Log Three: El Chaltén
El Mirador Del Condores
With the Fitz Roy hidden in clouds for the third day in a row, my friend Olivia and I decided to take it easy with a short, sweet hike. We wandered out of town, down the main road towards a trail that leads up to a mirador (view point) overlooking the mountain village.
This trail begins at a visitors center, similar to one you might see in a National Park in the US with a small museum and maps of the region. Then the trail takes you up into the hills, gaining just enough altitude to offer a beautiful view of El Chaltén, and on a clear day you would see the entire Fitzroy range as well. This day offered no view of the mountains, but the colors of the moody clouds, foggy glacial river and bright roofs of the village were beautiful.
here you can see the trail tracing along the hillside
behind those farthest hills would be the fitzroy
Mirador De Las áquilas
The trail continues on past Mirador Del Condores, the view over El Chaltén, taking you over to the other side of the hills to catch a view of the plains and lakes of Argentine Patagonia. This is the same plain the bus crossed three days ago when it delivered me kindly to this magical region.
Often I am struck by the colors of wide open landscapes, layers of colors from ground to sky, complementary and lush. Here, golden and green grasses meet distant but no less vibrant icy colored lakes, hills of the foreground were golden like the plains while distant mountains appear a hue of blue. Puffy white clouds played with the distant mountain range, mirroring their topography and forming yet another layer.
Who is olivia?
I met Olivia back in El Calafate, the town frequented by tourists visiting the nearby Perrito Moreno Glacier.
Our meet cute is quite a story worthy of its own post, but the long and short of it is we became fast friends. We spent a week in El Chaltén and though neither of us knew it we would soon embark on an epic hitchhiking adventure across 1000 km, a tale that includes landslides, crashing a 60th birthday party, ferry rides through the Chilean fjords (one in particular where I met a beautiful Argentine fly-fisherman), all concluding back in Bariloche, Argentina.
Olivia became my travel partner for a wild three weeks and the adventure we shared was so epic it remains a highlight amidst all my collective traveling.
