Giant wall of ice

El Calafate is at the south end of the same park (Parque National de los Glaciers) that El Chalten is in.  It has only one real attraction, and that is the Perrito Moreno Glacier.  And what an attraction that is!  It is not the only glacier in the world but its circumstances are truly amazing.  It is “stable” which means its not receding and its terminus extends into and almost across a lake that is easy to get to, which means that all you have to do is drive to this little peninsula and you can see the glacier up close!  The park has a series of balconies that you can walk on to see the glacier from different angles and different heights.  Since the glacier is still moving but not really making progress, it has to be melting into the lake.  This causes parts of the glacier to break off and fall into the water as ice-bergs which causes mini-tidal waves and flying ice which as one sign told us has killed 36 people since the 30's.  Our first day we watched and waited for these occurrences and every once in a while you would hear a huge CRACK and you would frantically search for where along the several kilometer face the chunk of ice would be falling and if you were quick enough (you didn't have much time at all since the sound got to you too slowly anyway) you got to see it fall in the water and the wave.  Sometimes you'd get lucky and happen to see it before the sound and you could watch it fall.


It was truly amazing just sitting there and studying the glacier, waiting for something to happen, but after awhile of just staring you start to see shapes and forms in the ice.  We try to point these out in the pictures.  But after four hours of almost continuous rain we were cold and wet and we went home.

The next day has become the highlight of our trip for me so far.  There are several tours you can do at the glacier, but the best tour (and most expensive) was known as “Big Ice” (translated to big ice).  We threw our budget to the wind and went for it.  It was the best decision we've made!  On Big Ice you get to hike up alongside the glacier to some point and then strap on crampons and hike on the glacier for a full four hours!  I'm sitting here trying to describe what it is like to hike on a glacier but I'm coming up short.  Even the pictures below can't really give more than a glimpse...  All I can remember is over and over just laughing with pure joy at what we were doing.  We would straddle a crevice with our crampons to get across or check out an incredibly blue ice cave and through it all I would just laugh.  The highlight was definitely the sink hole, where melted water that had formed a river would just fall in a giant waterfall into the glacier.  The guides had to hold our harnesses so we wouldn't fall in from the shock of it all (It's also constantly widening so they didn't want us to fall in.)  It was just simply incredible.

We are now in Ushuaia, the southern-most city in the world in Tierra del Fuego.  Here there are penguin colonies and tons of birds and sea-lions.  We're waiting for the weather to clear as its a bit rainy now.  More details to come soon.

~Mike

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