Viento, Mucho Viento

Cheers from Patagonia
Last week was our fall (spring in Argentina) break, which I spent traveling through Patagonia with my parents and Crissy, where I was able to spend a lot of time enjoying the peace and quiet of the rural lifestyles in these small towns. During my time spent away from Buenos Aires I began to realize how much of the natural world we take for granted as we shuffle around in the crazed beat of city life.
On our third day in El Calafate we chose to go on a glacier trek in which you take a two hour bus ride to a marina, take a small boat across the frigid river to a small base cabin and hike twenty minutes through the woods. Upon exiting the woods, you arrive at a small station where the Perito Moreno Glacier meets the smooth pebble beach that resided below it for thousands of years. Here the experienced trekking guides give you a set of crampons, which are like metal snowshoes with spikes on the bottom to allow you to climb/walk on the ice.
Once you had your “crampons” securely in place, we began hiking the base of the glacier in groups of twenty with two guides. Getting used to them took a little practice (I’ll admit there were probably about ten to fifteen instances where I almost tripped over my own two feet and barely avoided falling headfirst into a bottomless pit of prehistoric ice), but by the end of the day I was practically running around the ice with enthusiasm.
After I did get used to the crampons, and the whipping wind and snow had numbed my face enough that I was no longer focused on the stinging sensation, I began to realize how unbelievable the glacier experience actually was. My life, and all the trivial pursuits of my existence seemed so insignificant compared to the marvel I was standing on. I felt overwhelmed to be meandering so carelessly over so many years of frost bitten history, and felt almost guilty for stomping across it with sharp metal spikes.
The colors in and around the glacier were some like I had never seen before. While the sky was a clear blue, the water surrounding the glacier was a murky aqua color, littered with chunks of ice that have melted away. The glacier itself was also full of vivid blues. While the ice on top appeared a whitish pale blue hue, the many deep crevices emitted a piercing blue that I have never seen anywhere other than the neon section of American Apparel. The deeper the cracks, the stronger the colors became.
At one point we reached a series of small streams that ran above and within the thick ice, and the running water created a bright light blue color in the ice underneath its path. During one of our “photo-opp” stops I paused next to a wall of ice, and could hear one of these streams running through it close to my ear. It sounded so calm, like it had been trickling and bubbling down the same way for thousands of years but didn’t know or where to go. I stood there for what couldn’t have been more than a minute, looking at the landscape wondering how long this glacier had been at peace before people started destroying it, and wondering how much longer it would last.
We finished the glacier hike in roughly two hours, which we celebrated with a glass of whiskey garnished with small chunks of glacier ice (provided by the guides), and descended again for the trip home.
I have had the luxury of traveling a lot in my youth (my dad was an airline pilot for twenty years so I used to fly for free), but never have I experienced anything so incredible. The feeling of being so close to such a huge piece of our earth’s history was far more exhilarating that any man-made monument, painting, or architectural marvel I have ever witnessed.