Patagonia II

I might as well finish telling my Patagonia adventures while the memories are fresh...

So I believe I left the last blog talking about glacier grey, which reminds me something super cool: every couple hours in the park near the glaciers you can hear a huge rumble, akin the thunder, it is the glacier moving. I loved it.

Next, rainbows, I have never seen so many feel rainbows, they occur in Patagonia as if that was a normal, everyday sight! At one point, I felt I was in a dream: sun was lighting up a glacier, a rainbow arked the sky with one end landing on the glacier and the other on a mountain top. Behind me a waterfall...amazing. Totally, totally surreal.

Anyway, the rest of the hike continued to varied in difficulty and scenry, but always gorgeous and vale la pena (worth it). Nights three and four we stayed at Camp Italio, pretty high up the mountain in Valle Frances (French Valley). The campsite was right along a gushing river of glacier run-off, very very cold water. We spent day 4 doing a short day hike up to a lookout. We were pretty beat that day and used it to recuperate a bit.

On Thursday we hiked very long hard day up to the Torres. Everyone had told us the best way to see the Torres is to do a sunrise hike to the base. While I can´t complain about the beautiful weather throughout the rest of the trip, it was somewhat disappointing that it ended up raining the very last day. We decided to brave the rain (mixed with hail and snow) and do the sunrise hike anyway, even though there wouldn´t be much of a view. I though it was still worth it to climb an hour straight uphill on huge slippery boulders just to see the little lake at the base of torres and see the faint faint hint of pink from the rising sun. At this point we were soaked, freezing, and verging on miserable, a perfect day to be the last one in the park. We packed out an made it down to the bottom in 2 hours although it was supposed to take closer to 3!

All in all, I was beat, in a lot of pain, but super super happy. I love to hike, I loved the challenge, and we had a wonderful time. Asdie from the quarelling and broken tent, we did alright. I feel very lucky to have seen that part of the world.

Regarding pictures: I only have pics up until the viewpòint during the day hike (i´ll put those up tonight), but eventually i will post some of the other´s pics to log the rest of our trip.