours later we approached the town of El Chaltén and entered Los Glaciares National Park. This provided another photo opportunity and by now, Fitz Roy was just showing off for us.

After passing through El Chaltén, we drove ten more miles down a dirt road before finally arriving at the ten-room Hostería El Pilar, where we would be the only guests for the next four nights. 

Now I grew up in Southern California, so you’d think that my basic Spanish would be pretty good. I can ask “¿donde esta el bano?” and I have lots of experience ordering “una cerveza y tres tacos con carnitas, por favor” Yet, when I heard the word hostería, I wondered if we would be staying at a hostel at the end of a dirt road. We had already been forewarned that El Pilar has no wifi and is too remote to receive a cellular signal and, while I was perfectly okay with being off the grid, I was desperately hoping that it wasn’t going to resemble a small dormitory. I later learned that hostería can mean both a hostel and an inn. El Pilar, it turns out, is one gem of an inn, situated at the foot of Fitz Roy and run by a delightfully hospitable young couple. Oh, and why was it at the end of a ten-mile dirt road? Because the trailhead for our first hike in Los Glaciares National Park was right outside the front door.

We did three hikes in Los Glaciares, each intended to provide us with different views of the mountain range, where the weather is highly unpredictable, even from hour to hour. Many travelers will spend days here without ever seeing the summits but we were lucky enough to have three nearly cloudless days. After getting rain in Buenos Aires and Tierra del Fuego, perhaps the gods were cutting us some slack.

Day one was a 12-mile “out-and-back” hike. The six miles out included five miles of southern beech trees and views of the Piedra Blanca and Marconi glaciers, gently heading up before coming to a sign that warned of what was ahead. Very steep. Good physical condition required. Team Pea shrugged and plowed upwards with Federico (one of our local guides for the next three days) and two of our Tennessee hiking pals, Jenny and Cindy. We’re from Appalachian country and not afraid of climbing 1,000 feet over the last mile! The terrain quickly turned rocky and reminded us of climbing Mt. Whitney in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains but without the extreme altitude. The reward at the top was eating our sack lunches on the shore of the powder-blue Laguna de Los Tres, a small glacial lake right beneath Fitz Roy’s near-vertical east face.

Day two in Los Glaciares began with a drive into El Chaltén (down the ten-mile dirt road… which, upon reflection, sounds like a country western song), where we dropped off all of our dirty, smelly clothing at a laundry. This was quite exciting because our luggage for all South American domestic flights had a strict weight limit, requiring us to minimize our wardrobe and hand wash items every few days. Dumping our bags of laundry and picking them up the next morning was a luxury! Free of dirty laundry, we hit the trail for an eleven mile “out and back” hike with just under 3,000′ of elevation gain. The end point was a new view of Fitz Roy, overlooking Laguna Torre and the Torre Glacier. 

Day three, our final full day at El Pilar, began with our host Guillermo posing a grammar question to a few of us. Guillermo’s English skills are very good but it’s not his native tongue, so it was normal for him to be confused by the use of “don’t” and “doesn’t”. Specifically, he wanted to know should he be asking “who doesn’t want dessert” OR “who don’t want dessert”? When we explained that “doesn’t” was grammatically correct, he thoughtfully replied “then why do the Beatles sing ‘she’s got a ticket to ride and she don’t care’“? Even the best songwriting don’t make good grammar. 

Grammar lessons and breakfast complete, we headed you-know-where… down the ten-mile dirt road, this time to retrieve our clean clothes at the laundry and head out on another twelve mile hike. WOOHOO! Today, we’d hike to Laguna Torre (the same one we viewed from above yesterday) , where we would enjoy lunch on the shore. The terrain was slightly easier than the past two days and because the trail began and ended in town, we treated ourselves to ice cream and beer afterwards. And THAT’S how you do muscle recovery.

We sure were sorry for our stay at El Pilar to come to an end but it had one last surprise in store for us. Over our three days and four nights there, we had heard of Terry, the inn’s shy and elusive dog. Terry was the subject of many alleged sightings during our stay, with people reporting what began to sound like apparitions. “I saw a white blur in the courtyard and I’m pretty sure it was Terry.” Or “See that white lump out beyond the treeline? I think that’s Terry.” On some evenings, small search parties formed after dinner, calling out “Terrrry… Terrrrrrrrrrrry…. TERRRRRRRRRRY!”, as if he was miraculously going to overcome his avoidant anti-social personality and come bounding out of the woods, saying “wow, where have you guys been I’ve been looking all over for you”. So, it was only appropriate on our final morning that after every single one of us was on the van , buckled in and preparing to leave El Pilar, Terry wandered out from behind the inn and cooly laid down in the grass as if to say “adios amigos.”

Next up: Viedma Lake, the Blue Lagoon, and one really crazy glacier.