The Mountain that Smokes

This is the spectacular journey from El Calafate to El Chalten in Argentine Patagonia - The pictures will speak for themselves ofcourse. The highlight of the trip was the amazing colors of the waters of two large lakes that the road skirts around, Lago Argentino, the largest lake in Argentina and Lago Viedma - sometimes sparkling blue, sometimes emerald green, and sometimes both hues at the same time.

The peak of Mt. Fitzroy (or Chalten) was shrouded in clouds when we reached the lovely little village of El Chalten but soon after the veil started lifting and we got at least brief glimpses of all those strangely shaped peaks in the Chalten range.

Most interesting (and something I didn't know) is one of the peaks is named after Saint-Exupery. The author of the endearing book Little Prince (if you haven't read it, you must, some day) this is the peak third on the left from the Fitzroy (Chalten) - the tallest peak in the range.

And just to make the day perfect came this soaring Andean Condor (forgive the quality of the photo - it was too far away to focus properly)

For a long time the native inhabitants of this area - Tehuelches - believed that this was a volcano, because the lofty peaks were always shrouded in plumes of white clouds. Their name for it El Chalten actually means Smoking Mountain. The European explorers who travelled through Patagonia were of course too arrogant to respect any local traditions, beliefs and cultures. So in a spree of renaming, All these peaks in the Chalten group were named after their friends, colleagues and bosses! 

In fact even the European explorers like Francisco Moreno who explored and mapped large parts of Patagonia thought this was a volcano. It was only in 1899 that a German naturalist Hauthal showed that the peak was solid granite and not a volcano at all. It was Moreno who renamed Chalten to Mount Fitzroy to honor Captain Fitzroy of the ship HMS Beagle who made two voyages to South America and beyond. Fitzroy was responsible for charting the Beagle channel (2nd of the three natural sea routes to go from Atlantic to Pacific. The 1st being Magellan Straits and the 3rd - Drake passage) and exploring large parts of what is today the Santacruz province of Argentina. On the second of these voyages he carried Charles Darwin on his ship. And you can read all about that in Darwin's book Voyage of the Beagle! So much for Fitzroy. 

But it is a spectacular sight, especially when the weather is kind and lifts the veils surrounding the peaks. The interesting thing about these peaks is ofcourse their shapes, almost like needles piercing the sky. As a result even though they are not very tall (Mt Fitzroy or Chalten - the tallest of them all is only a bit over 11000 ft), they have been very challenging to climbers. In fact Cerro Torre -little over 10000 ft only - in an adjacent group (not seen from where I took these photos attached below) has been called one of the most difficult peaks to conquer. The first recognized conquest happened as late as 1978 ( by which time most of Himalayan peaks, easily twice as tall as Torre, were sumitted multiple times).