El Chaltén

February 4, 2019 – February 8, 2019

El Chaltén is a small village full of outdoor gear shops, hostels, cervecerias, bake shops and restaurants, all focused on servicing the thousands of visitors that come during the short summer season to hike in the surrounding Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. It is a fun and friendly little town, whose existence is completely reliant on tourism.

Very soon after we turned off of Ruta 40, heading for El Chaltén, views of the famous Fitz Roy towers began to emerge.

We had a perfect blue sky day for our arrival.
At the bottom of this photo you can see the edge of the village of El Chaltén, with the mighty Fitz Roy spires looming above.

We were excited to spend a few days in El Chaltén because many of the hiking trails begin just at the edge of town, meaning we could set Piper up for the day in the comfort of our camper and hike in the dog-forbidden park without having to try and sneak her in.

One day we hiked to Laguna Torre.

The park contains the Southern Patagonia Ice Field (of which this photo captures just a tiny part), the world’s third largest ice field after Antarctica and Greenland.
Derek mistakenly referred to the towers in this video as Fitz Roy but they are actually “Cerro Torre”.
Magellanic woodpecker

We spent the next day wandering around town with Piper. We visited the Parks office on the edge of town to get a hiking trail map, and were told that officially Piper was not allowed in the parking lot outside of the building….she was only allowed on the streets in town and had to be on a leash the whole time. This, even though there were street dogs all over the place….Piper is getting pretty tired of pet dog discrimination down here.

Interesting vintage rear-engine Renault.

The next day we hiked up to the base of Fitz Roy. The first kilometre of the 20 km return hike had us climbing up and onto a bench, then the trail levelled out for about the next 8 kilometres. We were in the trees for the first hour or so, and then broke out to the Fitz Roy Mirador for an amazing view of the spires.

Looking up the valley along Rio de las Vueltas
Interesting clouds….
Lots of WOW factor on this hike! In the bottom right quarter of the photo you can see the trail going up the green, then grey, slope towards the ice.

You gain 400 metres of elevation in the last kilometre of the hike to the lakes.

It was fairly steep getting to the top. We had left pretty early in the day, so it wasn’t too crowded for us on the way up but we met a lot of people climbing when we were coming down.
The view while climbing up to the lakes.
There were waterfalls coming down the rock face to the lake on the left, and a third lake behind the headwall above the lake on the right. We also saw a few ice avalanches from the glacier on the left.

There were a few more hikes we could have done, but we felt the urge to keep moving. We were still hoping to get to Ushuaia, and their summer season is even shorter, so we packed up and moved on, really happy to have visited El Chaltén and to have had nice weather on our hikes.

If we had been hiking on this day we wouldn’t have been able to see much!

2 thoughts on “El Chaltén

  1. Adele Revet

    OMG! National Geographic worthy. Really appreciated your composition as my eye was attracted by the tree trunks, twisted spiky shapes and the way the light illuminates and softens them with shadows and then by the wind swept tree and over to the softness of the forest canopy rising towards the sharpness of the spires surrounded by those pure white clouds blending in with the snow and others softly framing that sky… I do not have the words but I hope you get the idea that your reports written and photographic besides informing of us of places we dream of also touch our souls… Adele

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