Treading on Thick Ice
Last Saturday I flew from Ushuaia to El Calafate. I was going to the real Patagonia and I planned to head north via bus on Ruta 40 after spending three days in El Calafate. I planned to stop in El Chalten to trek Mount Fitz Roy and then see Cueva de Las Manos where there is a cave with painted hands and animals dating back over 9500 years before arriving at the Andes resort of Bariloche. Technically, Ushuaia is part of Patagonia, but as far as I was concerned, El Calafate got me to the real place. I just love the word PATAGONIA. Images of craggy mountain peaks, glaciers, lakes, rivers and the big nothing to the Atlantic Ocean fill my head.
Saturday was a dead day. The three days prior were so full that I did not arrange the boat trip on the Beagle Channel that I wanted to do and by time I got my act together that morning it was too late. I hung out in town all day. It was a grey day. I was almost bored. It started to rain. I went to the small airport way early for entertainment. I could have hiked, but instead I let things slide. I arrived in El Calafate near sunset and the big nothing swallowed me whole. I got to America del Sur Hostel (one of the greatest places I have ever stayed because the people running the place are so awesome… but lest we not get ahead of the story) and they immediately started to hook me up with tours for my stay and my way out of Dodge. Then we discovered that due to the bus only running on odd days in one place, even days in another and there being two odd days in a row this upcoming weekend (31st and 1st), I was going to be stuck in the town of Perito Moreno for three days with only the Cave of Hands tour to do. I asked if they would like to be there three days and they emphatically told me NO. And when I realized that my plans were coming apart at the seams, I plunged.
Once in a while I get very depressed. There is no greater place for depression than the big nothing of Patagonia. What am I doing here? Why did I give up my prior life? Should I just go home? Shit, I have no home! And there really is nobody to talk to about such matters. Newly met people would think I am a lunatic. And if you´re not here… well you´re not here. So I went to dinner and sulked and then went to bed sulking some more. I woke up and things were not any better, but I saw a beautiful sunrise with precious red and orange light reflecting off the hillsides surrounding Lake Argentina below town. And I told myself I was going to see one of the most beautiful sights in the world that day – glacial ice – but that didn´t stop me from wondering about WHY. But it looked ugly with dark clouds up at the glacier and the news that I needed to take rain gear because it would be raining there made me even uglier.
I got on the bus for the 90 minute drive to the head of the lake where Glaciers National Park starts. The sunrise does not occur until 8:00 AM here and I hate when you are in a place that is in the wrong timezone (sunset at 8:00 PM – an odd combination), but it allowed me to catch the early light. We picked up people throughout town and then we got out of town and my jaw dropped. The sunlight was bathing the hills and making them all glow. They radiated. What looks like dead brown plants on brown hillsides revealed itself to be every color imaginable. There are browns – straw to chocolate, but there are also yellows, reds, purples, blacks, whites, blues and greens. It is autumn here and the hills are alive and dying all at once. Patagonia´s steppe country is somewhat similar to America´s great west. Mesas, treeless hills, dry lands and scrub. A barren wasteland once might say with a BIG sky. By time we had driven a half hour, I was convinced I have never seen anything more beautiful in all my life. There is so much nothing that it is the biggest something. I felt my twenty-four hours of depression lifting and I knew WHY once again.
And then we reached the forest area where the park begins and soon I got my first glimpse of why I was here – Perito Moreno Glacier shimmering blue against the dark forest and mountains. We went out on a peninsula of the lake and the sun hitting the milky blue-green water which is only seen in glacier-fed waters was tremendous. The sky got darker as we approached the overlook to the glacier and it was very apparent that rain would be part of the day, but it seemed to matter less now that BLUE could be seen.
The last great trip Chris and I took was a small-boat cruise around Alaska´s Glacier Bay National Park. Aside from Chris blowing away fifty fellow passengers with her humor, attitude and spunk and us having the time of our lives, I most remember the blue of the glacial ice. I never could have imagined that the most beautiful substance on earth could be ice and that it could be that blue… so many different blues. I think about those blues often and wish I could see them more often and now I was just so excited to be returning to it. And now I could also see that Argentinian glaciers are just as blue as the ones in Alaska.
I bolted down to the closest overlook to the glacier´s wall. The peninsula we were on is across a narrow gap from the glacier and looks straight out to it. I wanted to be as close as possible to see the blues and to hear the cracking, the tremendous explosions and see the pieces falling into the water. The sun was still shining behind us and suddenly the biggest rainbow possible appeared coming out from the middle of the glacier and arcing over to the lake on the left front. And just as suddenly I was so glad it was raining and my day, trip and life was perfect once again.
The ice broke off in large chunks and roared. Unless you have ever been there, you cannot believe the noise of a calving glacier. It is one of the greatest forces you can ever witness. I cheered everytime a piece snapped and hung in midair slowly gaining speed as it slipped towards the water before it created the biggest splashes imaginable. I photographed and videographed and just stood there and watched. And then a horrible thing happened. I was pulling my camcorder out of my pocket and I dropped it. It landed smoothly enough except in about four inches of water. I immediately accepted that it was dead in the water, but everyone around me came to the rescue with napkins and tissues. They all felt so horrible. I wanted to laugh at them as I poured the water out of it because I knew it was dead forever and no tissues could help. And other than not being able to video the rest of my trip and losing a $400 item, this could not ruin the fact that I was standing in front of one of earth´s greatest shows. I wanted to say “please, can we all get back to what really matters!” They were all so sad for my loss. My biggest problem now is figuring out how to get the tape out of the dead device!
We loaded back into the bus and drove back on the peninsula road and boarded a boat to take us to the glacier. See, the rest of the day would be spent walking with crampons on the glacier. The best was yet to come. We hiked in a field of blue and even with the rain, it was magnificent. The walk was kind of dumbed down because the bus group was various in abilities, but I enjoyed it so much that I made plans to come back in two days to do the full-day trek on the ice.
That night I took the bull by the horns and decided about what I was going to do after El Calafate given the logistical nightmare. I decided to abort Patagonia. I will discuss this in the next blog entry. I decided to jump north and go see Iguazu Falls via Buenos Aires (where I am now until Sunday). I got excited about seeing the falls. I got excited about what I will do to make up for the abort… next post!
The second day was a full day boat ride to see a number of glaciers in another section of the park. It was a clear and crisp day. Let me tell you that Montana has a mini sky compared to Patagonia. This sky is so blue and wonderful that I can only stare with disbelief. And the clouds are so spectacular. I have never seen or dreamed of anything like it in my life. The drive like the previous morning as well as the drive home the previous night was once again all about the bathing light. The boat ride starts on part of the lake that is still in the steppe area and it heads up an arm of this tremendously large lake for an hour before reaching the forest area at the base of the Andes and the home of the front walls of the glaciers. It was freezing out especially since I stayed out on the bow of the boat for most of the day not wanting to miss a minute of the views of mountains, snows, glaciers, sky, clouds, sun and icebergs.
It was a special day given the clear blue sky meeting the blue ice. We pulled up near Upsala Glacier and a chunk appeared to calve off of the wall of the glacier. This was quite impressive, but nothing compared to what happened next – the greatest show of nature´s power that I have ever witnessed. See, the calving did not occur on the glacier wall. It was an optical illusion caused by not understanding the scale of what we were looking at. There was an iceberg in front of the wall bigger than any house in America except maybe the Biltmore Estate. And 85% of it was out of the water instead of the normal 15%. It must have fallen off the wall recently itself and was right in front of the wall. When it calved, it became even more unstable than its 85% above water stuation would dictate. And in slow motion it started to roll in order to correct this instability. As soon as the roll started we suddenly became very clued into the scale of things and that we were looking at an iceberg and not a piece of the wall. A collective gasp eminated from the two hundred people on the boat. The roll was in slow motion and the crash was tremendous when the big up side went in. And an even bigger crash occurred when the “small” down side came out. What had been a tall mountain-like chunk of ice out of water was now a rounded island of the bluest ice possible. Two hundred jaws were dropped and four hundred eyes were bulging and that includes those of the captain. We all felt very tiny. And then we cheered for Mother Nature and all of us knew we just got so lucky to be there at that moment. And no one questioned why such a big boat has to stay 300 meters away from the glacier and, in fact, most of us probably wondered if we were closer than we should be. A minute in time I will never forget. If I ever see such a powerful display of nature again, I hope I live through it.
The third day in a row visiting ice. I was quite excited. This would be a challenge. We hiked 90 minutes through the forest and moraine (rock debris left by the glacier) along the side of the glacier before we donned crampons and entered the middle of the glacier. It was a beautiful day again and we were soon surrounded by nothing but blue ice fields with mountain peaks and glaciers above with big blue sky and interesting clouds further above. We hiked for over four hours and the guides gave the sixteen of us a real challenge indeed. We went up very steep sides of ice as well as down and sideways. We walked up to giant holes carved by water. We went up corkscrew valleys with running water. We all walked like penguins and loved it. The biggest challenge was absorbing the surrounding landscape without walking off a cliff or into a hole. It was mesmerizing. It was tiring because it was so overwhelming. By time we hiked back out, I was beat physically and mentally. This was one of the greatest days of my trip. I entered Patagonia treading on thin ice and that ice got mighty thick and I left feeling really re-energized.
The last day in this chunk of Patagonia was a totally different experience. No more ice. Instead I went on a hike to a local canyon which resembles Arizona or Utah to visit a place with a petrified forest and, more importantly, a place where paleontologists discovered the fossils of the largest dinosaur ever discovered – 40 meters in length!!! It was an excellent hike though a strangely eroded and colored land finding petrified wood and large fossilized bones. It was another amazing day in Patagonia. I will return…
Tags: argentina, south america, Travel
vagabondrick
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