Tierra del Fuego

The bus from El Calafate to Ushuaia took 20 HOURS, thanks to a flat tire and the ridiculous charade that is customs. We had to pass through a tiny slice of Chile and then back into Argentina, which means going through customs TWICE. Once again, the damn Chileans confiscated my carrot, even though it was never going to touch Chilean soil. Jerks.

Moving on: I sat next to a Swiss woman on the bus, also traveling solo. I like to ask people about their nation's political structure (what?), and did you know that Switzerland has seven presidents?!? Seven! At the same time! And they speak four languages in Switzerland and at least one president has to be from each region.

Crossing the Strait of Magellan:

Random: From the Ushuaia supermarket, this is either a product placement FAIL or a product placement win. Thoughts?

I was hiking with some friendly Brits, Robin and Tom, in Tierra del Fuego National Park when I heard about the 8.8 earthquake that had hit Chile that morning. Robin casually mentioned that her dad had texted her asking if she was ok. It was creepy to hear of the quake because I'd been about to go to Valparaíso, Chile, but at the last minute decided to go to Ushuaia.

On that note, on to my trivial day: Decided to go hiking at 10:40am. Ran upstairs to get my stuff in time for the 11:00 shuttle, and totally walked in on two people banging in the hostel dorm room. People: if you're going to bang, get a private room. Spare the rest of us, and don't do it in a dorm.

Anyhoo, I met the two friendly Brits at the trailhead and hiked with them for most of the day. Robin had a perfect Kiera Knightly accent which I found posh and enchanting. Like the wonk that I am, I asked them about the British political system. They can only vote for their representative (which they call their PM)! That's it! Then the party PM's choose the Prime Minister, who is the party's leader. But he doesn't have any law-making or veto power; he just leads the party and sets their agenda. Officially the Queen has veto power, but apparently she's just a figurehead who signs what's put in front of her. Anyway, I was astounded by how little the British citizens are allowed to be involved in policy making. They only get to vote for their district's guy, and only once every five years. No president, no ballot measures, nothing!

We first hiked to a low mirador that afforded a pretty view of a calm channel (Beagle?), with mountains (end of the Andes?) in the background. The hike consisted of a fairly muddy trail that wound through coihue forest. Other than the coihue trees, there was tiny green groundcover, no bigger than baby spinach. That's it, no flora between those two sizes: trees and greens.

Then we hiked a 5-mile trail that hugged the coast. This was beautiful; lagoons of deep green, jutting rocks that were, oddly, Statue-of-Liberty green. Calm water. Sharp, salty smell. Schags would have loved it.

We got to a bus stop in time for the 5:00pm return shuttle, but the end of Route 3, the end of the southern-most highway in the world, was only 30 minutes farther on. I thought to myself: What would the Boy do? Go big or go home, that's what. So I opted to hike on.

I spent an hour chilling at the final viewpoint, watching ducks, seagulls, geese, and bunnies (bunnies, it must be bunniiiiies!).

The next day I saw penguins! But on the way there we got a flat tire and when everyone piled out of the van I took this picture for Holly, Schags, Jessica, and Katy:

There's a third girl in the trio who left her book in the car.

On to the penguins! We took a 10-minute boat ride (in the sort of boat Dad would almost refer to as a Chuck Norris assault raft) to a small island that is a nature reserve. There were two kinds of penguins on the island: Magellan and something else I forgot. Not Emperor, unfortunately, as those only live in Antarctica.

Hee hee! Penguins are so comical! Waddling and flapping. Hilarious. Sometimes they'd trip, landing on their fat bellies, then spring right up and continue their tottering. To enter the ocean, they'd shuffle in until they fell over onto their bellies, and then swim from there. Swimming, they had the profile of ducks.

Finally, remember how I said Patagonia was windy? This is how the trees grow here, because of the wind:

Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy

So. In 1976, Mom and Dad visited Patagonia and hiked to the famed peaks known as Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy. They had a friend turn their photos of Cerro Torre into a painting, which hung in our living room my entire childhood. One by one, each of us kids have made the pilgrimage to these mountains to see them for ourselves. Some of us got pwned by cloudcover, some of us got lucky. I got lucky.

 

 

As the bus approached the town of El Chaltén, both Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy were completely visible. Stunningly clear blue skies. Like Ashland in August, except it was 70 degrees out instead of 90. I dropped my backpack off at the hostel, repacked my daypack, and bought a sandwich on the way out of town, booking it straight for Laguna Torre, at the base of Cerro Torre.

Tangent: to get to the trailhead, you just walk out of town. This amused me because as a kid I had these independence fantasies of just leaving the house, walking till I hit the foothills of the Siskiyous, and keeping on until I was in the forest and could live off the land, like the boy in My Side of the Mountain. I love how there is a whole genre of children's literature devoted to this escapist/naturalist/transcendentalist fantasy. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Brian's Winter (who are we kidding -- anything written by Gary Paulsen), Sparrow Hawk Red, even The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I don't think it's a coincidence that I read those books around the same time I made elaborate (though, tragically, never realized) plans for a tree fort.

I digress. For the first hour of the hike, you climb out of the valley containing El Chaltén. The trail was dusty at first, going through an area of grass, spiky shrubs, and wildflowers. Then it entered a leafy forest, and then bam! You crest the little pass leading down into the river valley approaching the Laguna Torre and there it is: the Living Room Painting. Live, in front of me! I actually gasped and my eyes teared up. I spent a few awed minutes at the mirador, staring at the mountains, munching almonds, and taking copious photos.

But the mirador is not close enough, no. So I pressed on. One cool thing about this hike is that for the entire second hour, as you make your way through the river valley (landscape: shoulder-height-bonzai-looking-tree forest), you can see Cerro Torre. You just get closer and closer and the mountain gets bigger and bigger. Giddy with joy, when no one was looking I couldn't help myself from stretching my palms to the sky in celebration.

Finally I arrived at Laguna Torre, a small lake fed by the glacier at the base of the mountain. Thar she blows. Amazing.

 

  

I took off my shoes and ate lunch on a warm rock as I soaked up the mind-blowing view of majestic Cerro Torre. I just sat there for an hour staring at the mountain, the glacier, the lake, the sky. I can't believe I was actually seeing it. Live! Finally! It felt oddly like coming home, though I'd never been here before.

The next day I hiked to Cerro Fitz Roy, the taller of the two mountains (clocking in at 11,073 feet; Torre is 10,280), and the main attraction. The hike is 25 kilometers/15.5 miles round-trip. I've never hiked that far in one day, and I felt quite baller that I was able to do it.

I love it when there is no one on the trail but me. When it's just me and my thoughts and the soft tamping of my footsteps on the forest floor. And one of the things about a trail that's 15.5 miles round-trip is that it weeds out anyone who doesn't want to hike for seven hours (or hike for three and camp), so while I definitely saw other hikers on the trail, I also had the trail to myself quite a bit.

As with the Cerro Torre hike, for the first hour you climb out of the valley containing El Chaltén. The trail was pleasantly dry, with low shrubs and something that smelled sticky sweet. Then the trail entered leafy woods with bright green groundcover. I saw a woodpecker! Proud black body and shock of stiff red mohawk.

About an hour into the hike the trail splits and you can either go to the Laguna Capri campsite or to the first mirador. I went to the first mirador. Fitz Roy was fully visible, though the sky behind it was all washed out.

After the mirador you walk along a ridge above a river valley, affording impressive views of the river and the cliffs on the other side. Then you descend into the river valley. This part is mostly flat, with Alice in Wonderland-esque tunnels of dark green shrub. Two and a half hours in is the second campsite, and the beginning of the climb to the Laguna de Los Tres, with the final view of Fitz Roy. This last hour is straight up, essentially a long, switchbacky flight of rock stairs. You climb and climb, finally able to see all the way back down the way you came: Laguna Capri, and also the Laguna Hija and Laguna Madre.

At the top of this last, steep climb is a small, glacier-fed lake at the base of Fitz Roy. The lake is at the bottom of a little basin whose steep sides are covered in boulders worn smooth by years of snow and glaciers. Tired, I gratefully used one of the boulders as a back rest while I ate lunch. Then I just sat there for an hour and a half, watching the clouds swirl around the top of Fitz Roy. Like a shy bride, Fitz Roy never fully revealed it's face while I was at there that day, but it was still amazing. I never cease to be awed by the sheer immensity of rock faces like that.

The next day was clear, so I did half the hike I'd done the day before, this time going to Laguna Capri instead of the mirador. After a mere hour and fifteen minute hike, I had all afternoon to stare at a fully revealed Fitz Roy against a background of blue sky. First I ate lunch on a rock being lapped by the Laguna Capri, then I walked down a little farther to a beach, took of my shoes, buried my toes in the sun-warmed sand, and stared at the mountain.

The sky was summer blue, with the exception of a handful of fluffy clouds barely above the horizon, moving steadily from south to north (I think; from left to right anyway). When they got to Fitz Roy, the clouds did a peculiar thing, which I will attempt to capture here. They would pass behind all the other peaks, but when they came to Fitz Roy, it was as if they were drawn to something inside the head of the mountain. They'd slow their pace and start creeping up Fitz Roy's back, slinking over the mountain's left shoulder, moving like the Smoke Monster from FernGully -- a sort of slow, viscous oozing. The northward tug of the wind would cause the lingering cloud to split into tendrils, some reluctantly peeling off, the others still desperately curling around the tip of the mountain. It was a fascinating and beautiful dance. And I lay on the beach and watched it for an hour and a half.

 

  

 

Back in town, I went to a waffle place and had half a garlic-olive-tomato pizza and some chocolate-covered waffles at the same time. Also two bottles(!) of pomelo soda. That, my friends, is the definition of winning at life.

But wait, there's more! The next day I went on a mini trek over the Viedma Glacier.

 

It was cool; you take a ferry across the lake -- which has that milky opacity of glacier-fed lakes and was the exact color of a sage leaf -- and ''dock'' against some tires bolted to the rock a little ways away from the glacier. The glacier is 90 ft - 150 ft high, and it extends 330 ft below the surface of the lake! The surface area of the glacier was something crazy like 200 square km. Our guide said that the glacier is shrinking, that a square meter of glacier weighs a ton(!), and that 20,000 years ago the glacier was as high as the hills around the lake!

So: glaciers. Not smooth! The surface was more like the texture of a bad sno-cone -- you know, the kind they make using a blender instead of a shave-ice machine -- only bigger. And all over the glacier were little rivulets of water running off. Sometimes they flow along the surface, sometimes they bore tunnels through the middle of the glacier, and sometimes they bore down to the bottom and run between the rock and the glacier.

There was a tunnel, and kick-ass crevasses of cool, icy blue.

  

  

There was also a cave where the glacier had peeled up off the rock, melted from beneath really, and we could walk in maybe 30 yards. The ceiling was smooth solid ice, and you could look up and see air bubbles and rocks suspended in it. There was also a fine, wet layer of pulverized-rock clay coating the ceiling in places. Water shot out of chutes into a pool at one end of the cave. It was surreal.

 

One my last day in El Chaltén I went on a short hike that afforded a view of the entire Fitz Roy range.

The hostel owner said that there are maybe 10 perfectly clear days here in a season. When the Boy was here for a week last year, it was clear only on the first and last days, and total shit in between. When Brian was here two years before that, he didn't see the mountains at all, except out the back of the bus window as he was leaving. Climbers wait weeks for the perfect opportunity to climb these peaks. And weather forcasts are completely useless; the weather here simply can't be predicted.

Like I said, I got lucky.

Glaciar Perito Moreno

The Perito Moreno glacier is by far the coolest thing I have seen so far. It's massive. Unfathomably large. Truly too big to conceive of.

According to Wikipedia:

Surface area: 97 square miles
Length: 19 miles
Width: 3 miles
Height above water: 240 feet
Depth below water: 558 feet

People! That means the face of the glacier is 24 stories tall!

It was jagged, ranging in color from blinding white to cool blue in the cracks to a deep blue-green that -- I'm sorry -- was the exact color of a Gusher. There were also cinnamon streaks mixed in, where dirt had been pressed between layers of ice. Sometimes I'd try to look at it like a Jackson Pollack painting, first focusing on all the tan tips, then the darkest of the shadow blues, then the faintest blues. Everytime I looked at it I saw something new.

Every so often a huge chunk of ice would calve off and crash into the lake below, followed by a thunderous crack. The smaller pieces of ice made even louder cracks, like rifle fire. Oddly, there was about a one-second lag between when the ice hit the water and when you could hear the impact.

I have a weakness for taking pictures of gratuitous signage:

Caitlin and I spent a good five hours staring at the glacier. We went in the afternoon, when there are fewer people, and for a while we had an entire viewpoint balcony to ourselves. As we were sitting there, enjoying the silent beauty of the glacier and waiting for the next crash, I found myself wishing that I had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. I mean, how cool would it be to fire a grenade into the base of the glacier and watch a Dexter-Horton sized mass of ice blow off in slow motion, the creak turning into a wail as the chunk accelerated toward the lake in an enormous spray of water and ice? Made me think of that Onion article, ''Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention of Bazooka.''

Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine is a rugged national park in Southern Chile. One of the more popular hikes is ''the W,'' a W-shaped hike that takes five days and four nights.

Day 1

Day 1 was a miserable death march.

Backing up: I awoke that morning to an angry constellation of itchy red bumps on my forearm. Great. We went into town and loaded up on dried fruits and nuts, then caught the 2:00 bus to the park. We started hiking for the Torres campsite, the upper-right point of the W, at 5:40pm. Sunset was at 9:12pm, and the hike was supposed to take 3 1/2 hours.

Weather: cold (low 50's), cloudy, and drizzling. But the weather around here is a notorious crapshoot, and we didn't have the luxury of waiting around for it to clear. So we set out.

It was super windy. Did I mention it was windy? Because it was windy. This post is going to be like that episode of Buffy where they pound into your head how hot it is (''Record highs in Sunnydale...'' ''Please come in from the complete lack of cold.''), but then at the end of the episode it snows! And even Buffy's terrible bangs can't distract you from how dreamy Angel is.

Anyway, it was windy, and the trail was quite steep. We were hiking along a slope that fell off and followed a river far below. Despite the cold, I did manage to notice that it was beautiful.

The tiny blue dot in the photo below is Caitlin. When there were more people on the trail, their backpack raincovers gave the appearance of a row of colorful, bobbing Tic-Tacs.

I was disappointed in how slowly I hiked, both in general and in comparison to Caitlin. We soon established a system where she would walk ahead, and wait for me at the treacherous parts. So: Day 1 was a miserable death march. Cold, slow, and wet. As Caitlin observed at one point: ''The reason people do this hike in January and February is that's the only time you can be wet and have it not be completely awful.''

Even with my depressing slowness, we arrived at camp at 9:00pm. Hallelujah. Coming around the corner to the sight of that cluster of tents, I knew what Littlefoot must have felt like at the end of The Land Before Time. Also, it was comforting to know that my pace is the map pace; I didn't feel like quite as much of a chump.

We set up camp with painfully cold and numb fingers, and endured the skin-puckering sixty seconds of changing out of our damp base layers. According to my kick-ass Swiss army knife (thanks, Dad!), which tells both temperature and elevation, it was 41 degrees out.

Once layered up, we registered at the guardaparque's tiny cabin, and using his tepid tap water made some tepid squash soup from our powdered soup packets. We were too cold to want to take the time to boil water for a real meal. Also, I was oddly nauseated, I think from the pack's pressure on my sternum. So after our soup we just went and got in our heavenly, heavenly sleeping bags. I can't express how good it feels to lie down on that sleeping pad and let my back muscles slowly untighten.

We discovered, in talking, that we'd accidentally reserved the hostel such that we'd have five nights/six days in the park, instead of the usual four nights/five days. Fine with me.

Day 2

We'd hoped to see the sunrise on the Torres, so we set an alarm for 5:30am. The guardaparque's girlfriend had told us that if we wake up and can't see the stars, not to bother trying for a sunrise hike, because we won't see the sunrise either. When the alarm went off, it was still raining, so we bagged the sunrise hike. When my second alarm went off at 8:00am, I was shocked and delighted to see blue sky! We got up and started for the mirador, taking only water, nuts, and our cameras with us.

During the climb I felt exhausted. For every ten steps, I had to rest. I admit that there were some dark moments when I considered mailing it in entirely, and not finishing the W.

The trail to the mirador rises above treeline, then above snowline, and becomes a scramble over rocks. The pitiless wind made my rainshell snap (I couldn't zip it shut because there was a tiny pebble in the zipping mechanism), and almost knocked me over a few times. But damn is it worth it. Because when you clear those last few boulders, bam! There, across an opaque turquoise lake, the Torres in all their massive glory jut out of the rock. Absolutely stunning. We stared at the Torres in awe until the chill and the screaming wind (did I mention it was windy?) forced us to head back.

On the way down my legs quivered and threatened to buckle. I felt like Syd had just made me do three sets of Super Legs. I was alarmed, and even more tempted to mail it in. All I could think about was the oatmeal I was about to eat.

Mercifully, when we got back to camp, the guardaparque had water boiling in a teapot on his stove, so we literally had instant oatmeal! I don't think I have ever eaten anything so delicious. After the oatmeal I took some hangover pills, which are a mix of caffeine, asprin, and some other painkiller. Shout-out to Kevin for recommending these life-saving pills. Magic!

We'd been joking about how we should stage photos for a Spring 2010 Outdoor Clothing Catalog, because at any given time each of us was wearing at least six different brands. The morning of Day 2, Caitlin had to add another brand to the mix, since her shoes turned out to be not waterproof.

By the time we broke camp and set off down the hill, I was feeling awesome! I don't know if it was the hangover pills, the oatmeal, or the music on my iPod, but I felt great. (Thanks, Steve Perry; I won't stop believing...And by Steve Perry, I mean the cast of Glee.) I hiked steadily back out the way we came, and we camped at the Torres Lodge campsite that night. Setting up a tent is so much easier with dexterity in your fingers! Morale was high.

Remember how I said it was windy? Well, the cloud in the middle of the photo below is not a cloud, but a waterfall being blown backwards. You can see where the stream it should be falling into continues.

To understand the difference in weather between Day 2 and Day 1, compare this photo to the one of us setting out on Day 1:

For dinner we made cheesy pasta. After an interminable 11-minute wait, we opened the pot lid to the beautiful sight of cooked pasta. We ate ravenously, burning our tongues but not caring, the way Daisy does when you drop hot food on the kitchen floor. Afterwards we retired to the tent, read/dozed until dark, then played 20 Questions. (''Can you eat it?'' ''Well, I guess you could...'')

Day 3

Blue skies again! Shorts weather. What a glorious victory. Hiked along the Lago Nordenskjöld to the Cuernos campsite. Eleven kilometers (seven miles), a lovely 4 hours and 15 minutes for me, 2 hours and 45 minutes for Caitlin.

Beautiful, mostly flat landscape with some rolling hills. The hills on the other side of the lake were made from layers of rock that had clearly once been horizontal, but had been pushed up over the years into diagonal curves that looked like cresting waves. And they were covered in an almost iridescent green vegetation. Breathtaking.

Then there's the Cuernos themselves:

Caitlin wasn't feeling well when I arrived at Cuernos, so in the afternoon we laid low in the refugio, eventually setting up camp at the campsite just outside. By the way, bros, thanks a lot for not telling me about the existence of the refugios. I had no idea there'd be places where I could have recharged my iPod. Anyway, the refugios are little lodges, so on Day 3, I got to shower(!) and illicitly wash some undies.

I was amused by the quote on this flag inside the refugio, regarding what one must have in order to do this trek: ''Hay que tener cojones.''

As soon as we were safe and comfy in our cocoons after dinner (''spring rice''), the wind picked up and it started to rain. This went off and on all night. I'd wake up and be able to see stars out the almond-shaped window in the rain fly, then an hour later I'd wake up again to a fierce wind lashing rain against the tent. Then back to stars. Our cocoons:

Day 4

Camp at the British Camp, Boy?!? Two words: Hun. Yush. Anyway, sun and blue skies again! We had a long day planned: hike to the Italian Camp, set up, eat lunch, and continue on (without our packs) to the British Lookout. Total distance: 11 miles. Total hiking time: seven hours.

Certain misfortunes on Day 4 saw the creation of a new game, ''Would You Rather? Patagonia Edition.'' For example:

Would you rather change your tampon at the British Camp, or bleed in your compression shorts?
Would you rather puke on the way up to the British Lookout, or on the way back down?
Would you rather have a freakish arm rash or a debilitating heel blister?

Do you see how fun this game is?

Anyway, we woke up at 7:00am. I can never eat breakfast that early, so I was only able to stomach 1/4 cup of oatmeal. And my daily dose of hangover pills, of course. We left at 9:00am for a pleasant two-hour walk to the Italian Camp. As with yesterday, the trail continued along the Lago Nordenskjöld, but this time much closer to the shore. Maybe 40 feet up instead of 150. It misted at times, giving all the rocks and plants a vibrant shine.

Remember, kids: Don't do fire.

When I arrived at the Italian Camp, Caitlin had already set up the tent (part of our brilliant system). We cooked some curry rice backpacking food, then took a little nap. We decided to wake up at 1:40pm, see if the weather looked good toward the British Lookout, and make the hike if it did.

Blueish skies! We set out. It was supposed to take 2 1/2 hours to the British Camp, then another 1/2 hour to the Lookout. A 2,250-foot elevation gain total. I thought it would be heinously steep, so I steeled myself for the worst. As it turned out, only the first 45 minutes were scramble-over-rocks/pull-yourself-up-by-tree-branches steep. The rest was like a stroll through Lithia Park! The trail followed a stream fed by glacier runoff, taking us mostly through forest, with sunlight filtering down through the leaves. Soon I came upon the glacier, clinging to the cliff face across the stream. Massive, impressive, and occasionally chunks of ice would break off and thunder down the mountain.

The trail was clearly marked with gaping, orange vaginas:

From the British Lookout, we could see the down the seam cut by the stream into the valley below. Green treetops, turquoise, opaque, glacier-fed lake, humbling rock formations. And the sun lighting it up with a warm, golden glow. Amazing.

I started to feel sick on the way back down, and puked about an hour from camp. Bummer. I think it was a combination of heat exhaustion and dehydration. I asked for too much from my body and put too little in. A note on the water: it's potable; you can just fill up your Nalgene straight out of the streams here.

But the water made us burp a lot, like it had been carbonated or something. So we became suspicious of it and kind of tried not to drink too much of it. Thus, in the entire fours hours up and back to the British Lookout, I drank less than half a Nalgene of water.

Anyway, I couldn't eat anything that night, and could only manage a few sips of the suspect water. We got back to the tent at 7:20pm and I tried to lie in my cocoon so my stomach wouldn't be upset. No dice. Later that night I stumbled from the tent and puked again. Blegh.

Day 5

My stomach didn't feel upset in the morning, but I was still only able to eat eight almonds for breakfast. I wanted to sleep in, but Caitlin made the compelling point at 8:50am that we'd been in the tent for 13 1/2 hours, so I agreed to emerge from my cocoon.

I was wary of putting anything in my body that I'd put in the day before, so I didn't take hangover pills. Especially not on only eight almonds. Thus, the hike from the Italian Camp to the Refugio Pehoé (the bottom-left point of the W) took me 2 hours and 50 minutes, though the map said it was supposed to take two. I was so tired, and cold, and weak from being sick. I didn't even look at the scenery much, just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

Finally I arrived at the refugio, chilled and dizzy, and hungry for food that had never been dried. Caitlin and I bought the fixed-menu lunch for the outrageous price of $16, and I voraciously feasted on the ''salad,'' which was cabbage, canned corn, and an artichoke heart. But it was so delicious. Caitlin reported that her ''dog-food meat'' was just as tasty.

Then Caitlin had the brilliant proposal of staying in the dorm beds at the refugio, instead of camping. Genius.

Day 6

Mailed it in. Mailed it in so hard. Caitlin left at 8:15am to do the 14-mile hike out to Glacier Grey and back, while I stayed in the room, journaling and reading some Barbara Kingsolver.

I do wish I could have completed the whole W, but I didn't want to ask my body for another seven-hour day. I'm happy with the ''N'' I did hike.

Regarding hiking, I would like to offer the following ode to Duct Tape:

Duct Tape! O, frictionless wonder!
Slippery, silvery, sliding.
Shoe on my heel is but a lover's breath on my neck.
Smug blister nub lies dormant,
cocooned in your adhesive embrace.

In closing, here are some parting shots of the Cuernos and Paine Grande as we left on the ferry.