Viedma Glacier

Waking up on Thursday we were greeted by more typical Patagonian weather. It was a little drizzly while we were having breakfast and the wind was very strong. Typical winds in the region are a constant 50km/hr wind with gusts to 140km/hr, but thankfully ours was less than that. We packed up in the hotel and walked over for the transfer to the Viedma Glacier walk. Viedma is the largest glacier in Argentina and is the main outfall from the Patagonian icefields into Lago Viedma. The bus ride was about 20 minutes down a gravel road to the dock, then we boarded our catamaran to cross the lake.

We crossed the lake, which is a powdery green from all the rock-flour scraped away by the glaciers. The skies were so different from the previous days.

There were a couple of glacial icebergs in the lake. You can immediately identify glacial ice due to its incredible blue colour.

We took a quick pass the glacier (which towers 40m above the waterline) in the boat, before landing on the ice-scraped rocks and scrambling our way across to the get on the ice. We put crampons on the bottom or our boots and bundled up for the winds coming off the glacier, then began our trek across the ice.

I know we have glaciers that we can walk on back in Canada, but this was a really neat experience, with great views.

The glacier flows at about 2m a day out of the icefields and towards the lake. As such everything is different each day they go out. We had a good group of 4 guides that were there to show us how to walk on the ice and how to not fall down into a crevasse or down a slope.

After about 2 hours on the ice we were back scrambling across the rock to where the boat would pick us up and we headed back to town. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, we were in a mini-bus for 3 hours driving back to El Calafate. El Calafate is about 30,000 people and is pretty much devoted to tourism. It was 500 people in 1985 when El Chalten was formed as a town, 9,000 in 2000 when tourism here became mainstream, and has tripled from then until now. It had a feel of a blend of Banff and Jasper just without being right in the mountains (it’s about 80km away from the Andes).

For dinner we went out as a group, Mike had a steak with eggs and french fries, I had lake trout with cream sauce and vegetables (a specialty in the region), and we paired it with a Malbec (of course). Dinner was fairly good, but not quite like the food on Buenos Aires, or the artisan restaurants in El Chalten. After dinner we continued on with some of the group to a local bar for some more wine and selling Canada as a great travel destination to others in our group.