Day 2: Day trip to Glaciar Grey and back

We decided to leave our stuff at the campground, and just take a day pack to the glacier. This is the first (leftmost) leg of the W, and since we didn’t want to camp up there, there was no point in carrying all our stuff. It’s a 21 km round trip.

The first three or four km is some steep climbing, to get from the valley we were in to the valley Lago Grey is in. The view once you finally crest is pretty amazing. There’s a tiny little interim lake that tricks you into thinking you’re at the real lake, but they you realize how small it is. A little more hiking (wind still blowing like crazy in your face), and you finally see the big lake, and you can spot little icebergs floating in it, sometimes beached. One little cove that the wind beats against in particular had a large collection of drift ice in it. We keep at it, paralleling the lake edge, on fairly level ground, then we finally catch a glimpse of the big glacier off in the distance. This glacier is huge (it’s the one in the post I referenced in my last post), and has several branches that split around an island in the lake. You can take cruises to get up close to the glacier and see it calving, from a completely different location in the lake – this would have been a multi day trip to accomplish this. Not for backpackers. A nice mirador, then more hiking to get a lot closer. The weather started to go downhill, and I started to feel a little rain.

We started heading steeply downhill, down a pretty poorly maintained/defined trail. This didn’t make us happy, as it’s kind of a downhill scramble more than a hike, and my knees don’t like downhill very much. A walking stick or two, which we’ve always hated, we decided would come in very handy (translation: we may finally be old enough to need walking sticks while hiking.)

The trails in general in the park are not up to snuff. We paid American national park admission prices, and American amenity usage prices every night, and the trails just aren’t maintained all that well, in my opinion. I think the government of Chile could probably get a lot of response if they posted ads about “internships” in various hiking friendly places in the US and Europe (Seattle, Boulder, etc.), and had people come down and work on trail crews (I did later see a crew of white folks with shovels, speaking American accented English, so perhaps they have done just this.) We found place after place where a small creek had re-routed itself onto the trail, and was turning it into mud. Then they allow horses, who churn it into foot deep mud.

(God, I hate horses. Could a smellier, dumber creature have been invented? It’s so much fun to smell horseshit when you’re on the trail. Anything that dumb and stinky ought to be kept in feedlots and eaten.)

Finally, we get to Refugio Glaciar Grey. Not nearly as nice as the one we were camped at, and we were really glad it was a day trip. It was cold and the wind blew, and it started raining in earnest. A very wet looking campsite, and no shelter for cooking, etc. We went to the close-up mirador, and looked at the glacier for a bit before being driven back. So, we’re now halfway through, we’re getting rained on, and we’re already tired. Remember that scramble down that was hurting my knees. Now we have to go back up.

Eventually the rain passed us over, and the wind blew us dry. We finally got back, made dinner, and passed out. At this point, I was a little nervous – I was pretty tired and grumpy after two days, and wet, besides (wind-drying doesn’t count in terms of warming you up.) I was wondering how much worse it would be the next day with packs, if it was that tiring the second day with only day packs.

It doesn’t start to get dark until 11PM, and we were never able to stay up that late, so we never did see stars in the park.