From Argentina to Chile

May 15, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

We returned to El Calafate after an epic 3 days hiking the Sendero al Fitz Roy in El Chalten. We only had a two-day break before starting our second major hike – 5 days in Torres del Paine National Park. I must admit, these two days were a bit miserable for me. I had caught a cold a few days before and it peaked on our time off. Honestly, it was better than dealing with a cold on the trail, but I was a bit irritable in between.

It’s a 1.5-hour drive from El Calafate to Perito Moreno glacier, which is one of the biggest attractions in the town. Interestingly, both the Sendero al Fitz Roy and Perito Moreno Glacier are located in Los Glaciares National Park, which extends along the border throughout the mountains. Both attractions are extremely popular destinations for tourists, but while Fitz Roy is free to camp and hike, Perito Moreno has a 10,000ARS ($10USD) entrance fee.

Perito Moreno is very well developed as a tourist attraction, with a large visitor centre and several kilometres of extremely well maintained boardwalk extending along the hillside to provide viewing balconies for the glacier. It really bothered me to pay for Perito Moreno and not Fitz Roy. The facilities on the Sendero al Fitz Roy are in terrible condition (I’m mostly talking about the outhouses), and I really wish the government would charge campers $10 a night to upgrade some of the park facilities along the trail. The environment really needs it!

Our driver dropped us at the trailhead for the glacier balconies and we spent several hours walking the boardwalk and viewing the glacier. The weather was drizzling, but it wasn’t full on raining and it started and stopped a lot. The trail was quite empty when we arrived, which was surprising, but I think we were ahead of all the big tour buses, as it did get more crowded later, although it was never overwhelming.

Perito Moreno glacier is unlike any glacier I’ve ever seen. It’s a massive ice sheet that comes down through the mountains from the larger Southern Patagonia Icefield. The glacier extends all the way to the lake, where it discharges into Lago Roca and Lago Argentino (which is right next to El Calafate). The ice extends almost to the walkways, so you’re incredibly close to it! Until 2020, the glacier had remained constant for 100 years, meaning it was neither growing or receding, but it has started to recede since 2020. It has a large impact on the water level in the lakes and can cause flooding in years where there is a high melt.

We spent a few hours walking the boardwalks and watching icebergs calve off from the sheet. You can pay to take a boat out into the lake to get slightly closer to the ice, but you’re so close already, I don’t regret saving our money and lazing around at the balconies. There is a visitor centre with food, but there’s no food available along the boardwalk, so we had brought lunch with us and enjoyed it along some of the benches.

We spent about 3 hours at the balconies in total and then got picked up by our driver. I slept on the way back to town again, while Seth continued to count rhea and guanaco through the window. I decided that I wanted to eat guanaco before leaving the desert and Seth found us a “hip” restaurant with guanaco burgers that turned out to be a dingy pub. Unfortunately, the burger was very disappointing, but I blame the restaurant more than the animal. It was decidedly not hip, but at least I got to try something new on our final day in Argentina.

The next day we had to take a 6-hour bus across the border to Chile. In classic Maria fashion, I didn’t sleep well because I was up all night worrying about missing our bus. This resulted in us getting up early and waiting around for a bus that obviously left late. I was a little bit nervous about crossing into Chile because I had read online that their border control is very strict. We’d dehydrated all our own food for the trip, which was a pleasure to eat on the trail, so I really didn’t want to get it confiscated at the border. Argentina didn’t care at all about what we brought in, but because Chile has a big agricultural industry, they ask you to declare all food. If you don’t, you may not get caught, but if you do, you could be facing large fines. So if in doubt, declare.

To make my dehydrated food look more legit, I actually heat sealed everything into those little foil lined bags used for loose leaf tea, and created fancy labels for each packet. The vibe I was going for was “farmer’s market, but commercially sealed”. It ended up being overkill as no one even bothered to look at it. I wonder if the border guards may have been interested if I entered through an airport, but they don’t even make you take your luggage off the bus when you cross by road.

We did have to get off the bus and put all our day bags through screening, and a border agent inspected the inside of the bus, but no one checked any of the luggage (although the hold may have gotten a sniff test from a border dog). We still declared what we had, but when I said it was “dried hiking food”, they didn’t ask any more questions. I could have saved myself a ton of time on the packaging and just used Ziploc bags like I normally do. They seem to mostly be interested in confiscating any fresh fruit or vegetables. Several people did have fruit in their bag that they did not declare, which got taken, but no one on our bus got fined. It seemed like very normal border control to me, and not scary like what I’d read online.

We arrived in Puerto Natales in the late afternoon, which is the jumping off point for anyone visiting Torres del Paine National Park. It’s an interesting town. It was similar in size to El Calafate, but it had a much different vibe. El Calafate had the feel of a town that was built around tourism, whereas Puerto Natales felt like a town that tourism happened to. We selected our guesthouses based on proximity to the bus depot, so in both instances, it was a walk to get to town, but somehow it felt a lot further in Puerto Natales. The town didn’t feel quite as welcoming to me, although there were a lot less stray dogs (I’ve never seen more stray dogs anywhere than in El Calafate)!

Our guesthouse in Puerto Natales was top notch and had the comfiest king sized bed! After dropping off our gear, we had a lot of errands to run. We’d eaten all of our food from Argentina (to avoid crossing the border with it), so we had to stock up on snacks and breakfast food for our Torres del Paine trek. I’d read online before the trip that it’s easy to find hiking food locally and to not bother bringing your own, but I’m so glad we did! It was so hard finding breakfast and snack food that was filling, enjoyable to eat, and lightweight; I was so glad I didn’t also have to find 5 days’ worth of lunches and suppers! We spent a long time at the grocery store trying to find enough snacks for our week long hike, and it was chaotic because we didn’t have a coin for the shopping cart, so we were forced to run around the store with armloads of food.

Eventually I piled enough food into Seth’s arms that I figured we wouldn’t starve on the trail (obviously we ended up buying way more than we needed) and we went in search of dinner. Everyone eats late in Argentina and Chile and a lot of the restaurants don’t open until 7pm. I wanted to be asleep by 9pm and we still had to re-pack, so we walked around until we found a nice little spot that was open. It was a good meal, but the staff didn’t speak any Spanish so I ended up with something very different than what I thought I’d ordered. I thought I was getting grilled white fish (which is a comfort food for me and I was still sick), but I ended up with the most ridiculous mixed seafood platter. On any other day, I would have been pumped to eat it, but it wasn’t really a “eat mystery seafood” kind of day for me. Fortunately, it was tasty and it ended up being fine.

Seth on the other hand, had ceviche. It was a delicious meal and he savoured every minute of it, but it was many a little too ambitious for his travelling stomach on the day before a major hike. He ended up regretting it the following day (if you catch my meaning). Fortunately, there was no issue that evening and we returned to our guesthouse to repack all our food and bags to start our 5-day trek on the W-circuit the following morning! Check back next week to read about the trek!

Pipeline Road Ski Touring

March 6, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

To date, I’ve only been touring at Brockton Point, so I was excited to try out somewhere new. I’ve been to the Zoa Peak/Falls Lake area a few times in the winter and was feeling comfortable with the idea of touring up the Pipeline Road, which delineates the first half of the trail to Zoa. The trail continues up through the trees to Zoa, which is also popular for touring, but I’m still very nervous about coming down and I don’t like densely gladed runs even in the resort. The pipeline road is a good grade and nice and wide, so I liked the idea of just skiing up the road.

Originally, we had planned to go snow camping overnight. But the weather has been so terrible and it was calling for rain all weekend. I don’t mind going out for the day in the rain, but the idea of also camping in the snow and rain was not at all appealing. So we decided to go for a day trip instead. It was just me, Carolyn, and Brandon, so we drove out to the Coquihalla nice and early, hoping the rain would let up.

Unfortunately, it was still raining when we arrived and we were shocked to discover that there’s so little snow this year that they’ve actually been plowing the road to the Zoa Peak trailhead! The road is ~1.5km long, but it’s not normally plowed in the winter, so generally it adds an extra half hour of flat terrain to your hike to get to the official trail start (where the summer parking lot is). So we drove all the way out to the base and strapped on our skis and skins in the rain.

Brandon hasn’t picked up touring yet (but we’re wearing him down), so he just had snowshoes and a crazy carpet. He’s such a good sport and to be honest, it didn’t make much difference with him on snowshoes. It’s a nice hike up the road, fairly easy and the rain didn’t bother us. I actually find touring a lot more enjoyable than snowshoeing and it only took us about an hour to get to the top of the road. From there, we removed our skins and prepared for the ski back.

We probably could have skied out in like 10 minutes, but we took our time to try and enjoy it. Plus we had a good laugh watching Brandon on the crazy carpet, so it ended up taking around a half hour. The snow was very sticky because it was wet, but there was enough base down that it wasn’t too challenging to ski. Like I said, it’s a nice wide road, so I felt comfortable skiing it and we had a good time. It’s a shorter trip than going up to Brockton, but I definitely enjoyed it more.

If you’re a beginner, then I think the pipeline road is definitely a really good option and I’m already looking forward to coming back in better conditions! We only did one lap because of the rain, so it was a short day, but we hit up the owl cafe in Hope on the way back and had the most delicious meal of Newfoundland mussels and elk burger! I was super surprised to see NL mussels on the menu and didn’t expect them to be very good, but they were really tasty!

Brockton Point Ski Touring

February 28, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 2 Comments

I’ve been downhill skiing since I was 10 years old. Since moving to BC, it felt inevitable that I would eventually want to get into ski touring. It’s intrigued me for the past few years, but it’s such a high buy-in for new gear that I was reluctant to commit. My downhill skis are 16 years old and very narrow for west coast skis (68mm underfoot). Me and Carolyn both decided to get new downhill skis at the same time, and as soon as she said she was getting skis for touring, I was obligated to get them too!

For those of you unfamiliar with ski touring, to oversimplify it, it’s downhill skiing without a chair lift. Meaning you stick skins to the bottom of your skis that allow you to walk uphill. The bindings are also different and use a pin in the front that allows your heel to lift out of the binding while walking. They look a bit like what most people know as telemark skis. This allows you to explore a lot of different terrain that wouldn’t be accessible to ski otherwise. Once you get to the top of the hill, you take off the skins, switch your bindings from ‘walk’ to ‘ski’ mode, and clip in your heels for a more traditional downhill ski experience.

Choosing skis, bindings, and boots was a learning experience and took me most of last winter. A great tip when deciding is to take advantage of Whistler’s ski demo program. When you have your own equipment, you can demo skis for $20 a day, you just can’t keep any one pair of skis for more than 2 hours, but you can try different skis all day. I did this once at the demo shop on Blackcomb (at Rendez-Vous) and once on Whistler (at Roundhouse). You use your own boots and poles and it’s a good way to see what you like. My favourites were the Head Kore 97 skis, which I was able to get for a really good price online. It’s been an experience getting used to my new skis though since they are 30mm wider and 10cm longer than my previous pair.

Bindings were the most expensive part of my new gear, but the most straightforward. I wanted hybrid bindings that could be used both in the resort and in the backcountry (instead of the lightweight backcountry bindings). There’s really only one hybrid set on the market (called the lab shift) and they’re made by both Salomon and Atomic. For boots, I went to a professional boot fitter and tried on boots until I was happy. This was the most challenging part as I found a lot of them really uncomfortable. I opted for Salomon boots, but I’m not 100% sold on them yet.

Anyways, back to the point. After getting all my gear last year, the season as almost over, so I only got to ski tour once last year and opted to start with Brockton Point on Mount Seymour. It’s a popular trail for touring because there’s a dedicated trail up the mountain and you can ski down the resort runs. I was hoping to do lots of touring in 2023, but it’s been a terrible year for snow, so I kicked off my season with a second run up and down Brockton Peak as well. I’ve done it twice on skis now, both with my friend, Eddie.

Eddie has been ski touring for several years, so he’s been very tolerant and supportive while I get comfortable. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but overall I think it’s been easier than I anticipated. The downhill part is definitely scarier than the uphill part, but the uphill part has been surprisingly comfortable. It’s very easy to walk uphill with the skins on and to be honest, it’s a lot more comfortable than snowshoeing. Your weight is distributed more and because you’re sliding your feet versus lifting them, it’s a lot easier. There are some tricky parts when the trail is steep, but overall the uphill part has been pretty enjoyable. I think a lot of people imagine that it would be exhausting, but mentally you’re prepared to go uphill for an extended period of time, so it’s really more like hiking with a fun ski out. At this point, it’s not really about the downhill ski part for me. More experienced skiers are out there chasing fresh mountain powder, but since I’m learning, it’s less about that for me right now.

Anyways, Brockton Point is a great place to learn, because like I said, the downhill part is scarier than the uphill, but since you’re just skiing in the resort, it’s no different than a normal ski run, it’s just free. You just have to plan to get a day pass and park in the snowshoe lot since you’re not purchasing a resort pass. We followed the snowshoe trail up the side of the road and then up the side of the slope to Brockton. From Brockton, you can drop back onto the resort runs. It took us about 90 minutes each time to get to the top, but I think Eddie could have down it faster without me. Eventually I’d like to try going further to Pump Peak, but I’m not quite there yet.

Touring seemed intimidating to me for a long time, but I’m thrilled to have finally taken the step to try it out. You just need to be cognizant that touring is generally a lot more dangerous than snowshoeing because skiers tend to prefer to be in steep terrain. Taking an Avalanche Safety Course is an absolute must if you’re getting into ski touring and I never go out without my beacon, shovel, probe, and helmet. Check out my winter safety post for more tips. I’m disappointed I didn’t get to go very much touring this year with the snow conditions, but looking forward to expanding this hobby in the years to come!