The Martial Slide
Day 194
It seems like you can do just about anything in Ushuaia and claim to have done it in the “worlds most southerly city”. Golf, ski, visit the lighthouse and even drink at the worlds most southerly Irish pub. To be honest it gets to be a bit much, the city has enough natural beauty that it doesn’t have to rely on its geographic location to promote itself. Today we were off for a hike, no claims to being the worlds most southern anything, just a walk in the beautiful landscape surrounding the city.
Jordana, Natasha, Sheamus, Juan and myself were off for a walk to glacier martial, a glacier that hangs to a mountain side just over 10km north of Ushuaia. We took 2 separate taxis up to a chair lift that took us partly up the mountain. This is the kind of mountain climbing you gotta love, a lift does the work. Actually not so fast, yes we were a quarter of the way up but we had a long way to go and wow did it look steep from here. It looked stunning as well. Behind us about 800 meters below was Ushuaia with the Beagle channel behind. In front of us stood a rocky mountain face covered in a lot of snow, the glacier actually hung to the otherside of the mountain. So to see it we would have to climb over 1000 meters.
As we started to hike I figured we would just keep going and eventually reach the summit. I’ve never seen a glacier before and I really wanted to. The first part of the trail was mostly rocky, a bit muddy and some light snow pack. Then as we began to climb the real challenge started. The five of us climbed through knee deep snow, this hike felt like it had turned into an expedition. The climb was so steep I had to dig my toes into the icy snow to create steps to pull myself up. Juan and I reached a rocky section where we had to take a break. The others were below us and as we both gazed up to the peak we knew that we weren’t going any further. We may have been halfway up but from here the mountain seemed to rise at an impossible angle and the deep snow cover was exhausting to walk in.
Soon after Jordana, Natasha and Sheamus reached us, all of us utterly exhausted. We sat on those rocks enjoying the beautiful views and eating. All this work really builds up an appetite. Clouds were moving in over the top of the mountain and the temperature started to drop so we decided it was time to head back down, unfortunately no glacier today. As much as I wanted to continue I think you need to be better prepared for the remaining section of this walk. We all tried to carefully walk down through the deep snow, but Jordana had a better more efficient idea. “Yeeeeaaahhhhhh”, I heard Jordana screaming and then saw her hands in the air as she slid down the mountain on her behind. It was the worlds longest most southerly slide, sorry just had to throw one of our own claims in.
Needless to say going down was much faster than going up, we were all back at the bottom in no time. Soon we were back riding the chair lift and in taxis back to the city. Even though we didn’t reach the top nor the glacier it was a fantastic hike. Back at the hostel Antarctica we made a quick lunch while Juan went off to catch the same 3pm boat tour we had done the other day. We had planned to leave Ushuaia tomorrow but the 4 of us decided that another day wouldn’t hurt. If it was up to me I might have stayed another month, I really love this place. We figured we needed a day of rest, a day to just walk around town before getting the on that long bus trip back to Rio Gallegos.
We cooked another great dinner in the hostel and spent the night relaxing in the lounge/bar with a few Quilmes. Yet another light, flavourless South American beer. While we planned to relax tomorrow what I really wanted to do was add one more activity to my list of things done in the most southerly of cities. Golf, the Ushuaia golf club is only a nine hole course and far from being a championship course. However the setting is said to be incredible and I want to bragging right that come with playing the world most southerly golf course. Figures crossed that the course is open, we shall see in the morning.
Tags: Argentina, Glaciers, Ushuaia
Michael Coroneos
You didn’t swim? Pussy!