On November 28th I finished my last final exam. On November 29th I was in Punta Arenas, 240 miles from the Southernmost point of land on the planet (outside of Antarctica), a mere 2,000 miles from the South Pole.
Courtesy of Google.Maps
My classmate Joel and I had purchased airline tickets months before, but had never formed more than a sketchy itinerary for the trip. So after catching a bus to Puerto Natales, the city that serves as a launching pad for most Patagonian adventures, we began to plan our 8 days. With some friends from Santiago arriving in Patagonia to overlap with the final five days of our trip, we decided to delay our departure on the 5-day circuit of the “W” (the famous backpacking route through the mountains) so that we could trek with them. Because we ended up deciding to start our hike a day early, 11 miles from the trail head, we had the full day of November 30 to kill. And so, after arriving in Puerto Natales late on the 29th, we were left frantically running around town to try to catch bus companies before closing time so that we could get tickets for the morning to whichever adventure spot we decided on.
Five companies later, we finally found space on a rinky-dink little bus to El Calafate, the Argentine city near “Los Glaciares” National Park. Though we didn’t finish buying food/equipment for the week until well past 8 pm, we still had a few hours of Sub-Antarctic sunshine before nightfall, so we hopped into a cab headed toward the outskirts of town to take a short hike before bed. After traipsing through cow fields and climbing blindly through overgrown (and surely puma infested) forests, we finally emerged out above the tree line to our first spectacular hint of what was to come in Patagonia.
View from the top
After somehow making it back through the puma forest and to our hostel, we crashed with the 11 pm sunset, only to get up (well after sunrise) at 5:30 am to catch our bus to El Calafate. 5 hours of twisting dusty dirt roads later, we arrived at the Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares Parque Nacional de Argentina. The electric blue glacier flows more than 2 meters per day from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field (2nd largest non-polar ice field in the world), but it disintegrates just as fast in the summer sunshine. Because the glacier juts out into a narrow, boomerang-shaped section of Lago Argentino, it intermittently interrupts flow of water from the river-side of the lake to the basin-side. This effect creates a spectacular natural dam, which has been recorded to cause a backup of water levels on the river-side of the lake to over 100 feet above the basin-side.
Courtesy of Google.Maps
Every 4-5 years, however; the incredible water pressure behind the ice dam coincides with the summertime warming/weakening of the glacial dam, and a “rupture event” occurs. This multi-day event begins with water breaking through the bottom section of dam and carving out an ice bridge, which collapses over the following few days as the rift is widened by the torrential waters. Unfortunately we missed the rupture event by about 10 months so the bridge had already collapsed, but the waters were still rushing through the gap and, much more impressively, huge sections of ice were still falling from the 100-200 foot glacial wall, impacting the water with deafening cannon-like booms and sending huge shock waves rippling out across the lake. It was incredible to witness, especially from the deck of the boat on which we managed to secure a space. We were motored up the lake to within a few hundred feet of the base of the glacier, where it’s sheer size was much more apparent, and rather overwhelming. After a few hours that passed like a few minutes, it was time to pack it back into the bus and start the 5 hour trip back to Puerto Natales to prepare for the second leg of our Patagonian trip.
Glacier Perito Moreno
Glacier Perito Moreno
Panorama Glacier Perito Moreno