El Calafate

Our first day in El Calafate we did little. We sat around recovering from the exhaustion of endless hiking in El Chaltén. Our hostel was a little ways out side of the center so we walked to town to get groceries and to the bus station to get onward tickets and that was it. El Calafate is much larger than El Chaltén was, but it is also a relatively new town. The oldest building was from 1949! The town sits on the shore of Lago Argentino, which is an enormous glacier lake. It's largest in Argentina and you can see it in satellite images from outer space! It's a lovely milky blue green color, and with our hostel being up on a hill, we had very nice views of it. Nearby there was a wetland along the shore that we planned to visit, because they have wild flamingos,(!!!) but we were too lazy and it was hot and sunny out again.

The main reason people go to El Calafate is to see the glaciers along the lake, none of which you can see from town. You have to drive about an hour west along the lake toward the Andes and into Parque Nacional Los Glaciares South. The lake and mountains in this part of the park border the gigantic Patagonian ice cap and many glaciers can be seen. The most famous glacier to visit is Perito Moreno. It's not even the largest one along the lake, but it's certainly the most impressive because of how close you can get to it at the various view points that have been set up. It's also famous because it advances, sometimes so much that it makes it across the lake and separates the lake into two parts, creating an ice dam! When this happens, about every year or so, the force of the trapped water creates a tunnel through the ice and eventually the tunnel breaks. Both the creation and the breaking of the tunnel are very exciting to see. We went yesterday to see the glacier, and the tunnel had ruptured the day before!!!

We visited the glacier on a tour, so we only had about an hour to view the glacier. Many people will sit for hours and watch. It's constantly thundering and calving off large ice bergs into the large. The park service has created a series of boardwalks for people to walk along and see all different angles of the glacier. It has 2 faces, North and South, and the South face alone is 2 km wide and it extends back 27 km and at the face, it's as tall as a 20 story building! We had another clear, hot and sunny day and we could see all the way back into the mountains where the glacier was coming from. It was mind blowing!

The focus of our tour was ice trekking, so after our short visit to the viewing platforms, we took a boat across the lake and began hiking up a rocky lateral moraine alongside the glacier. After about 45 minutes of going up we strapped on crampons and began walking across the glacier. We learned some interesting things about glaciers that I never knew! There are rivers of melt water running on top of the glacier and the water escapes to the bottom of the glacier through holes in the ice, this creates nice water falls. There are rocks on the glacier, that the glacier itself kicks up while it moves. The rocks get hot in the sun and create long tube like melt holes in the ice. There is a bug that lives on the glaciers! And melt water along the side of the glacier can build up if it has no escape route, so sometimes you will see a high water mark alongside a glacier where a lake once was until the water broke through the ice! We got to spend a little over 3 hours on the ice walking over hills and around crevasses and into valleys and along rivers. We ultimately reached a high view point and then turned back. It was a very fun and unique experience.

We are now in Puerto Natales, Chile. The bus ride was about five hours, but we spent an additional two hours at customs checking out of Argentina and into Chile. It takes forever with a bus load of people, and we had another bus in front of ours! We will spend about a week here visiting the main attraction, Torres del Paine National, and hiking the 4 day W circuit inside the park. The mountains in Torres del Paine are similar looking to what we saw in El Chaltén, granite spires and towers, but the fauna should be much different as the rain fall is quite a lot higher on the Chilean side of the Andes. And we have the chance to see guanacos, rheas (the ostrich birds) and flamingos during our hike!