El Chalten


Having said goodbye to Alex in El Calafate Johan and I jumped on a bus NorthWest up a bumpy unpaved road to El Chalten, high up on the Chilean border.


Established in 1985 so as to claim the area as Argentinian the place has a very temporary feel about it. It lacks unpaved roads, has no banks or cash machines, no mobile phone connections and in fact all communications with the outside world rely on the satelitte links that allow phone calls and internet connections. What El Chalten lacks in technology it makes up for in natural beauty with the town being surrounded by fantastic hiking trails and the stunning Fitzroy peak towering at 3441m.


Arriving at night the first thing that struck me was the stars. Here in the Southern hemisphere there are just so many more stars (proximity to the milky way or something...) but high up in the mountains where there is zero light pollution the number of stars visible is awesome. Having been dump struck by the stars I was then quite literally swept off my feet my the wind. El Chalten has a bit of a reputation when it comes to blustery weather and what would be light rain anywhere else is transformed into a hail of bullets as the rain is driven horizontally at a rate of knots, and when it was not raining the wind will drive the dust at you with the same force.


The next morning the weather was a little better. It wasn´t raining but the wind was vicious. We set off none the less, wrapped up in Gore-tex and armed with the ubiquteous ham & cheese sandwichs and some cereal bars. Our route was the 8hr hike up to the Laguana de los Tres whch climbs up about 1200m. The first couple of hours were hard work thanks to the wind but nothing overly strenuous. The fun really started when the rain came on.


After about 3 hours of slight climb the last kilometer was at almost a 45º ascent on loose rocks and as we climbed that driving rain turned to driving snow so that when we reached the top visibility was seriously hampered, as was my ability to stay upright against the wind. This little hike had just turned seriously nasty. The tops of our bodies were somewhat warm and dry in Gore-tex but neither of us has waterproof bottoms on and so my trekking trousers and Johan´s jeans (!) were soaked. Stopping to admire the view or take a break at the top was not an option. I took a quick photo to capture the moment then we scrambled down that steep kilometer of loose rocks and an incredible speed, however with the wind in our faces the volume of water running off my jacket and down my legs was too much for my boots and for the first time ever my boots started to fill up giving me cold wet feet. Quickly I lost feeling in my toes making walking all that more difficult and dangerous.










The flash helps make the scene seem prettier than it was, I promise.









In the basecamp at the bottom there was, thanks to the trekking gods, a German couple who had just fired up their stove. We traded a bar of Milka for a couple of cups of tea but having stopped moving we were both quickly turning hypothermic. Johan rang out his jeans and we put our heads down for a quick march back into town against that bloody wind.

What should have taken us 8hrs took a little under 6hrs given that we practically jogged back to the hostel in order to keep warm, the only thing we stopped for being the supermarket to pick up mountains of pasta and a bottle of wine to sooth our aching limbs. We were still quite literally soaked, as was everything in our packs; money, passport, camera, maps. Even Mixie!


A hot shower, change of clothes, plate of pasta and couple of glasses of tinto later we could look back and laugh about the day, and also reflect on how lucky we´d been. If either of us had slipped or fallen on the climb or descent, or if that German couple hadn´t been their with their stove we´d not have faired so well, in fact things could have gone seriously wrong. Johan is a soldier in the Swedish army so when he says a hike is pretty hardcore I consider that relatively extreme.



Still we survived and over the next 2 days the wind dropped and the clouds evaporated giving us the most spectacular views of Fitzroy and some of the best hiking i´ve done in a long time. This is what I crave. Being in the wild, under enormous skies, in the mountains with high altitude sunburn being my only concern.



xxx