Laguna de Los Tres
Wednesday January 28, 2015 (Argentina, Patagonia, South America)
Frederico, the helpful hostel guy, had recommended something like this hike for our second day. In the morning, we happened to be sitting beside Nick (Australia) who was carefully tending to his heel blisters before heading out for the day. Even with the nasty state of his feet, he was intent on hiking for the day rather than sitting around. Awesome! We invited him along with us to third wheel our hike.
The general plan was to grab a bus fairly deep into the Los Glaciares national park and then hike back. Our intel showed that the hike was supposed to be “generally downhill”. Of course, once we reached the optional offshoot to Los Tres about halfway through the hike, we decided to take it at Nick’s behest. This turned out to be the highlight of the trek but required a whole lot of steep uphill (and consequently downhill) hiking. We ran a bit short on food also, since we neglected to account for this multi-hour intermediary trek.
After effectively marching up the side of a mountain, we were greeted with incredible views of Mt. Fitzroy (it’s the tallest one in the pictures) from the foot of a lake. A quick jaunt up another nearby rocky mound granted us another viewpoint of a separate lake being filled by a series of waterfalls cascading from a melting glacier. Pretty hard to beat!
By the time we were returning home to our hostel, we were definitely ready for the hike to be over. It was another 20km plus hike, but with a pretty massive change in elevation. We have no idea how Nick powered through it with his already disastrous blisters — we had enough trouble even without any major foot impediments!
I definitely didn’t look the part today as I decided to triple-protect my neck from the sun: sunblock (obviously), a thin longsleeve wrapped around my neck preppy style, and a backwards cap. Three levels of protection to ensure no beam of sun could worsen by already nasty neck burn. Eat it, Sol!
We didn’t even make it fully into town upon return before we stopped to pick up empanadas and beer. It’s certainly a nice welcome home to walk down the streets drinking a cold (novelty-sized, obviously) beer and chowing down on pollo empanadas. And here in the south of Argentina, it’s pronounced “PO-sho” and not “PO-yo” as you may expect from a more typical Spanish pronunciation. More things for us gringos to get wrong!