(Sorry about the photos, I´ll add as soon as possible)
It´s been ages since I´ve posted anything simply because the internet in the south of South America is very expensive. I´ll break up my journeys a bit, since I´ve covered a fair bit of terrain since my last entry.

After Iguazu´s adventures, I headed once again back to Buenos Aires to wait out the Easter holidays. Much of the country was shut down, so it seemed the easiest way to do things. There were some small street parades, but all in all it was just a calm weekend. Monday, I hopped a bus for San Martin de los Andes, which is a tourist town at the north of Argentina´s lake district. As I understand it, the lake district is the area where glacial lakes are interspersed with the Andes in a very scenic fashion. It is just north of Patagonia. San Martin was just a day trip for me on the way to Bariloche, but I decided to make the most of it and headed out to see if I could find something to entertain me.

Behind the city is a gorgeous lake rimmed by wooded mountains (picture coming soon). There is supposedly a nice overlook of the city from one of these mountains, but to get there requires a very roundabout route. Since I didn´t have all the time in the world, I decided to just start walking up the side of the hill and see what I could find. After a few false starts, I came upon a series of trails that led through some gorgeous fir forests. Much to my surprise and enjoyment, I also found that the local Mapuche village (group of local natives that are still hanging on in the area) had been doing some harvesting in the woods. For a forester, it was interesting to see how they were performing their logging using animal labor. I tried to snap off some photos, but naturally, my camera batteries died. Ah well, back to the bus and on to Bariloche.

San Carlos de Bariloche is Mecca for South American backpackers, and is a center for numerous great hikes in the surrounding mountains and lakes. I arrived just as autumn was starting to get underway, and was very lucky to have cool, but not cold, weather every day. Prior to arriving in Bariloche, I´d been walking around the cities I visited, but hadn´t really been doing any "hiking". Here, though, there were no sites to see other than the peaks and the lakes. Upon first arriving, I set out to hike up Otto Mtn., which was only a mile or so from my hostel. While there was a chairlift to the top, for those interested in taking the easy way out, I didn´t feel like spending the money on it. The woman at my hostel assured me there was a trail nearby that would take me up, so headed off. Here again, I didn´t really use the best judgement in the world. I found a road that went in the general direction I wanted to go, so I followed it. Somewhere along the way, I saw a little trail through the woods that headed up the hill. It seemed good enough to me, so I followed it. Where it spit me out, though, was directly under the chairlift. I knew the chairlift went to the top of the mountain, so I decided I could follow the trail beneath it. This seems like reasonably sound logic, sitting here in the comfort of a hostel, but in fact it is sheer lunacy, as chairlifts rarely worry themselves with the steeness of terrain. About two-thirds of the way up the mountain, as I was sucking air and madly scraping the ground in front of my face trying to gain some traction, I took the opportunity to consider this fact. I´m sure the folks sipping coffee and enjoying the scenery in the chairlift found it quite amusing to have a crazed mountain man flailing madly at the rocky soil beneath them screaming obscenities in a foriegn tongue. Always happy to please.

I did finally make it to the top, and the view was really great (picture coming soon). Also, along the top of the ridge, there was a series of hikes to other overlooks in the mountains. One of these headed out to a set of rocky spires jutting out of the hill, from which you could get a terrific view of the opposite side of the ridgeline. I grabbed a photo from here as well. The lakes in the region which are fed by glacial waters are a bizarre greenish or turquoise color. This is a result of the sediments suspended in the water, and is really phenomenal to see. After walking around on the top of the mountain, my time was starting to run short, and I realized I didn´t really know how I was going to get down. I decided to search about for the "real" trail down since there was no physical way I could go back the way I came without killing myself. After a bit of searching, I found a shelter where they told me how to find the trail down. Luckily they pointed, too. I was able to follow bits of what they said, but I clearly missed one or two nuances, because after follwing the trail they pointed out, I began to climb back up to the top of the mountain. Since that wasn´t what I wanted, I turned around and followed a little animal trail through the woods until it petered out in the middle of a big boulder. The situation was reasonably similar to stories you might here of people getting lost in the woods with the singular exception that I am a skilled and experienced man of the woods. Instead of heading back on the animal trail, I dropped down from the boulder and started out on a different trail that seemed to head nowhere. When it in fact arrived at nowhere, I turned around and was lead to a completely different area. Once again, I began to bemoan my idiocy, and decided the best course of action at this stage was to follow yet another animal trail through the brush. To the layperson, this may seem like foolishness, but to the well trained man of the woods, its a perfectly natural course of action designed to deliver you into a hopeless state of confusion. My well laid plans were dashed, though, when this trail somehow spit me out on the blazed trail down the side of the mountain. Years of training pay off again.

The following day, I decided to stick to larger thoroughfares and walked 6 miles out to another mountain at the end of the lake. It was supposed to have one of the most amazing views in the region from the top. Yet again, I didn´t want to shell out the bucks for the chairlift to the top, but this time I asked where the trail was from the bottom of the mountain. The walk up was comparitively easy, and the view was really quite nice (pictures soon) but there was bit of cloud cover. I´m sure that a little snow on the surrounding mountains would have added some effect as well.

My final day in Bariloche, I decided to spring for a tour out to the "black glacier" and Tronador Mtn. A large mountain located exactly on the border between Chile and Argentina. After the preceding two days, I was tired, and glad to have a ride to some of the areas attractions. Just the same, I´m still not a big fan of organized tours. We had terrific weather, no clouds at all, which gave us some really nice views of the mountain. Unfortunately, I didn´t really get a great photo. The black glacier was a bit of letdown. Yes, it was my first glacier spotting, but the black color was just a layer of dirt covering the glacier. From the cove where the glacier was located, though, we were able to watch some small avalanches on the snow-covered ridge above us. Also, as a testament to the rather rapid disappearance of the glaciers, our guide told us the area we were standing in had actually been covered by the glacier just 20 years ago. Pretty impressive.

With that, my time in Bariloche was over, and I headed south to the storied plains of Patagonia.