The Accidental Explorer

Moon over Fitz Roy

EL CHALTÉN, ARGENTINA – Patagonia. The word conjures up images of far-off, exotic, fairy-tale lands. Most maps don’t even label Patagonia as a place, lending it an air of mystery. So, just in case you don’t know exactly where Patagonia is, that’s OK.

Patagonia is the large region that covers the southern cone of South America. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Argentina or Chile – on either side of the Andes, you’re in Patagonia.

It is home to some of the greatest mountains in the world, and for climbers (me, for example) a trip to Patagonia is akin to a trip to Mecca. My mission here was to visit two of the most famous peaks in the world – Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre – so I headed way off the beaten track to the little town of El Chaltén.

El Chaltén is a small, ramshackle collection of buildings deep in the middle of nowhere with a very end-of-the-world aura. It’s so close to the the continental ice cap that you practially trip over it.

It was really cold and windy when I arrived. I should have taken the hint.

In an effort to lighten my pack I had left almost all of my camping equipment back in Ecuador, so I had to rent gear locally. I found a “lightweight” 2-man tent that weighed about 12 pounds and an incompressible sleeping bag that weighed about four pounds. Frustrated, I decided to bypass other weight-boosting items like a stove. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So began my solo 5-day trek into the freezing wilderness of Patagonia. Within a few hours I reached my first camp, almost right at the base of Cerro Fitz Roy (3,375 m, 11,073 ft), where I spent two nights while doing day hikes and taking pictures.

Did I mention that it was cold and windy? The continental ice cap sits right behind Fitz Roy. Air over the ice cap cools, becomes dense, and flows down into the valleys below. Guess where I was. During the entire five days of my trek I don’t think the wind ever dropped below 30 mph. Combined with sub-freezing temperatures and occasional snow it was downright frigid.

And how did my rental gear do? It sucked. Big time. The sleeping bag was the most useless, heavy piece of material I have ever carried and was incapable of insulating so much as a burrito, let alone a human being. On the plus side, it was easy to get up early for sunrise photography since I never actually fell asleep.

And the sunrises were awesome. Most people apparently don’t care to drag themselves out of a tent on a dark, windy day in subfreezing conditions just to see alpenglow on the mountains. Go figure.

After two days of freezing my butt off at Fitz Roy I decided to pack up and hike several miles to where I could freeze my butt off at Cerro Torre instead.

Cerro Torre is a thin spire of rock that rises 3,128 m (10,280 ft) into the sky. As I arrived that evening I had a beautiful, clear view of it in the twilight. Unfortunately, that was the last clear view I ever had.

I hung around Cerro Torre for two days, freezing my butt off, eating cold food, drinking cold water, begging mother nature to give me one crystal clear sunrise. She wasn’t listening. I was close enough to El Chaltén that I could have walked into town, eaten a hot lunch, and walked back to camp during the day. But that kind of defeats the point of suffering needlessly for a photo you will never get, right? I knew you would understand.

I should mention one other think about this part of Patagonia: it has the cleanest water in the world. The water comes straight from glaciers that have been frozen for thousands of years, and you can dip your water bottle into any water source in the park and drink it straight. There aren’t many places left where you can do that. It tastes great, too.

After five days of no sleep, sub-freezing antarctic winds, cold food, even colder water, and still not having all the photos I wanted, I headed back to El Chaltén for a hot meal and hot shower. And they felt really good.