El Chaltén, AR

Hiking: 14.5 mi / 3000 ft. climbing
Home: Campo Base AirBNB

The midday clearing on our ride into El Chaltén was the opening of a perfect 2.5-day weather window. And while cycling provides a near-unbeatable way to view the staggering mountain landscapes here, hiking is one mode that beats even cycling (as we would see later, paragliding would be another!) Unfortunately there was no way were were going to happily do a 14-mile hike the day after our exhausting 2-day crossing from Chile, so we had to let that first day just float away through its own blue skies, but we were all set for second day.

After some debate on the two world’s most-iconic mountains, Fitz Roy vs. Cerro Torre (including advice from Carly and Ben), we decided on Fitz Roy, but rather than the conventional out-and-back hike from town, Rett set us up with a shuttle service that would drive us back north to the Rio Electrico Bridge, where we would then do a mostly-one-way hike back to town, with a “short” out-and-back segment to the Laguna de los Tres viewpoint. It would take us back up the same road we had taken into town, but knowing how beautiful that area was made it worth seeing it again.

The driver stopped on the way to the trailhead to let us get out and view Fitz Roy in the pre-dawn alpenglow. This was still at least 30 minutes before the first direct rays of sun hit the mountaintop.

The hike is in Los Glaciares National Park, and the government recently began charging (controversially-exorbitant) daily fees. Information is still fairly-unclear and frequently-changing, but my perusal of Reddit suggested that our unusually-early shuttle might be fast enough to beat the park ranger to the trail. But no, when we reached the booth around 6:50am (oddly a quarter-mile down the trail from the road/parking-area), we were required to stop and pay. My reading had also suggested that card payment was the only accepted method, but no, here it was the opposite with cash as the only option here. So luckily I was carrying ARS$90,000 (~US$32 per person) with me (I’m not sure what we would have done otherwise!), but it made a significant dent in our cash supply that I wasn’t expecting.

A couple of cat’s ears: the red one is Cerro Electrico, and the white one is Fitz Roy, actually miles behind. This is still pre-dawn lighting.

Salmon clouds indicate that sunrise is near.

The first rays of dawn paint the mountains to the north.

The iconic Fitz Roy wall is incredible just for its shape, but it also has the good fortune to directly face the rising sun. During and after the hike, we would learn how big of a deal “seeing Fitz Roy at first light” is for people, but our early start was ignorant of all that. We just wanted to be early for our usual reasons of beating the crowds and getting better weather. So it was almost disorienting when we caught views of the intensely-bright color-painted peaks piercing above the still-blackened mountains in the foreground.

Aguja Poincenot, one of the sub-peaks, is painted nearly as red as the sunlight that it’s reflecting.

Just six minutes later, the hue has changed significantly (here on Fitz Roy proper), but the brightness is still arresting.

The much-higher Fitz Roy is fully reached by the sun, while it’s just beginning to touch the top of the closer, lower mountain.

Fitz Roy reflected in a small stream that we crossed.

It surely would have been better to be at the lake to see the full mountain wall painted by the dawn, but that would have required hiking for hours in complete darkness, or camping at a really crowded campground (something beyond our operational abilities anyway). Plus the painting lived in full-color for only a tiny slice of time, meaning we would have risked either missing it entirely (on the final approach Fitz Roy is invisible for at least an hour), or waiting for a long time in the cold for the sun to rise, so catching glimpses along way felt like a good compromise that we hadn’t even known we were making. Instead of hiking and sitting with shuffling crowds, we were all alone on a trail that was only occupied by the dozen others who had shared our shuttle (and who we soon left behind).

Already the flames of the mountains are dying out.

And now, the light has been completely extinguished, perhaps by the blue glacier sitting at the base (but really, there must have been some low clouds blocking the sun just after it rose, but either way the life had vanished!)

Piedras Blancas glacier runs down from the mountain and drops off into a lake hidden in this deep bowl.

A waterfall gushes meltwater down into the lake.

The “White Stones” glacier has a lot of blue towers.

The trail wound through this forest for much of its distance, which meant that our views were frequently limited, but it was a really nice forest to walk through!

Full sunlight has returned to the mountains, but the ridge behind us is still preventing it from reaching the trail.

The towers of the Fitz Roy massif, looking maximally spread-out from this angle, one of many views that we would not have gotten if we had done the conventional out-and-back hike (which more just “zooms in” to the same view, while this hike scrolls laterally for the first half).

Rett heads for Fitz Roy, one of our last sections alone before our trail merged with the conventional trail.

This is the camping area for people who hike in and then leave themselves a short (but steep!) hike to the sunrise view. It looked like a tent-packed nightmare!

The first 5.5 miles were relatively-flat, ascending only 1000 feet, while the last mile to the viewpoint would be a brutally steep and rocky 1500 foot ascent. The trail became really crowded at that point, but overall our timing seemed to be about as good as it could have been: we were in a window where the sunrise viewers had all gone up before us (so we only had to pass some of them on their way down), but we were still ahead of the mass of “conventional” hikers who woke up and left town later than us. Reaching the top was definitely worth it to get the most-unobstructed view of the Fitz Roy wall yet, though for people who don’t have the whole 14.5-mile hike in them, simply skipping the two miles of out-and-back (and up-and-down) would make it significantly easier and still be a hike with world-class views.

For most of the steep climb, the slope blocked our view, but here near the top the mountain wall reemerges in dramatic fashion.

Lunch at Fitz Roy, above Laguna de los Tres.

I took this one on the timer just to test the framing for a conventional photo of both of us while Rett finished eating, but I think I like this one better! (I like how it also makes it feel like we were the only ones there, which was definitely not the case!)

Ok, the conventional photo of us and Fitz Roy is pretty great too!

The corkscrewing Aguja Poincenot, the 2nd-highest of the many peaks

Aguja Guillaumet, the northernmost section of the wall, is a whole different type of fractured insanity.

Here’s the view that Fitz Roy gets to look at all day.

The crazy shape of Fitz Roy creates crazy atmospheric effects, like this roiling cloud that cycled above it like a conveyor (video on Instagram!)

Starting down, I turn back to let those still up on the ridge give some perspective.

An example of the crowds, there are at least 30 people in this photo. In this section there were at least multiple paths you could take, but frequently we were stopped and waiting for a line to pass in the other direction.

These are the mountains on which the Patagonia (clothing company) logo is based.

The glacier is looking even bluer in the afternoon light.

Now back down in the valley one ridge apart from the road, it’s an environment that would be pretty great even without the insane mountain wall.

But, the wall is what was drawing me here for much of our ride through Patagonia, and it did not disappoint.

On our way back to town, we frequently turned to look back at the Fitz Roy wall behind us. One time we saw people pointing and turned to find a paraglider flying near the summit! Since returning, I have learned a lot about paragliding, especially in Patagonia. Apparently you can actually use thermals to ascend much like a bird (and here following condors is a trick to make it easier!), and people cover long distances from lower points to visit high mountains. But also, people climb to mountain tops like Fitz Roy with their paraglider on their back, and then launch from there. Neither “Paragliding Tour to Fitz Roy!” nor “Climb Fitz Roy With Us!” are anywhere close to being established tourism businesses; these activities are still quite rare and performed only by extreme adventurers. But I’ve been unable to find any YouTube or Instagram post of this adventurer documenting their flight, so I don’t know if he launched from the top, or was “simply” doing a fly-by. Zooming in shows that he’s not enclosed in a “pod” and has a large pack on his back, which seems to make it more likely that he launched from the top (he’s flying a Skywalk X-Alps 6).

A literally out-of-this world scene, made even crazier when you spot the paraglider just off the peak of Fitz Roy’s secondary tower.

A paraglider flies near the summit of Fitz Roy!

Our view from here is pretty amazing, but imagine what that paraglider can see!

The pale Fitz Roy wall, lower red mountains, a blue glacier, and the dark green forest: Patagonia is incredible!

Now back in “our” valley, Rett points toward the road that we rode into town on (the river looks much cooler from this perspective!)

As we neared the end of our 8 hour hike, observing some of our fellow hikers (many with fully-white hair) made me suddenly grateful that I have the freedom to be doing things like this in my 40s, so that I can spend the decades of my 60s and 70s just sitting on my ass and doing absolutely nothing. Of course seconds after that thought, I realized it was nonsense. Both my own personal history, and that of my parents (who still go out adventuring as they near 80) tells me that it’s extremely-unlikely that I will ever sit of my ass doing nothing. But feeling that desire for a decade of rest was certainly an indicator of how tired I was at the end of this hike!

A condor overhead, maybe waiting to guide a paraglider back over to Fitz Roy?

Just after spotting the condor overhead, I noticed this “feature” on the cliff above us, which seems to be a likely condor nest.

When we reached the trailhead and the huge parking lot at the north end of town, a worker came out of the booth and asked to see the tickets that we had bought at the beginning. So even if we had started the hike before the booth was manned, we still would not have gotten away with doing the hike “for free”.

We sought post-hike beers (and chairs) as soon as possible. El Chaltén has an unusually-long arm that extends north from the core of the town, and now I finally understood why: like us, many other hikers must resolve to turn into the first place they see serving beer, so businesses just kept extending further and further north so that they could be that “first place” and grab all the tired and thirsty customers!

As tired as we were, it was still easy for us to tell that it was one of the best hikes we’ve ever done, and thus it made the exhausting effort to get to this remote part of Patagonia feel entirely “worth it”. The “bad” memories from that previous exhausting day had already begun fading away, as they always do, allowing the satisfaction to rise to the top.

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