The Fitz Roy

Our bus ride down to El Calafate really wasn´t all that bad; our seats reclined pretty far and we had some Tylenol PM to help us through the 40 hours! After getting some supplies in El Calafate we took another bus ride to El Chalten, about another 3 hours away, to hike around Mt. Fitz Roy. It is in South Argentina close to the Chile border and the Fitz Roy is a little over 10,000 feet. The hiking is not too strenuous and very beautiful. Our first day it was incredibly windy - and naturally we forgot the stakes to our tent! Ben, being the boy scout he is, rigged up some fallen trees and rocks around our tent to protect us from blowing away. Once he was done everyone else at the camp site was jealous of our spot! We spent the first night at Laguna Torre which is a small lake at the base of Glacier Grande and survived the wind without blowing away. The next day we hiked to another camp site that sits closer to Mt. Fitz Roy, dropped our stuff and trekked up to the lookout point which is fairly steep but worth it. It was really incredible and the weather was gorgeous - perfectly clear, sunny, and hardly any wind! Would have been a great night for a camp fire, but unfortunately they are not allowed in the national park - with the wind you can see why. We had some rowdy neighbors that stayed up until 3 am and then we heard them get back up around 5 am to go see sunrise over the mountain. I don´t think it is possible for them to be any louder than they were. Our last day we just hiked around the camp sight to various viewpoints and played some cards before spending another night. Thankfully most of our neighbors had moved on so we got a little more sleep. It was a good way to spend 4 days and get a little more back on budget after being in Buenos Aires for a week. Afterwards we spent a couple days in El Calafate which is a really cute town. It is small but has some good places to eat and all the buildings look like log cabins which you can´t beat in a mountain setting. Our first night back we went to an all you can eat parrilla that Ben actually ate at back in 2005 when he was here with our buddy Harvey Cleveland. We stuffed ourselves silly. From here we are heading north to Esquel to hopefully do some more camping and fishing.