El Chalten

This town is the “Capital of Argentina Trekking”. On the drive from El Calafate to El Chalten, we kept passing gorgeous blue lakes…

… with desert on our side, and snow capped mountains on the other -

I just loved the clouds in Patagonia. They were in shapes I’d never seen before. Maybe because of the constant high winds? Whenever I got out of the truck to take a picture, I had to be really careful not to let the wind literally rip the door off. We were warned about this when driving in Iceland, but they have nothing on the winds of Patagonia!

As we approached El Chalten…

… we got a hint of what we’d be exploring in the next few days -

The tall towers in the middle belong to Mount FitzRoy…

… and the spire on the right in the picture below is Cerro Torre -

Little did we know that was the best look we were ever going to have of Cerro Torre. I’m so glad I kept to my vow of always taking a picture when I have a chance, for I can always delete poor pictures later, if I get a better one.

That evening, the clouds were doing an amazing dance…

… that became surreal with sunset -

Our next day dawned gorgeous and clear, so we headed out early to hike to Laguna de Los Tres (the lake at the foot of Mount Fitzroy). Our stats for that day : 14.5 miles total hiking in just at 8 hrs, with 2500+ ft of elevation gain. It starts innocently enough…

… and we soon were overlooking a wide valley with Las Vueltas River in it -

About halfway along the trail, we saw our goal for the first time -

The hanging glacier in the bottom right of the next picture…

… had an awesome waterfall cascading from it -

Continuing on…

… we got to cross a marshy area on an interesting “boardwalk”…

… and see a cloud that looked like the feathered ends of a bird’s wing -

This one-person-at-a-time “bridge”…

… was right before a sign that said in the last kilometer, there is a 400m ascent. Estimated time to complete this 40% grade was 1 hr…

… and we did it in just that!

Rather than staying on that first ridge, where we first caught our breath, we headed down to the lake shore…

… where I kept looking for reflections…

… found pretty boulders…

… and took tons of pictures of snow fields -

Of course we had done our research ahead of time, and knew to hike “only 15 more minutes” up a small hill to the left of the laguna, to find…

… a second laguna that was just off the charts on blueness, complete with its own waterfall -

This was our view for lunch, which we had for over 20 minutes all by ourselves! (reminder again, open this email in your browser to be able to see the video) -

Also included was a neat cloud -

Steve took an awesome panorama so you can share with us the beauty of this place -

We were so thrilled with the weather conditions, the lack of crowds, and how good we felt even at the end, that this goes into the books as one of two of our favorite hikes of our lives!