The Perito Moreno Glacier

Today was awesome. I went out to visit the main attraction in the El Calafate area, the Perito Moreno Glacier. Rather than just sight see, I booked a trip through a local guide service and they took us out on it. They had two trips, a mini-trek or ours called Big Ice.

The main difference is the amount of time spent on the glacier. We had four hours, versus an hour and a half for the other one. It was well worth it.

The group was pretty small, just six of us and two guides. It was a pretty fun group. We had Rebecca and Lindsey, two recent UCLA graduates who had just gotten done with a mission trip to Uruguay and were traveling through patagonia before they left for the US. Jim and Susan who were vacationing down here. She moved to Buenos Aires to study the tango. Jim is attending grad school in Boston and just got out of the Marine Corps. The last member was Maria, who is from near Buenos Aires but moved down here for a year to work in a hotel.

They picked all of us up at our hostels and hotels and took us out for our trip. We had to take a boat to the opposite shore and then hiked up beside the glacier where our two guides, Matias and Jeremias gave us our safety lesson and fitted us with crampons and harnesses.

After a couple of miles, we strapped on the crampons and walked down onto the ice. The scenery was amazing. The glacier was huge and was like nothing I´d ever seen before. The ice was so blue down in the cracks. We even stopped to drink some of the melt water. I was hesitant at first because I doubted the rest of my vacation would be much fun with a case of giardia, but they assured us it was safe. It tasted great. Matias even filled his bottle for the rest of the hike.

From there, we hiked further up the glacier and then turned into it. The ice changed from being soft under our feet to being very hard and slick. It got pretty hairy at times. We stopped for lunch next to a huge pool of the bluest water I have ever seen. We all could have used a nice break, but we didn´t spend too long there. Sitting on ice is not the most enjoyable experience.

After spending roughly four and a half hours on the glacier we hiked back and took a detour to an ice cave. It was a melted out cave underneath the glacier that we were able to crawl down into. It was neat, but I didn´t like thinking about all of that ice over my head.

The hike was over a little after that and we had some coffee and waited on the boat to pick us up. We had a great view of the front wall of the glacier from there, but we didn´t get to see it calve off any icebergs. We could hear the ice cracking though, which sounded like very loud gunshots. Jim described it as sounding like artillery. I took his word for it.

Our boat ride back was interesting too. The guides were nice enough to pack a bottle of scotch, so we had some scotch on the rocks. The ice was some they had chipped off the glacier. It was a great way to end the hike.

All in all, an unbelievable day. We couldn´t have asked for better weather, or guides, and the people on the hike were a lot of fun. Tomorrow, bright and early, it´s off to El Chalten for the main point of coming down here, hiking around Mte. Fitz Roy. I can´t wait.