Mountains in the mist

  El Chalten, Argentina
Saturday, December 16, 2006

04 Would this be FitzRoy in the mist?

 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 

I went to Chalten to do a four day trek around Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy, two famous mountains, still in the Glaciar National Parc, but at the south side of it now. The weather sabotaged my plans a little bit though and the four days were reduced to three. Those three days in rain, wind (unbelievable hard wind!), snow, cold and, what most bothered me, fog didn´t prevent me from noticing though that it must be very nice to wander around there in nice weather, when you can actualy see the mountains. For me things were limited to seeing lakes, glaciars and some birds, not bad, but also not the reason why I came there. It was a good test though for my nieuw, argentinian made tent, and as it survived (and me too and I spend a lot of time in it!!), it can´t be that bad.


I had to stay for another day in El Chalten when I got back, as the bus that goes up north ruta 40 to El Bolson only leaves every second day. It became a nice day of relaxing, in the sun (!), amazing how big the weather conditions were between town and mountains (only a few km apart). I found some boulders at the end of town where I tested my new climbing shoes and at night I met this Australian guy with whom I checked out a local home brew pub.

10 On our way out

Next morning, as we left town with a bus, the irony of things wanted that the clouds around Fitz Roy started to disappear. But we looked at it from the positive side, jumped off the bus and were glad to be able to take a picture of that mighty granite rock after all. Later, on the bus, I learned that it is true that there are always people with less luck than you. Two Argentinian climbers told me that they spend whole their holidays, being 20 days, waiting to climb Fitz Roy and weather hadn´t allowed them to. For them it must have been terrible to see weather getting better at the day they left.