Equipo Williams

In the past week we’ve been to Torres Del Paine national park and Glaciers national park (the Argentinian version). They were both very interesting, but also very different. We went to Torres Del Paine first, so I’ll talk about that.

Torres Del Paine is a huge national park, I think the most famous in all of South America. It is called Torres Del Paine for its super tall mountainous spikes or towers sticking out of the ground. Torres Del Paine is settled at the base of the Andes. The Andes are known for being super tall, and they are. The peaks of the mountains at Torres were covered in snow and ice. 

We came in through the side gates and took the “scenic route” in. It is Patagonia, as you know, so the entire time we were there we had a small risk of losing our youngest member to the wind. In fact, at the first lookout we stopped at, Syd did get blown backwards quite a bit, maybe four or five feet. After looking very quickly we decided we actually didn’t want to blow away and went inside the car for safety. 

We went on a hike after that. It was fairly steep and, again, super windy, so we decided to turn back after about fifteen minutes of walking. My parents thought I was going to complain a bunch so I proved them wrong by not whining once. Baba and I went up ahead, but we saw that the trail went up onto a ridge, and, given the wind we decided to turn back.

As makeup for our failed first hike, we went on another one, to see Glacier Gray. You had to walk out onto a pebble-y peninsula land-bridge to get to an island which was connected to the mainland by this bridge of tiny rocks and see the glacier. As you can imagine, glacial wind is particularly cold and wet which made crossing the bar all the more miserable. It was also as previously stated made of pebbles which meant you had to work twice as hard to gain the same amount of distance. 

We walked to the lookout point at the end of the peninsula to see . . . clouds. You could see the glacier a bit and we did see some small icebergs, but it wasn’t very magnificent, so we decided to come back and try the walk again the next day.

Well it turned out to be sunnier, but WAY windier the next day. Syd had to physically hold onto my mom to keep from falling into the water on either side. We did the walk again and saw the glacier a bit more clearly, but not much. It was really far away and really just looked like a thin sheet of ice.

We tried to camp in the parking lot for that hike when it was time for bed.  It was really windy at that parking lot, and at about eleven, as I was about to go to sleep, we made a decision to find somewhere else to camp, because the parking lot was too windy. Baba woke up Syd, we packed up, and got in the car. We made a quick stop at the toilets before hitting the road. 

As it turns out, dirt roads are both hard to drive on, and creepy at night. We saw a bunch of cows whose eyes were lit up by the headlights. They looked so much like ghosts, it scared the whatsit out of all of us. We found a cove that was fairly sheltered at around midnight and made it our roost. 

We woke up in the morning to hear the first cars arriving after the hour-long drive from Puerto Natales, the nearest town. It turns out we found a nice protected spot near the road, but still just out of sight of it. We took our time getting up and then left Torres Del Paine.

After Torres Del Paine, we drove to El Calafate, the next big town. El Calafate is so big because it is the only town driving distance away from Perito Moreno glacier. We went to the glacier yesterday. 

But, before we went to the glacier we went to the glacier museum. Here we learned about Perito Moreno and glaciers in general. We learned how glaciers move, are created, melt, and other similar things. But, the coolest thing we learned about was Perito Moreno’s signature behavior. Every couple (between two and sixteen, there is no pattern) years, Perito Moreno forms a dam of ice between two sections of Lago Argentino. When the lake unfreezes after winter, it starts to put pressure on the dam. The left side of the lake makes a small hole to get to the other side of the lake. As more and more water flows through, more and more pressure is placed on the glacier. This causes sheets of ice to fall and eventually the dam collapses. I hear it is loud and really cool to watch, or so says the video of it we watched. The glacier actually loses two meters of ice in the front a day, but flows an equal amount down, and therefore stays in equilibrium. 

After the museum, we got to actually see the enormous glacier. I was lucky and the only one who was able to see a really big piece of ice fall off. I saw it fall just as we got to the viewpoint, but the others were still on the boardwalk behind me. We watched it for an hour or two, but no more big pieces fell. There were huge cracking noises, but we think they were farther in. 

Perito Moreno is HUGE. It is probably more than one hundred and fifty feet high and two miles wide. Not to mention it goes up the mountain at least twenty miles. Up on the mountain you could see the areas where the snow hadn’t packed into ice yet and the areas where there is half ice half snow. 

We ended up leaving Perito Moreno when it closed, at seven-ish, but we definitely all loved it. I was really looking forward to going here, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. It was really cool to see this enormous glacier and learn about it. Both national parks, actually, were really cool and I felt like we got our full experience out of both.