Lago del Desierto, AR to El Chaltén, AR

22.9 mi / 8.0 mph / 873 ft. climbing
Home: Campo Base AirBNB

In the middle of the night I rolled over and rubbed my face, and was confused when my hand felt a weird organic grit. The gusty evening winds had returned as we were going to sleep, likely more of the katabatic winds tumbling down the slopes of the deep and narrow north-south valley that we continue to find ourselves in. And now more-awake, I could hear their intermittent blasts, and then feel myself getting pelted by the sticky dust that they were churning up and and then somehow blowing into the tent! I could feel that it had already coated every exposed surface, including the top of our sleeping bag. We’ve camped in a lot of places, and never experienced anything like it. The well-used forest floor that we had pitched our tent on must have debris ground to a Goldilocks-perfect size, big enough to be visible and palpable, but small enough to fit through the no-see-um mesh of the tent. Oh well, nothing to be done about it besides rolling over and trying to cover my head with our sleeping bag.

Knowing that we didn’t have anywhere to go before the 11am boat arrived, we allowed yesterday’s exhaustion to keep us in bed much longer than normal. During breakfast, Rett dumped over most of her coffee inside the tent, where it ran under our sleeping pad and pooled at the bottom. I cleaned it up with a Swedish dishcloth (incredibly useful bike touring/camping products that I use in the shower for both washing and drying, in the kitchen, and to clean up any number of things), not bothering to do a perfect job, because the dust meant everything was going to be cleaned when we got to El Chalten anyway.

The light and intermittent rain was gradually increasing, but we managed to get things packed up without too much of a soaking. In our rain gear, we trudged over to the dock as the boat approached. The hikers who had camped near us had all departed to walk the length of Lago del Desierto, on a trail so notoriously challenging that only the certifiably insane have attempted to take their bikes that way, while we would take a boat across its surface. That meant that it was just us, Carly and Ben, and Sharon and Lori, a couple girls who I knew were Canadian because Lori had Arkel panniers. And not just Arkel panniers, but old-school Arkel panniers that matched the 2003-vintage of mine. How did someone so young have 20+-year-old panniers? They were her parents’, who were bike tourers before her. Apparently I’ve now been bike touring for an entire human generation (more amazingly, my Arkel panniers have lived for an entire human generation!), and I’m grateful to Lori for finding a way to talk with me as if I was normal person, and not the positively-ancient creature that I actually am.

Can you tell where our tent was? (As Rett finds a place to cross the little stream to get to the boat.)

The view toward Lago del Desierto from our tent. Towering Fitz Roy is behind the mist, and I’ve seen clear-day photos from this spot that make it look like the most-beautiful campsite that ever existed. Too bad we didn’t get to see that, but even in the rain, it’s a lot better than most!

I had been mildly concerned about getting on this second boat. If the first one across Lake O’Higgins runs so intermittently, does this second one even have the capacity to carry us all when the O’Higgins boats push through a big plug of cyclists like it did over the last two days? So even though everything I read was like “yeah, they take credit cards, and it’s cheaper to buy on the boat than as part of a package booked with the first boat’s tour company”, we really couldn’t afford being stranded here, so I had gone ahead and bought tickets (directly from them) before we’d left Villa O’Higgins. Then during our border snafu, I messaged them to say that we wouldn’t be making the 5pm that we’d booked, and they quickly responded with an “it’s all good!”

It turns out that this much-smaller lake is actually plied by a much bigger boat, so it was an easier process for the six of us to roll our bikes on, and that explains how it was able to drain ~2 O’Higgins boats worth of cyclists away yesterday afternoon before we even arrived. This morning, it rained for the whole 45-minute crossing, so while we were robbed of any views, at this point we are so view-blessed that the opportunity to have lengthy conversations in English with our fellow travelers was a gift far more rare and valuable!

Now arrived at the south end of Lago del Desierto, Carly and Ben set off riding.

Unlike the remote north end of the lake, a significant amount of civilization reaches up to the southern end from the Argentine tourist town of El Chalten. Shortly after disembarking, we came to a bustling parking lot in front of a cafe, and after some debate, I convinced Rett that we should go with her gut (though not necessarily mine) and get some food there. Unfortunately their empanada menu was a lie, since apparently there was no cook working, so we settled for some brutally-expensive coffees and brownies. But, just having access to a nice bathroom to poop in (something I had skipped this morning) made it worth the price. And then the time that we killed allowed the rain to let up significantly, so it was totally the right call by my brilliant wife.

Once past the hustle-and-bustle at the south end of Lago del Desierto, we quickly returned to what felt like a rather wild and remote road.

Road and river run through Patagonian forest. It’s similar here in Argentina to the road in Chile now two lakes behind us, but still somehow different.

The road followed the river down the valley, and the water-level was disconcertingly high, nearly level with the surface of the road. At first I thought maybe it had something to do with the rainfall, but more observation suggests it’s just “normal”, and they put the road so low because the river never floods?

Five minutes after we re-started, the rain came to an end for the day. Ten minutes and the clouds began lifting to reveal surrounding mountaintops. Thirty minutes and there was blue sky in most directions, unveiling a whole world that we would have missed if we had just powered on straight from the boat. I’d had no expectations about this day’s ride, and in retrospect it’s because most of the bloggers I’d looked at had done it on days where the clouds were hanging low. So despite the rainy start, the rest of the ride not only exceeded (my non-existent) expectations, it actually competed with anything we had seen on the Carretera Austral proper. That certainly helped to make yesterday’s brutal slog (and really, our decision to continue to this part of Argentina at all) feel more “worth it”.

Incredibly-sharp serrations on this mountain ridge begin ripping through the cloud cover.

Here in late February (equivalent to Northern hemisphere’s late August), we see a hint of fall color (and…a waterfall tumbling in the background).

Not much space here between the bottom of this valley and the treeline, and even less up to the snowline.

A black shark’s tooth that we would have been completely oblivious to 10 minutes earlier.

As usual it’s hard to capture waterfalls in photos, but this was one of the most-magical waterfalls we’ve ever seen, so we stopped and sat on the log and ate our lunches.

This could be Glacier National Park in the US. Oh wait, aren’t we less than 10 miles from the boundary of “Parque Nacional Los Glaciars” of Argentina? Maybe it’s more than mere coincidence!

As the sun warmed us up, it also began drying out all of the water-filled potholes in the road.

I guess now that the river is far bigger, they decide that it’s a good idea to put some vertical distance between the road and the water.

This textured red giant, Cerro Eléctrico, dominated our view for a while. A bit of Fitz Roy is barely visible behind its shoulder on the right edge of the frame.

At least four wildly-different mountain types in one scene.

This peak, Gran Gendarme (del Pollone), would normally be a world-famous icon. But here on the shoulders of Fitz Roy, it’s just a barely-known subsidiary tooth on a ridgeline. I spent a couple hours searching and analyzing maps and talking to AI just to find its name!

The bulk of Cerro 30 Aniversario feels even more massive with the fog dusting its western flank.

Here the Rio de las Vueltas has been joined by tributaries coming from these mountains.

Some sections of the Fitz Roy massif look even crazier when seen through this window/angle. The leftmost, which looks nearly like a human-made skyscraper from this angle, is Aguja Saint Exupery. The point of Aguja Rafael Juárez pokes up next to the much larger shoulder of Aguja Poincenot. “Aguja”, approriately, means “needle”.

A wider shot of all the mountains arrayed to the northwest of Rio de las Vueltas.

The mountain wall on the eastern side of the the valley brings its own set of textures and colors.

Another Rainbow Mountain for our collection.

Cliff pods, which we haven’t seen since the Sacred Valley in Peru, would certainly give you a good view of Fitz Roy across the valley. If you feel like spending ~US$2,000 per night!

Argentina is rightly proud of this landscape, though this is very close to the place where a Chilean was killed in a border dispute in 1965.

Horses colored to match spots on the mountains.

We were glad to again spend most of the day leapfrogging with Carly and Ben; here they are coming from behind us.

Looming Fitz Roy.

While the gravel road was not the worst, it took nearly three hours of pedaling time to cover the 22 miles to El Chaltén, which made us feel even “luckier” that we had no chance of catching yesterday’s 5pm boat across Lago del Desierto. Because we would have needed to camp before town anyway (or roll in after 9pm!), and then last night and this morning we wouldn’t have gotten nearly the views that we did this afternoon. Though we might have been able to do the ride a bit faster without the stiff southwest wind that rudely kicked up several miles from our destination, almost the exact opposite of the forecast. For the last mile, we had to ride around day-hikers who were using the road to complete their loops, but day-hikers using the middle of the road at last indicated that traffic remained low even as we approached the busy town.

El Chaltén, Argentina is essentially the mirror image of Villa O’Higgins, Chile, where the “mirror” is the near-impassible international border that allows hikers and bikers to connect them, but for everyone else, turns each town into “the end of the road”. But the feel is substantially different. Both towns are “remote”, and both are filled with “adventurers”, but those terms actually cover a pretty wide spectrum. Which is perhaps only discernible to the experienced eyes of those of us occupying the “long-term, dirtbag” end of the “adventurer” spectrum, who made up most of the population at the genuinely-hard-to-reach Villa O’Higgins dead-end. Because El Chaltén is packed much more with city-dwellers, out for a quick vacation. Mostly that’s because El Chaltén is just a two-hour drive (on a paved road) from an airport with easy flights from Buenos Aires, whereas it’s at least two days of rough driving from Villa O’Higgins to the nearest airport.

Well, and as beautiful as the surroundings of Villa O’Higgins are, there is nothing close to the arresting sight of Fitz Roy looming over the town (and really nothing like it in the world, I think!) So it makes sense that there is simply a bigger draw here. And there is still very little “luxury”, “I’m just here for the ski-lodge, not to ski” tourism. The percentage of Fjallraven pants (or knockoffs) must as high as anywhere else in the world, and at a meal out on the main drag we had to count up to at least 30 before we saw the first passerby who was not carrying some sort of backpack.

This relative ease-of-access allows supply-and-demand to jack prices up to the highest level we’ve seen in South America, with our ~US$136/night AirBNB exceeding even or Villa O’Higgins accommodation by 25% (for a much smaller space). But it was really nice, nearly “American”-feeling, and would be a good place to spend five nights.

Rett rides the last couple blocks to our accommodation in El Chaltén, with Fitz Roy looking like a bad matte painting dropped into the background of a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode.

Later in the evening, Carly and Ben met us out to celebrate the true completion of our crossing. Though they were new to bikepacking, they’d been to Patagonia before, so had some good advice for us.

Our AirBNB was essentially 8 studio “apartments” in a building, and while our 3rd-floor unit didn’t have a direct view of Fitz Roy, all we had to do is step out onto the balcony/stairs.

In the opposite direction from Fitz Roy, some completely-different mountains show that the exit from El Chaltén will take us to a much drier and more-barren place.

And then between the two opposites, yet other completely-different mountain range, all visible from our front door.

Yep, this is just a normal view in El Chaltén, walking back from the grocery store. The really-skinny tower, on the left side of the dark green hilltop that separates it from the Fitz Roy massif, is Cerro Torre, a totally-separate mountain. It’s towering shape is so extreme it makes the peaks of the Fitz Roy group look almost “normal”!

Lago del Desierto, AR to El Chaltén, AR

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