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Day 5 was our rest day. We had a bit of rain and some wind.
Imagine 5 guys sitting around playing backgammon on a little travel set, reading, and doing whatever to pass the time. No Pictures.
But, it was nice to have a day without walking.
Day 4 was another great day. We woke up and took some more pictures of Cerro Torre.
Normally this trip is planned for a rest day at Cerro Torre, but since the crevasses under our camp were likely to melt further, Max chose to take us to a Refugio(hut) further down the glacier. The hut was left behind by a government study of the icefield in the 60's and 70's. Now the local guides use it occasionally.
On our third day we awoke to another great day. We had great views across the icefield all day. We were surrounded by a sea of white all day. So I tried to take a bunch of panoramic pictures. I haven't put them together but the pictures I have posted should give you an idea.
We hiked down the icefield for most of the day. The snow had a hard crust on top and was relatively flat, which made most of the walking this day easy. At the end of the day we had to start to navigate around crevasses.
Our camp for the third night was directly out from Cerro Torre. These are the pillars that you see in most of my pictures. Since the summer has been warm and dry in Patagonia a lot of the snow has melted and a lot of the crevasses were exposed. Max and Nico found a spot , about 20 feet wide, between to crevasses were we set up our camp.
Day 2 we hiked up the Macroni Pass. The difficult part of this trip is the climb up the Marconi Glacier using crampons. Luckily we had great weather for this day. Sometimes the wind is blowing so quickly through the pass that it is unmakeable.
At the end of this day we camped on the shoulder of the Marconi Glacier. We had a great view across the icefield. And a great sunset. I took a bunch of pictures of the sunset, you can see some in the day 2 photo album.
The first day of the trek we hiked to Laguna Electrico, were we would camp. It was a basic walk except for the heavy packs, we were carrying food for 10 days, and all of the winter gear etc. for the icefield.
The group consisted of our guides Max and Nico, Mark and Seth a father and son from Boston, and myself. You can see Max and Mark negotiating the stream crossing in the pictures from day 1.
The reason I was in Chalten for so long was that I was doing a trek on the Patagonian Icefield. It took 7 days to complete, though we had 10 days planned for the trip in case we ran into bad weather.
I booked the trip with 40° Patagonia www.40degrees.com. They did a great job of organizing the trip i.e. providing the guides, food, etc.
I am going to break the trip into multiple posts to make it a bit easier to describe...
OK,
So just after I was there the Moreno Glacier started to give way. I guessed I missed the big collapse by 5 days. So Close.
Anyways, the town of EL Calafate is safe from being flooded for a few more years.
I just got to Bariloche from El Chanten. It is in a small town and the internet access was limited and expensive. And I was there for 12 days so I have a lot to catch up on...
Why 12 days? The majority of the time I was on an organized trek of the Patagonian Icefield. We had 10 days planned for that, and then I had a couple of extra days wait for my flight to Bariloche. I will summarize the highlights and figure out how to get my photos online in the next couple of days. I have 100 pictures from the last month, so I am deleting the bad ones.
I know I haven´t gotten any photos uploaded yet. So here is the website of a photographer I met on a bus in Torres del Paine.
He has some pictures of South America, so that will have to satisfy you for know.
Kent
My next big trip is trek around Mt. Fitz Roy. I won´t be near a computer for a week and a half so I won´t be replying to any e-mails.
Kent
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