Los Glaciares National Park

Today was an absolutely epic day in Patagonia. It was a bluebird day of clear skies, there was no wind, and the temperature was about 22C. Talking to our guides these days happen about 10 times through the entire tourist season. We were hiking through Los Glaciares National Park to the viewpoints at Lago de los Tres. We started by boarding a mini-bus to take us into the national park to the boutique hotel where we could start hike and get different views compared to the way down. After going along a river that looks like (and does) have amazing fly-fishing we cut into the forest and worked our way up to the first viewpoint.

It was a spectacular view up onto the glaciers and to the Fitzroy Massif.

Our hike was decent coming up to the base camp for climbers in the area then was a steep slog uphill; 450m vertical over 1km.

The view of the peaks at the top was great….

And that of the lake even better.

We all made it down to the lake and had our boxed lunch before taking a whole bunch of pictures.

There was another lake Lago Glaciares Mojades down over the lip of the valley which made for another set of great pictures.

After just over an hour at the top, it was time to head back down into the valley.

By this point, most of us were getting pretty tired, but we still had a fair ways to make it back to town. We worked our way down checking the view over our shoulders as we descended.

We kept working our way down and came back to the valley of Rio de las Vueltas where El Chalten is.

We finally made it back down to the town and competed our first solid day of hiking. It was a total of 22.7km with 750m elevation gain (450m being in the 1km spur trail up to the lake). Everybody was getting a little sore and tired by the end, but were still amazed by the amazing scenery and even better weather we had. We quickly showered and got ready for dinner where we went to a micro-brewery. After a beer to start both Mike and I had the lamb ravioli in cream sauce and had a bottle of Torrontes (white) and they were both quite good.

Lastly it was off to have ice cream to try the calafate flavour (a berry that grows in the area). It was pretty good, but didn’t quite live up to its billing. Now it is time for bed to do a glacier trek tomorrow.