Blanca Lake Backpacking Trip

August 21, 2024August 26, 2024 / Maria / 2 Comments

I hiked to Blanca Lake around the third week in July and it was the first weekend where it really started to feel like summer. The snow melt was very late in the mountains and I’d been tracking the hike via satellite all week. 5 days before we went, the entire lake was still frozen, but it was melting fast and by the time we hiked up there, it was almost entirely gone.

Blanca Lake is not a well known hike, but it is starting to get more popular. It’s located pretty far up Squamish Valley Road and it does require 4×4 to get to the trailhead. The hike is only 4.5km, but the road to the trailhead is long and exposed, so I wouldn’t recommend hiking the extra distance on a hot day. We ended up picking up a few hikers along the road and they were about to give up and turn around before we drove by because it was so hot.

We had a great crew for this trip. Seth and Sadie both joined me for their second hike of the summer, and of course Brandon was ready with his 4runner. We were also joined by our friend Adriana, who we hiked Tetrahedron with last year, and a new friend, Victoria, who we met when hiking Hozomeen Lake several weeks earlier. I downed a lot of gatorade along the drive as we convoyed up to the trailhead in two cars. It’s a pretty long drive on Squamish Valley Road, as well as on the FSR. The road isn’t in that bad shape, but there are several water bars along the way and a sketchy washout before the top. A few cars parked before the washout as it’s not a long walk from that section.

To make the occasion more special, it was Brandon’s birthday! We ate sandwiches at the car and then started the hike up to the lake. The trail is flat for a short distance, but then you immediately do a big climb up through the trees. It was challenging because it was so hot, but at least we were in the shade. After the climb, the trail stays in the trees and is pretty flat again. You traverse through some small meadows and eventually come to a stream crossing before starting to climb again.

Some of the group was able to get across the stream crossing with their boots on, but I opted to just put on my sandals and wade through it. It was much easier and we all did it on the return trip. We encountered a few groups who were day hiking on their way down, but otherwise we didn’t see a lot of people. You continue through the trees again and then eventually come out on a boulder field that follows the river to the top. Seth really struggled from the heat on this section and the hike took longer than we expected it would, but eventually we all made it to the beautiful wide open view at the top.

The final section of the trail and the lake are all in the alpine. Blanca Lake is really at the start of the alpine and if you have 2 nights to spare, it’s definitely worth it to stay up there for an extra day and explore around on your own. There aren’t any trails, but the terrain is easy to navigate and you can do a scramble to some of the other lakes and peaks.

Blanca Lake is the biggest lake, but there are several other lakes nearby, as well as a lot of tarns. I decided to swim in Blanca as soon as we arrived and it was so hot even Seth joined me! It was freezing cold (it had literally only finished melting 2 days ago), but it was refreshing. Adriana and Victoria opted to swim in the small lake just below Blanca, which was warmer, and Brandon scoped out a secluded place to pitch our tents by an even smaller tarn.

There were quite a few people camping on Saturday night. Most of them camped right next to Blanca Lake, but there’s lots of room to spread out. I liked our spot over by the tarn because then Sadie wasn’t distracted by or a nuisance to the other campers. I swam in the smaller lake and 2 tarns, but not the other 2 large lakes. I can’t see any names for them on Gaia, but there’s a big circular lake west of Blanca, and another lake to the South. I hiked over to view both, but they were a bit farther away, so I didn’t swim in either.

We sent up the tents and proceeded to have an excellent evening hanging out in the alpine! We brought party hats for Brandon and celebrated his birthday with some cherry liqueur that I’d brought home from Portugal. We had Brandon’s infamous thai chicken curry for dinner and had a great time hanging out and enjoying the view during golden hour.

There’s no facilities at Blanca Lake, so be prepared to dig catholes for your bathroom. There are some trees around, but it’s pretty barren, so we brought bear vaults and bear bags rather than hanging our food. It should be possible to find somewhere to hang your food, but it was definitely a lot easier using Carolyn’s bear vault, which I borrowed for the trip.

It was an absolutely gorgeous evening and we spent most of the night taking photos of each other. The sunset turned everything orange around us and we shared snacks to celebrate Brandon’s birthday. I made everyone worms and dirt (a girl guide classic!), but I guess our sugar tolerance is lower than my girl guides because we all ate way too much!

I was the first one up in the morning thanks to Sadie. It gets bright so early and she wants out of the tent, so I decided to let everyone else sleep in and take her for a walk. She was my little dog sherpa and carried our essentials in her bag. Like I said, there’s a lot to explore, so we did a short hike up to some of the ridges to view the other lakes and have our breakfast. Blanca is cool, but in my opinion, the lake to the west has the most beautiful view. I wish we’d had more time to explore, but I’ll have to add it to my long list for a return trip.

We took our time having breakfast and packing up and as a result, we were the last to leave. The campsite was completely empty, so I think it’s really only busy on the weekends. The hike back down the valley was nice and there were a lot of wildflowers around. We stopped for lunch shortly after crossing the river and then continued back to the cars. We stopped at the Water Shed in Squamish for dinner and then closed the books on a really nice weekend in the mountains! I took way too many photos on this trip, so here’s a few more!

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!