Sendero al Fitz Roy Backpacking Trip Part I

April 24, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 3 Comments

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!

Hollyburn Chalet Winter Camping

February 21, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 2 Comments

This isn’t a trip that will be replicable for many people, but it was a very cool experience that I had for the first time this winter! Many people don’t know that there is a secret cabin community hiding out on the side of Hollyburn Mountain, near Cypress. There are about 100 small cabins, with some as old as 100 years, that make up the Hollyburn Cabin Community. The cabins were constructed by pioneers and ski enthusiasts and at it’s peak there were ~200 cabins on the mountain. Many have fallen into disrepair, but those that remain represent a unique piece of heritage conservation and the only remaining ski community on the north shore.

Most of these cabins are privately owned, but two of them are owned by Girl Guides and Boy Scouts of Canada (as two separate entities). The Girl Guide Cabin is known as Hollyburn Chalet or Burnabee Chalet. The chalet is very popular among units in the winter, and last year we decided it would be a great trip to take our Trex unit up to the cabin for a weekend. In order to secure a spot, I attended an orientation about the cabin in late 2022, and then returned again in late 2023 for the annual work party. Volunteers assist in the maintenance of the cabin on an annual basis and those who participate are given priority booking.

So that landed us a spot at the cabin in early January! It’s a ~20 minute walk to the cabin in summer conditions and ~45 minutes in snow with gear. The cabin is stocked with firewood every year at the work party, but we still have to bring up some compressed logs to burn overnight to conserve firewood, along with all our equipment and food. All the trex members had their backpacks with their equipment, and we took turns towing up 3 sleds of equipment. We had snowshoes for the hike in, but microspikes would have been sufficient and it was a bit of a struggle climbing up to the cabin.

The biggest challenge we faced is that it was very cold on our visit! It’s an el niño year, so it’s been uncharacteristically warm in the lower mainland and there is limited snow in the mountains. But we did get a very big snowfall in the city in early January, followed by a deep freeze right when we were going to the cabin. It was -17 degrees overnight on our first night in the cabin, so while we were excited that we didn’t have to worry about rain, we were concerned about staying warm.

It was a bit of a chaotic walk up to the cabin because it was dark and very cold standing around, but we couldn’t move very fast with our sleds, which were heavy with firewood. At first I was at the back of the group and it was quite cold because of the pace. But when I took my turn pulling the sled, I warmed up a lot from the effort! It took us ~40 minutes to get to the cabin, and while we were thrilled to arrive, it’s still very cold in the cabin.

Hollyburn Chalet actually turned 100 years old this year, so while it is a historic cabin, it does have propane lightning and 2 wood stoves (one for heat and one for cooking). The cabin has a nice kitchen and eating area on the main floor, so we didn’t have to bring any dishes or pots with us, as well as there are lots of chairs for sitting around the wood stove. It’s totally empty in the loft, which sleeps ~25 people. So it is a pretty big space, which means it takes a while to heat it.

We arrived just before 7pm and immediately got the fire going. Everyone kept their winter clothes on and we learned some choreographed dance moves to keep warm! We had hot chocolate and s’mores for mug-up and a lot of the trex were anxious to go to bed. Our starting point was -17 degrees, so even after a few hours, the cabin was still below zero and our water bottles were. We were afraid to send everyone to bed too early because most of their sleeping bags were only rated for -5 degrees, so we stayed up late playing games around the fire. We made everyone a hot water bottle for their bedrolls and when it finally hit zero degrees in the cabin (around 11:30pm), we figured we’d be warm enough in our sleeping bags to go to bed.

I slept near the fire on the first floor to keep it going all night. I was convinced that some of the trex were going to be cold, but because they were all sleeping above the stove in the loft, it did eventually warm up upstairs, though it was still quite cool in the morning (only around 10 degrees). We all slept in because of the late night and then enjoyed hash browns for breakfast!

Our morning was dedicated to the chores of running the cabin. It was still very cold, but it was a beautiful sunny day outside! Hollyburn Chalet is set up with several large pots for melting snow water on the wood stove and we melted lots of drinking water in the morning and split wood to re-stock all the wood supply. We always leave everything the way we found it or better, which includes leaving all the wood boxes and kindling boxes full, so we overstuffed them so we’d only have to fill them once. There’s a very fancy wood splitter at the cabin, so everyone had a turn splitting wood.

We spent an hour playing in the snow before lunch and tried to break up our outdoor time since it was so cold. We had a delicious tortellini soup for lunch and managed to get the indoor temperature up to 14 degrees. After lunch, we decided to go for a walk to explore the other cabins in the area. Like I said, it was a gorgeous sunny day and we hiked a few kilometres to a lookout, checking out all the unique cabins and looking for big trees.

Dinner was macaroni and chili, followed by some more games. Our unit is really into games (which I love), our favourite is Godfather, which involves everyone picking a character and trying to win others to your team by guessing their character. But on this trip we also tried 4 on a couch, which is a game I used to play in high school where you swap identities with each other and try and get your whole team sitting on the designated couch. We also played a game I know as Monikers, which is a mix of catchphrase and charades. We didn’t play the board game and just made up our own words and put them in a big bowl, but I’m not sure what name the game actually goes by. It was a big hit!

The highlight of day 2 was our mug-up, for which we decided to lug up chocolate and fruit for fondue! We had a big pot of chocolate and cream, and then strawberries, bananas, marshmallows, rice crispies, and apple slices for dipping. It was definitely a hit! We managed to get the indoor temperature up to 20 degrees by the second night and we were finally able to take off our jackets. So it was much warmer going to bed, but cooled off in the night because I slept so well and forgot to stoke the fire as much. I woke up at 4am and had to pretty much re-make it in the middle of the night, but overall it was a lot warmer inside and we were able to keep the cabin comfortable.

Our last morning was dedicated to clean up. We got some photos outside the cabin and had a quick 15 minute walk to return to the parking lot. We opted to take the snowshoes down in the sled rather than wear them (they are quite bulky), and since it’s all downhill, we made pretty quick time back to the campsite.

So while we definitely had some adversity to overcome with the temperatures, it was a fantastic trip! I was really concerned on the first night, but our hot water bottles worked super well and no one complained about being cold overnight. It was the first time backpacking for several of the trex, and even though it’s a short distance, it’s in pretty challenging conditions (dark, cold, snowy), so I thought they all did really well! The chalet is a really lovely piece of history and I feel lucky that I had the opportunity to experience it through Girl Guides. Some units go up there every year; we’re not planning for it to be a regular thing for us, but I would definitely go back in the future and think it would be fun to go up there in the summer as well (when it’s much easier to get a booking).

Even if you’re just going for a walk, it’s pretty cool to check out the Hollyburn Cabin Community, because there’s some really interesting cabins up there and it makes for a fun day hike!

Tetrahedron Park Backpacking Trip Part II

December 13, 2023July 11, 2024 / Maria / 3 Comments

The first half of our trip centered around Mount Steele (featured in Part I), so the second half of the trip was about McNair Lake. Like I said in my last post – there are 4 cabins in the park. Edwards Cabin is the most central and could be used as a home base for day hiking. Bachelor Cabin is located the closest to the parking lot and is really popular among both families and partiers because of the short hike for hauling in children or booze, depending on your desires, I guess. These two crowds probably don’t mesh very well, so my opinion is to leave this cabin for the families!

I think Mount Steele is the most popular hut because of it’s location for skiing, and I’d heard McNair Cabin is one of the least frequented in the park. It’s certainly the hardest to get to. You’d think that Mount Steele would be the most challenging because of the hike up the mountain, but it’s a longer hike to McNair Lake and while the terrain is flatter – it’s more technical. In the shoulder season, it can get very muddy on the trail to McNair and there are several detours around boggy areas.

It was another gorgeous day when we departed Mount Steele and we hiked our way back towards Edwards Cabin. Just before you get to the cabin, there’s a branch towards McNair Lake. We weren’t ready for lunch yet, so we skipped Edwards and immediately carried on towards McNair. It’s a nice forested trail at the beginning, but it does deteriorate as you continue on. It’s not really in bad condition, but there’s a collapsed bridge and a detour before Chapman Lake that were pretty muddy.

Eventually our hunger caught up with us, but it’s pretty swampy and we didn’t see many places to stop. We decided to aim for Chapman Lake for lunch and we did find a small dry spot right at the head of the lake to take a break, but overall there’s not many good places to stop at the lake either. We didn’t see anyone on the trail except for one father and son who were leaving the cabin. Apparently on this particular weekend McNair Cabin had been the party cabin and they told us they had a great time participating in “beer olympics” with a bunch of partiers the previous night. They were crowned champions at the end of the night as the only ones not blackout drunk.

The partiers must have gotten up early though, because we didn’t see them. There are some large meadows just before the cabin and a short climb to get up to the top of the hill. The Cabin is still a few hundred metres from the lake, so you can’t see it, but there is a really beautiful view looking down to the meadows. The father-son duo told us they had seen a bunch of elk down there the previous day, so we kept our eyes peeled for them. We saw lots of evidence of where they had been bedded down, but unfortunately we didn’t see them.

We were the only people at the Cabin when we arrived and it ended up staying that way all night. We loved meeting new people at Steele, but it was nice to have the cabin to ourselves at McNair. I don’t know how McNair got its reputation as the least popular cabin though, because we absolutely loved it! Don’t skip it if you’re visiting the park, it’s definitely worth the muddy trek out there! Someone has strung lights around the edge of the cabin that can be plugged into a power bank, so it has a really great atmosphere!

We made a trek down to check out the lake as the clouds moved in for the evening. It’s a pretty small lake and if you’re feeling adventurous, there is another day hike that can be done up to Panther Peak. Definitely do your research for this one though as there’s no marked trail and it wasn’t even shown on my GPS. Instead, we hung out at the cabin and ate supper and had a cribbage tournament. Girls vs. Boys and me and Adriana absolutely smoked the boys!

The hut is very similar to Mount Steele, but McNair has a little balcony on the front of the cabin, which is a nice spot to hang out. I didn’t sleep well though because I woke up in the middle of the night and was absolutely convinced I had forgotten my rain pants at Mount Steele when I’d been repacking my bag in the morning. I only recently bought rain pants after a very wet episode at Lake O’Hara and I was feeling dejected thinking that I wouldn’t have them for the following day.

Fortunately, I lost sleep over nothing and found them in the bottom of my bag the following morning. It wasn’t raining when we woke up, but it started while we were having breakfast. I wouldn’t say it was heavy rain, but it rained consistently throughout the entire day. We had a nice breakfast before packing up for the hike back to the car. We made for a colourful crew with our rain jackets and pack covers!

As muddy as the trail had been the previous day, it was much worse in the rain. In the very first meadow I went calf deep in the mud and got my shoe wet and Brandon took a tumble backwards into the mud. It continued to rain on us all morning and it was a slow hike back to Edwards. Adriana was very worried about crossing the broken bridge and she did take a little tumble off it right at the start, but was otherwise okay. Eventually we made it back to Edwards for lunch and were thrilled to find 3 other guys there who were getting ready to leave, but had a fire going.

I was pleased with my new rain pants, which were only $15 from value village, but kept me quite dry on the trail. We stripped off all our wet layers and enjoyed our lunch warming up by the remnants of the fire. Brandon literally had steam pouring off him as we dried out our gear as much as possible.

Given the rain, it would have been an easy choice for me to skip Bachelor Cabin on the way back. It’s a slight detour (~2km) to get there and we skipped in on the way in to secure spots at Mount Steele. But I’m glad Eddie was there because he was determined to check out Bachelor Cabin to come back in the future with his family. So he convinced us to detour and now I can say I’ve been to all 4 cabins! Bachelor Cabin is located in the woods, but not far from Bachelor Lake. We didn’t stop for too long and it was only a short hike back to the car after that.

It was pouring by the time we finally got to the car, which made for an interesting dynamic of 4 people trying to change into dry clothes! We had a ferry booking for 8pm, which was the only sailing with reservations left, but we were hoping to get on one of the earlier sailings. We checked the ferry status as soon as we got service, but even though it was only 3pm, the ferry was already ticketing for 8pm, so we just kept our reservation. Instead, we got to enjoy some time in Gibsons and had a delicious meal at Lunitas Mexican Eatery, followed by ice cream!

So overall, I think it was a very successful trip and had a great time backpacking with some different friends than I usually go with. My love for the Sunshine Coast stays alive and well and I hope to be back one day on skis!