El Chaltén - Argentina

NOTE:
We are sorry for the lack of update on the trip but unfortunately we are back to the RAT RACE which leaves not much free time for updating here, but we`ll keep posting as we can! Okey dokey?

10/23/05
Well, so we arrived in the tiny El Chalten! Do you know when we joke about a town saying that it is so small that it has only one street?, well, so this is the one!



Why did we come here? El Chalten is located inside the National Park Los Glaciares and it is the base for visiting the Cerro Chaltén (aka Fitzroy 3,405m) and Cerro Torre.

The access from the town to the beginning of the trail is just a matter of minutes by foot and although there are some itineraries where you can take a tent and camp for a couple of days en route it is also perfectly possible to visit the major points in a day walk and return to town to comfortably sleep in a warm nice bed.

We had beautiful day with nice weather and the hike was a delight! As I said, there are a couple of different trails and routes, we chose to do just a day hike and return to the hostel at the end of the day, so all we had to carry was some food for the day and water, really a pleasant walk.

The route started with flowers, nice and tiny indeed!



As you saw on the first picture, the town of El Chaltén lays in a valley, so guess what? any direction you walk to get out of it goes uphill, but in less then an hour of walk you are already rewarded with the astonishing view of the Mountain El Chaltén.



Actually the walk is pretty easy after the first viewpoint and on. Right there we met a guy from Catalunya that took our picture! From there we walked together all the way to the base of El Chaltén and back to the town.

The forest we have to cross to get there is beautiful, peaceful and full of woodpeckers. You can see the damage they do in almost any tree you look at, and of course you can see the birds too. We saw many couples and one interesting thing was the fact that the couples are always made of a whole black bird and a bird with red head, like the one in the picture below.



After you get across the forest start a very hard climb uphill to the base. Here is Angie (on the right) and our Catalan friend searching for new batteries for his camera!



Looking a little more to the right you can see how close we were from the pick.



The name Chaltén comes from a Tehuelche (Ahonikenk) word meaning "smoking mountain," due to a cloud that usually forms in the top of the mountain (just like on the picture below), and it was considered sacred by them.

Can you see a black dot on the bottom right of the picture?



Here is the close up. That is a person standing in the middle of the trail that leads to the rock climb base point.



And that`s me having lunch before the almighty smoking mountain.



Looking back can also provide another astonishing view.



We continued the way to loop back to the town. The problem is that the way back was swampy and we got our feet wet. It is hard to walk outside the trail because the plants here adapt to the lack of rainfall and to the strong winds, so the bushes are really tough.



Some parts of the trail had an elevated walkway.



We entered back into the forest and discovered this weird yellow thing, that we came to learn later it is called `Pan del Indio', as it was called by the early europeans when they arrived and saw that the native indians were eating this fungus.



At the end of the hike, one hour away from the town we passed by the Cerro Torre, another very popular peak among the rock climbers.



And finally were we were back in the town!



And the last pictures is my definition of for peaceful place!!!



At the hostel 'Rancho Grande' we had a nice hot dinner and rested for the following day!