Despite the Chilean government's 50-year quest to colonize Northern Patagonia (there are fences everywhere indicating who owns what), it is still a wild place. On January 14, Alice, Kaleb, and I set off with a local guide named Patricio and another lodge guest in an old Chevy S-10 pickup on the Carretera Austral towards the Leones Glacier. Patricio hit the magic speed at which the truck glides over the washboard road, and we made record time to our departure point. We parked and headed for the river where we were supposed to meet a zodiac boat to take us upstream to the foot of the glacier. After waiting for a little while and neither hearing nor seeing a boat, we decided to start hiking along the river towards the glacier.
We were walking through what the glacier and winds had deposited over time, including these huge boulders.
We crossed the river formed by the glacier and snow melt, and then picked and skipped our way through more muddy and wet trail remnants.
And then we hiked for a couple of hours through a variety of terrain, including some steep, loose bits of trail overlooking the river, a ladder descent down a short rock face, and several ad-hoc bridges over creeks. We waited for the boat at several points along the way but gave up after a while, figuring it had a mechanical problem. We had a radio with us but very intermittent signal and limited battery, and we we were never able reach the boat driver. Eventually, we emerged at the lake that sits below Leones Glacier and I did a Tyrolean traverse across the river to get a better look.
I paused to admire the view before hauling myself the rest of the way across. The whitecaps on the lake in the distance meant that we couldn't take the small boat that is hidden along the lakeshore across to admire the glacier close-up.
It was getting seriously windy, so we retraced our steps back towards the boulder field and the truck.
At that point, five and a half hours after we started our ten-mile roundtrip hike towards the glacier, we found the small zodiac boat pulled onto the river bank in the left side of the panorama. Here's a better view of the amazing blue glacier visible in the right corner of the panorama:
We couldn't find Ocho, the boat driver, so we headed back towards our truck -- which was gone. We figured Ocho must have taken the truck some place and would return eventually to collect us, so we dropped our packs and prepared to take naps in the afternoon shade. Ocho rumbled up a few minutes later with another guest. He said he needed to drive the boat back to the lodge and planned to take some of us along with him. Kaleb and I had been excited about the boat portion of the trip, so we hopped aboard in all of our rain gear and Ocho tore off downstream through a few Class I and II rapids before the river widened. The ride was pretty smooth in the river, but Ocho was still laser-like focused on the task at hand.
Good thing, too, because when we reached the darker waters of the Lago General Carrera, Ocho said the waves were the strongest he had ever seen and that this would be the first time he tried to cross it in the small zodiac boat in such extreme conditions. The waves were the largest I had ever seen on a lake, by a wide margin. The boat would sometimes get stuck surfing the top of a wave, and both Ocho and the outboard motor had to work really hard to carve a path through the insanity that wouldn't send us all into the water. The water came at us in the boat anyway via a few proper bow waves, including one as I was taking a video.[wpvideo Al84CjX6]Here's the Strava page with the details of the hike and boat ride.
The views were consistently fantastic, and the trail was never overly technical. It did get quite a bit steeper towards the top, as this helpful trail sign illustrates.
The views off to the right on the small plateau you can see on the elevation profile before it gets steep were especially attractive.
The last half a kilometer involved a lot of rock scrambling until we reached the Mirador and had an awesome picnic on the shore of the lake at the base of the towers. Here's a photo of me halfway up the steep part.
See if you can make out the trail in this shot of the final section of the hike:
We had the best weather imaginable -- hardly any wind, which is extremely unusual for summertime in Patagonia -- and could actually see the towers.
We contemplated a swim in the lake, but thought better of it. Felipe did take his boots off and soak his feet in the cold water. Even though he comes up to this spot several times a week, he said it never gets old.
You can see the map and details of this awesome hike on Strava.
