Patagonia 2023 — Rob Bruce

Patagonia 2023

I first saw Cerro Torre (pictured below), which is on the Argentinian side of southern Patagonia, in a climbing magazine when I was at university.

I was climbing a lot at the time, and half-thought I might climb it one day. It’s a super-hard 2000m big wall climb and I doubt I was ever able to do it, but the decades passed and the middleaged spread spread … so it was never to be.

....Cerro Torre in 2023.

At the end of 2022, I was looking around for guided photo trips and one that came up was Patagonia, but by the time I went to book it had been cancelled. So, I contacted my friend and amazing South America tour operator, Kathy Jarvis, and asked if she could organise a trip. She and her Andean Trails colleagues did an amazing job. So, happily, my friend Chris Hamilton and I managed a dream-come-true trip through Patagonia.

We converged in Buenos Aires in late April ’23, and flew straight to El Calafate (four hours south), which is how we got to El Chalten - the climbing town at the foot of Fitzroy and Cerro Torre. El Chalten has a population of 3000, one third of who volunteer for the mountain rescue, and all its power is supplied by diesel generators. It’s a very popular destination of outdoorsy tourists and walking up to Laguna de Los Tres, below Fitzroy (pictured right), or into the iceberg-filled lake below Cerro Torre, takes a full day each.

After El Chalten we travelled by bus to the border with Chile - a very strange unpaved road with a no-man’s land of a few kilometres - via a stop off at the enormous Perito Moreno glacier, which flows directly into a lake.

Our main destination in Chilean Patagonia was the national park, Torres del Paine. Because Kathy had organised Koen Jongerling as our expert guide, we were able to camp at 800m and walk up in the dark to see the sun rise over the incredible Towers themselves. After that we spent quite a few days walking on remote paths, experiencing the strongest wind we’ve ever come across, and watching the wildlife.

P8. Perito Moreno glacier 2x1p 28apr23 P1026825-min.jpg

We saw pumas quite a few times.

There are a couple of hundred in the park - but the highlight was getting to about 40m away from a mum and cub that were resting. At one point a local kind of llama called a guanaco came over the ridge behind the cub and - although it was obviously interested in pouncing on its prey - thought better of it and left it alone. Koen said that it’s dangerous for pumas to attack until they know exactly how to do it.

On the onward journey, we stopped for a night in Santiago and stayed over with distant relatives of mine; my grandfather’s grandfather emigrated to Chile in 1840. I spent a very enjoyable time with my second and third cousins before heading homewards.