Sendero al Fitz Roy Backpacking Trip Part I

April 24, 2024April 25, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

While it was super fun to visit Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, let’s be real – I came to Patagonia to hike. There are lots of options for hiking in both Argentina and Chile, but there are really two quintessential trips that everyone wants to cross off their bucket list and most of the tourists we met were all doing some variation of the same trip. Those hikes are Torres del Paine in Chile and Sendero al Fitz Roy in Argentina.

Since we started in Argentina, Mount Fitz Roy was the first hike on my list and I was ecstatic to finally go backpacking. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has two circuits that most people follow, Mount Fitz Roy is really more of a collection of hikes that you can make your own custom itinerary for. Mount Fitz Roy is located in the Andean foothills near the Argentina-Chile border in Los Glaciares National Park. Most people don’t climb the mountain itself as that is a major mountaineering objective, but it can be viewed from many different trails within the park. Most trails are accessible from El Chalten, which is a tiny mountain town that pretty much exclusively caters to hikers visiting the mountain.

The hike to Lago de los Tres is THE hike to do if you want to get the best view of Mount Fitz Roy. It’s roughly 11km each way to hike to the lake, so it’s usually done either as a big day hike (with accommodations in El Chalten), or as part of a backpacking trip (camping in the park). There are several other hikes in the park that can be combined with this hike to extend your trip, with the second most popular being the trail to Laguna Torre. While I easily could have spent an entire week hiking around El Chalten, I decided on a 2 night, 3 day trek to visit both Lago de los Tres and Laguna Torre.

The convenient part of our itinerary was that we didn’t need to book any accommodations. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has a mandatory reservation system that fills up months in advance, you can camp for free in Los Glaciares National Park with no pre-planning. This has some pretty big cons, which I’ll get into later in the post, but it’s definitely convenient. Accommodations in El Chalten are pretty limited, but it’s only a 3 hour bus ride from El Calafate, so we planned our entire visit around the bus schedule and didn’t stay in El Chalten at all.

We left El Calafate on the 8am bus and had a very scenic ride through the desert to El Chalten. We saw lots of guanaco along the ride and even some rhea (which is a big bird like an ostrich or emu). We arrived in El Chalten at 11am and immediately started hiking. Laguna Torre and Lago de los Tres can be done as a loop trail measuring ~45km in total. You can go in either direction; the two campsites you’ll stay at are Agostini and Poicenot. Agostini is located right next to Laguna Torre, while Poicenot is 2km before Lago de los Tres and has 400m in elevation gain (so it’s a considerable climb from the campground).

My planned itinerary was to hike to Laguna Torre on day 1, hike to Lago de los Tres on day 2, and back down to El Chalten on day 3. I hadn’t planned for any sunrise hikes, which is why I planned to start with Laguna Torre. We ended up hiking to both lakes for sunrise, which means I had to do the climb up to Lago de los Tres on my final day (making for a long day and fast hiking to catch our bus), so if I had my time back, I would have done the hike in the opposite direction. But we still had a fantastic time!

Like I said, we got off the bus and pretty much immediately started hiking. It was ~10km from the bus to Agostini Campsite. We were super lucky with the weather and quickly switched to shorts and t-shirt after we started hiking. We could only get away with this because it was a blue sky day and the presence of the sun makes a huge difference in the air temperature. The trek starts with a hike up through the canyon to Mirador Cascada Margarita and then on to Mirador Cerro Torre, which is approximately halfway to the campground. It’s a steady uphill hike until you reach Cerro Torre, but it’s pretty flat after that, so we decided to stop at the viewpoint for lunch.

This was where we had our first experience with the park outhouses. Normally I don’t have a lot to say about outhouses – they’re generally never nice – but the latrines in Los Glaciares National Park were probably the worst I’ve ever used. They’re pit toilets, which I don’t have a problem with, but they were all in extremely poor condition. Some of them were almost full to the top with waste, the structures were rotting away, and the metal plate that separates the structure from the pit looked in danger of collapsing in some of them. The park, and this trail in particular, receives thousands of visitors a year, so they really need to invest in replacing the outhouses. They’re so gross that most people were not using them and just going in the woods. That’s fine when people properly bury their waste, but the park receives so many visitors (and so many inexperienced backpackers) that it’s not sustainable for the well-being of the park to be without usable toilets. It’s amazing that you can hike and camp in the Park for free, but I would happily pay $10 a night for a permit if it meant the latrine situation could be improved. It was shameful in my opinion. That’s my rant – I’ll shut up about it now!

After lunch, we continued to the campsite. The second half of the hike was much easier than the first half and you have a pretty incredible view of the back of Mount Fitz Roy the entire time. The one tip I would give to other hikers is to make sure you fill up your water carriers at the river ~1km from the campsite. The Rio Fitz Roy runs right past the campsite, but it’s extremely silty and will easily clog up your filter, but there’s a great drinking water source at the bridge crossing the creek 1km before the campsite. Most people weren’t filtering their water, but we filtered everything we drank, especially once we discovered the outhouse problem and that people are just shitting next to the river at the campsite without digging catholes.

The campsites are pretty bare bones. They’re nice in that there is lots of room for tents, but there is very limited privacy. The Poicenot Campground is a nightmare because of the volume of people and the limited amount of camping experience the average visitor has, but I didn’t mind the Agostini Campground at Laguna Torre. It was reasonably busy, but it didn’t feel too crowded. I felt that most of the people there had previous backpacking experience and were considerate and respectful of the other campers and LNT practices. This was not the case at Poicenot Campground, but more on that later.

We found a nice site for our tent and then packed our bags for day hiking and set off to Laguna Torre. It’s only a 5-10 minute walk from the campsite to the lake. It was still sunny when we arrived at the lake, so I immediately decided to go for a swim. No one else was swimming and I knew it would be cold, but I have a lot of cold water pride as a Canadian, so I couldn’t resist going in the water. It was cold, but no colder than the glacial lakes in BC. Swimming isn’t permitted in Torres del Paine, so I’m glad I took the opportunity to swim at Los Glaciares!

The lake is extremely silty, so it’s kind of an ugly grey colour, but it has an incredible view of Mount Fitz Roy and the glacier. Plus, it has a ton of glacial ice floating in the lake, so it was really cool to swim with the bergy bits (something I’ve only actually done one other time in BC). After my swim, I was determined to continue hiking to Mirador Maestri. The lake is surrounded by a large moraine that was deposited by the glacier in the past, so you can hike up to the top of the moraine and then circle around to the back of the lake where you get a better view of the glacier.

I think Seth would have happily skipped this part, but he was a good sport and accompanied me up the moraine. It’s ~5km round trip to the viewpoint, but because you can see the full trail the entire time you’re hiking, it seems closer than it is. It’s also a steady uphill, so eventually Seth lost interest and decided to hang out on the rocks and look at wildflowers while I finished the hike up to the viewpoint. I didn’t quite make it to the end of the hike, but I made it up to a natural crest in the topography and got a fantastic view of the back of the glacier! It took me ~1 hour to get there (2 hours round trip), but I definitely hustled. I would give yourself a solid 2.5-3 hours to do the full hike and properly enjoy it.

We raced the sun back to the lake and it set behind the mountains shortly after we got to the lake. As soon as the sun went down, it immediately got a lot colder and we quickly bundled up in all our layers, including our puffy jackets. But we still enjoyed eating our dinner at the lake before returning to the campground to go to sleep. Like I said, I hadn’t planned on doing any sunrise hiking, but the campground is so close to the lake that I knew I had to at least hike up to Laguna Torre for sunrise (but was still undecided whether I would do it for Lago de los Tres). So we went to bed pretty early and I set my alarm in time to get up for sunrise the following morning. It was cold overnight, so you should definitely come prepared for that, but I was warm in my -7 degree quilt and puffy jacket.

Check back next week for Part II!

Tierra del Fuego National Park

April 17, 2024April 24, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

On our second day in Ushuaia, we were determined to visit Tierra del Fuego National Park. I was really tempted to check out some of the hiking trails in the area, but I felt that visiting the park was a unique experience that I didn’t want to miss, so we opted to do the much more touristy activity. We signed up for a tour and got picked up at our hostel in the morning to drive towards the park. The bus dropped us off at the train station and we had the opportunity to travel into the park by train instead.

Tierra del Fuego is already an interesting geographic region at the end of the world, but it has an interesting history as well. We didn’t have the opportunity to learn very much about its indigenous history, except that there were a number of indigenous Fuegian groups living all over the coastal south region and the interior of the island. They had a very unique culture and were never colonized by the Incans (like many other parts of Argentina and Chile), but like many indigenous groups, they were devastated by the arrival of the Europeans and diseases like measles and smallpox.

Unfortunately, the park doesn’t really focus on this history. It’s a common theme we noticed in both Argentina and Chile, with the bypassing of indigenous history, save for our guide in Santiago, who shared more indigenous history with us on his 3 hour tour, than we learned on the rest of the entire trip. The National Park is heavily marketed to tourists, but they’ve decided to focus on the colonial history of Ushuaia and the surrounding area.

Ushuaia was initially founded as a penal colony in the early 1900’s and as it expanded, a railway was constructed to transport the prisoners into the forest to harvest timber to support the town’s growing needs. The train has been refurbished and is now known as “el tren del fin del mundo”. Today, it transports hundreds of tourists 7km into the park, showcasing gorgeous landscapes and educating visitors on the history of the railroad. It was a cool experience – it’s very picturesque and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn about the history – but I have to say, the entire experience is a bit tasteless.

The train has a very dark history, as many of the prisoners were severely mistreated during this time period. I felt that the tour didn’t understand its intention, in that it didn’t think critically about the experiences of the prisoners or respect them. The audio tour starts off by talking about how progressive it was to offer the prisoners work, and that many of them loved the opportunity to get outside and enjoy nature. But then later in the tour it expands on how the prisoners were starved, beaten, and mistreated while working in what was essentially a labour camp. It’s not like they were given the choice to participate in labour, so it didn’t seem very progressive to me and felt rather tone-deaf.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the Park also has paid actors running around everywhere dressed as goofy prisoners. They make you take a photo with them before boarding the train where they encourage you to pretend that you caught these naughty prisoners trying to escape (and then later try and sell you the photo of course). I found the entire production to be disrespectful and insulting to the people that suffered in this prison at the start of the century. It’s a good learning opportunity, but it was too commercialized and executed poorly.

It’s a one-way train journey, so our tour bus picked us up at the end of the line and we spent the next several hours exploring around the park. This part of the tour, I really enjoyed. First we visited the post office. It’s not the most southerly post office in the world (that honour is reserved for the one in Antarctica), but it is known as the “end of the road”. The road in question is the Pan-American highway, which stretches 30,000km from Alaska to Ushuaia. The post office is located on a beautiful beach, so we sent ourselves a postcard (stamped with a penguin) and then enjoyed the views.

Our next stop was Lapataia, which is the real end of the road and has a beautiful mirador of the Beagle Channel. Our bus dropped us off 1km away from the parking lot and we did a short walk through the forest to Lapataia and then explored the viewpoints. It was a nice day – not super warm, but a mix of sun and clouds. I really liked the forest walk, which smelled amazing after rain from the previous night. Our last stop was to Lago Roca, which is a huge lake located on the border between Argentina and Chile. Our tour guides shared some local spirits with us at the end of the tour (which was actually delicious, a very caramelly whisky), before returning to Ushuaia.

We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping around the downtown area. Seth was determined to find a bird guide and we visited some of the outdoor stores, of which there is actually a large number due to the many expeditions leaving from Ushuaia. But our main goal for the rest of the day was to sample the king crab that Ushuaia is known for. Our tour guides all recommended the same restaurant, a small place called El Viejo Marino, but given how small it was and how often it’s recommended, we could not get a table. Seth did a bit of research and found a place called La Casa de Los Mariscos, which I would highly recommend!

We got to the restaurant 15 minutes before it opened and were the first in line for the night, but a long line quickly developed behind us and by the time the doors opened, the entire restaurant was immediately filled. It was a great choice and one of the best meals I had on the entire trip! The popular dish is the parmesan king crab, which is basically a full crab baked with parmesan cheese. It was delicious and we ordered one to share with a seafood paella that came with squid, scallops, shrimp, clam, mussels, and white fish! We topped it off with a full bottle of wine for the low low price of $9. There was a guy performing life music throughout the night as well and the whole restaurant had a great vibe!

It was a wonderful way to end our time in Ushuaia. It was a very quick trip to the end of the world, we only really had two days there as we flew out to El Calafate early the next morning. I found our trip to be a bit airplane heavy on the front end with the excursion down to Ushuaia, but once we landed in El Calafate, we wouldn’t be flying anymore until the end of the trip,

El Calafate is further north than Ushuaia (everything is), but is located squarely in the center of the Argentine Patagonia. It’s the jumping off place for anyone looking to explore Los Glaciares National Park. Like Ushuaia, it was not at all what I expected. I thought El Calafate would be smack dab in the middle of the mountains, but Patagonia is quite different from the other mountainous regions I’ve visited. Mostly in that it’s still true wilderness. There are not very many towns actually located in the mountains. The mountains are crowded around the Argentina-Chile border, but east of the border mountains, Argentina is pretty much all flatland desert. It’s very dry and barren.

El Calafate is located right on the enormous Lago Argentino. It has a nice view of the mountains across the lake, but the town is characterized more by the desert than the mountains. We stayed in a nice little guesthouse, arriving around noon. We were starting our first trek the following day, so we spent the afternoon picking up some groceries for the trip and sourcing other things we couldn’t bring with us, like fuel for our stove. We enjoyed some beers at Patagonia Brewing and then spent the rest of the day birdwatching at Laguna Nimez, a reserve next to the lake. We saw lots of birds, but the most interesting was probably the Chilean Flamingo! There were dozens of them hanging out in the lagoon and they’re pretty goofy to watch.

In the evening, we re-packed our bags, leaving a suitcase at the guesthouse and getting our backpacks ready for our first trek: 3 days on the Sendero Fitz Roy!

Birdwatching in Ushuaia

April 10, 2024April 24, 2024 / Maria / 3 Comments

We arrived in Ushuaia very late at night and took a taxi to our hostel. It was a harsh welcome because Buenos Aires was 30 degrees and Ushuaia was more like 10 degrees. It didn’t help that our room at the hostel could only be accessed from outside and no one had turned on the radiator before we arrived, so it was freezing on the first night.

We had a full day excursion booked, so it was an early rise the next morning with a 6am wake-up call. But it was worth it because we were taking a tour to Isla Martillo to walk with penguins! We were very lucky that it was a gorgeous day, which can be hard to come by in Ushuaia. Ushuaia is the most southern city in the world, and is popularly known as “the end of the world”. So even though it’s summer in February, the weather can still be quite harsh. It didn’t get much warmer than 12 degrees the whole time we were there and it can get extremely windy. One of the locals told me it does get up to 25 degrees sometimes, but there was fresh snow on the mountaintops while we were there.

We were up early enough to catch the sunrise as we walked down to the waterfront to find our tour. Ushuaia is in Patagonia, but it is more commonly associated with Tierra del Fuego, a large island at the bottom of South America. Ushuaia is located on the famous Beagle Channel, which separates Argentina from Chile. It’s also the starting point for most cruises to Antarctica, so there were a lot of ships of all sizes docked in the harbour. We enjoyed the sunrise over the channel and then jumped on a bus to drive 1.5 hours towards Haberton Ranch to catch a zodiac to Isla Martillo.

One of the most popular activities in Ushuaia (aside from Antarctica), is to cruise the Beagle Channel to see penguins. There are a ton of pleasure cruises that leave from Ushuaia and motor down to Isla Martillo to observe the penguins that nest on the island. There is just one tour (Piratour) that allows you to actually go on the island. It was definitely a costly tour, but I don’t regret paying extra for it because it was fantastic!

There are only 20 people allowed on the island at a time and you have to be accompanied by a certified guide. Our group was split in two and we spent the first hour visiting the Museo Acatushun at Haberton Ranch, while the other group toured the island. The Museum has the largest collection of marine birds and mammal bones in the world. It’s an eccentric place – the owner was an enthusiastic collector of whale bones, but they can be pretty stinky, so she basically bought the ranch as a place to store all her bones and then turned it into a museum. She’s since passed away, but the museum is now staffed by energetic biology students, who run daily tours and then clean bones in their spare time.

Tierra del Fuego is a great place for a bone museum though because it seems to be the place where whales go to die. We saw one dead whale washed up on the beach on our way to the ranch, and another one from the boat on our way to the island. But it’s a cool place and the students that give the tours are very knowledgeable. We had a fun time and it’s a super scenic location. It was quite chilly and windy and it really contributed to the “end of the world” vibes. It kind of hit me at that moment, the gravity of where we were and how lucky we were to be there. I’ve wanted to visit Patagonia for at least 6 years now, and it felt unreal to actually be doing it.

As cool as the Museum was, the penguins were infinitely cooler. We took a zodiac for about 15 minutes to Isla Martillo, where we disembarked with our guide to walk the island. There are two types of penguins that nest on the island – Magellanic Penguins and Gentoo Penguins. Occasionally you can see King Penguins on the island as well, but they don’t nest there. The Magellanic Penguins don’t really like the cold, so from what I remember, Isla Martillo is one of the most southerly colonies of Magellanic Penguins and they only migrate there in the summer to nest. The Gentoo Penguins are more traditionally found in Antarctica, but this colony can be found on the island year round.

I would hate to have to be one of the guides shepherding people around the island. It’s really important to stay together as a group and to always be with your guide so as to cause the least disruption to the penguins. But as you can imagine, people more or less lose their minds the second they see a penguin, so there was a lot of trying to keep the group gathered together. But it’s really such a cool experience. The boat drops you right on the beach and you visit the Gentoo colony nesting on the rocks first. There are Magellanic Penguins all over the island, so after that, you walk a little bit inland to see some of their burrows. They don’t seem bothered by people and it was cool to watch them waddling around. But my favourite was watching them swim. They’re so slow on land, but they absolutely whiz through the water!

We spent about an hour on the island before getting picked up by the zodiac and returning to Ushuaia via bus. We had a few hours of break time in the afternoon and we spent some time exploring the town. Ushuaia was not at all what I expected. It’s the “end of the world”, so I was expecting a very small town and was completely shocked to find dozens of mid-level high rises stretching across the oceanfront. The town is nestled on the foothills of the Patagonian mountains and because of the Antarctica cruises, it’s absolutely crawling with people. The actual town population is ~82,000, but I’m sure that balloons quite a bit with all the tourists.

Because of its location, seafood is easy to find and we quickly learned that the delicacy in Ushuaia was king crab. We decided to save that for our second day and instead, found a nice restaurant selling roast lamb, another Patagonian delicacy. We ordered lamb with roast potatoes and vegetables for two and received a ridiculously delicious and large portion of lamb! We ended up bringing half of it back to the hostel and eating it again for lunch the following day.

In the evening, we returned to the waterfront for our cruise of the Beagle Channel. Cruising the Beagle Channel is one of the biggest attractions, and like I said, a lot of people ride all the way down to Isla Martillo to view the penguins from the boat. We didn’t need to cruise that far, but I didn’t want to miss the channel, so the evening cruise was a great compromise!

One thing I loved about coming from Canada to Patagonia in February was the increased amount of daylight. Sunset was still 5pm in Vancouver at that time, so it was a real treat to enjoy a 9pm sunset every night in Ushuaia. Our cruise left at 6pm, but instead of having to motor all the way down to Isla Martillo, we got to circle around the Channel observing all the marine life! I think it may have been Seth’s favourite day of the entire trip and we had a blast on the boat because there were a ton of other very enthusiastic bird nerds on board that we quickly befriended.

It was pretty cold, so a lot of people stayed huddled inside the heated part of the boat, but we spent the entire cruise on the roof. Seth had his binoculars of course, but most of the other birders were sporting very large cameras. We hadn’t been able to find a quality English bird guide yet, so we took advantage of the other birders identification skills and had a great time spotting wildlife.

The highlight of the cruise for the birders was spotting a Blackish Cinclodes, which is a pretty unremarkable little black bird, but apparently it’s super rare and was flying around the boat for a solid hour, so all the nerds were in a tizzy over it! I’m not sure what my favourite bird was, I’m still pretty partial to oystercatchers, so maybe them, but it was cool to see an albatross.

The highlight of the tour for non-birders is probably Faro les Eclaireurs, which is a small lighthouse structure on a barren rock. It’s probably known as the “lighthouse at the end of the world” if I had to guess. It did have a bunch of sea lions hanging out on it at least! What I found more intriguing was the fact that the Channel is basically the border between Chile and Argentina, so while you’re cruising around, you have Argentina to the east and Chile to the west!

The tour finished around 9pm and we made a quick exit back to the hostel to try and catch up on some rest before another big day exploring Tierra del Fuego National Park. Check back next week for that!