January 21, 2024
“Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It’s the same with surfing.”
- Yvon Chouinard
FitzRoy was not a difficult discovery. As shown in the previous post, you can see the peak across the vast treeless plains of Patagonia from over 80 miles away.. A Spanish explorer was the first European to record seeing it, but it wasn’t until the busy Argentine explorer, Francisco Moreno, that the peak received its current name.
Moreno decided to name the mountain after the captain of the HMS Beagle Robert “Hot Coffee” Fitzroy. The “Coffee” sobriquet arose from his history of having a volatile temper. Darwin would write about it on one of his expeditions. FitzRoy, being British, according to history, never did send a thank you note for the honor to Moreno. It is not certain if he ever saw the mountain himself.
Fun fact- Moreno, during his explorations , was attacked by a "Leona" (a puma) at the location of the Butch Cassidy house mentioned previously. The hotel today gets its name from the incident.
It wasn’t until 1952 that the peak was successfully climbed. In 1968 Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the Patagonia clothing company, would be a a part of the team that would also successfully ascend the mountain.
The company’s logo today features the mountain.
The superlatives about the peak are endless. It is a visually stunning mountain with great rock walls, glaciers, lakes , rivers, and surrounding foothills all it paying homage.
I will tell you about our time here but I will say ahead of time there are too many pictures to share. Every time the light changes or a new cloud formation drifts by, the entire scene is new.
So pictures , however lovely, can only tell a portion of the story. Anyone who has ever spent anytime in nature will attest that the experience is reverential and sensual.
The time spent in country also has the remarkable capacity of making you feel quite small. In the grand scheme of geological time, you occupy only a very small piece of it. The world is much larger than you and this realization provides perspective to life.
So here are scenes from the visit.
El Chalten is the village that lies at the foot of the mountain in a small valley. Actually to call it a town is charitable at best. While it does offer some basic services, it has one gas pump in the whole town, it is mostly a a series of hostels and boutique hotels catering to climbers and hippies.
Entering the area you pass through a gate. This region if one of the national parks of Argentina.
Our first hike was a short one. We were looking for Andean Condors, the largest bird in the world. We saw three gliding very high over head
It was a good introduction to the area. The weather was perfect. The winds had died down and the temperature was in the low 70's. Clear, beautiful skies.
So we wanted to try to earn our Boy Scout Hiking Merit Badge by tackling something more ambitious.
We chose a moderate hike, there are hundreds of choices here, to try to get a better look at the mountain.
For two out of shape 62 year olds, the trek nearly ended us.
But we did it!
Here are scenes from the climb.
In order to maintain some modicum of pride I have excluded the stops to use an asthma inhaler and being assisted by a very overweight Portuguese man.
"Voce esta bem"? he kept asking
(Are you all right?)
Finally, after a 4 1/2 mile climb we leveled off.
And received our reward.
We were exhausted. Round trip it was 9 1/2 miles which was a lot for us.
But it was worth it. In all our travels I do not think we have ever seen anything more beautiful.
Up next- "Ice, Ice, Baby"
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