El cielo gigante

Patagonia's famed Route 40 lives up to its legendary status: 500 km of tailbone-abusing dirt roads, wild guanacos (fuzzy-butted llamas) and choique (kind of like a feral emu) grazing, and one monumentally large, sheltering sky. How anyone could motorcycle, let alone ride a bike, is completely beyond us. It´s hard enough staying upright while bipedal in this wind!


A curious guanaco


Sashaying away


Choiques, or 'lesser' Rheas (or see a closer view) -- the males incubate the eggs, and from the number of teenage-sized birds here, it looks like a successful strategy)


The new definition of a godforsaken town



We caught a miraculous window of clear weather when we arrived in El Chalten, and set out for the backcountry.



We headed first to a freezing lake at the base of Cerro Torre, whose eerie ice-cone summit was obscured by clouds, and then yesterday to a freezing lake at the base of Fitz Roy (see below. brr.).


Summertime, and the living is easy...

Grandaddy of all mountain hardmen, Reinhold Messner, called the mountains of Patagonia a ´shriek turned to stone´, and he wasn´t far off. Everything about these peaks screams cold and dangerous. But they´re also beautiful, and it´s not hard to see why people are drawn to them, year after year.


The iconic Fitz Roy skyline

Z observed that you could tell the Argentine hikers by one of two characteristics: facial piercing, which is very popular with the local youth, or packing methods that resemble mobile garage sales, with extra bags, pots, and shoes hanging precariously in every direction. We were impressed with these kids' cheery approach to long, arduous hikes, given their skinny jeans, canvas shoes, and swinging plastic bags. So much for the importance of the right gear.

Our favorite trail-mates, though, were a posse of giggly Japanese women who kept themselves animated and entertained at the lake below Fitz Roy for ages, taking new versions of two-fingered photos, as all onlookers shivered in puffy layers of clothing, indignantly chewing their trail mix and pulling their hats down over their ears.

Another perk of the remarkable weather has been the preponderance of charismatic mega- and mini-fauna. Besides the critters we saw from the bus, we saw an incredible diversity of birds yesterday on our hike toward Fitz Roy.

(Elizabeth will take over for the bird-nerding here)

The highlight for both of us was the Austral pygmy owl. Another bird was making a tremendous fuss about something, and we looked over and saw this little potato sitting on a branch. Then its head swiveled, and we realized it was an owl. It paid no attention to the small bird bouncing around it and hollering.

We also a male Magellanic woodpecker hopping up a tree trunk, bright red crest quivering. It's the biggest woodpecker in the Americas, apparently, and it is large -- bigger than the owl by quite a bit -- though not on the scale of the dogs or anything.

The funniest bird sighting was a pair of scuttling little critters who both seemed to be playing Secret Agent and yet also seemed to have missed the day at bird-school when they learned how to manage their extremely long bills. They saw us, swung their beaks around (barely avoiding planting them in the ground), dropped to a crouch, and together scooted across the path for a few inches before stopping, looking up at us, whispering to one another, and then scooting a little further. It took them so long to get across the path this way that we were actually able to take a picture. And they were extremely furtive about the whole thing. They were just a few feet in front of us, so we had to be quiet, but it was all we could do to keep from bursting out laughing.


Bird, James Bird. It does blend in well with the background, I'll give it that.

Satellite internet is pricey, so we'd better wrap this up, pile on the layers, squint, and head out into the wind. Ciao, chicos!