In southern Patagonia winter comes fast and furious. By May 1st most hotels, restaurants, stores and even entire towns in the southern regions have shut down for the 4 month winter. El Chalten is definitely one of those towns. The gateway to some of the most amazing trekking and spectacular scenery in the world, El Chalten is a speck of a town perched on the edge of the Los Glaciares wilderness and the Fitz Roy Mountain range. When we arrived in the last week of April, windows of hotels and stores were already being covered with plywood, streets were empty and El Chalten was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. We absolutely couldn’t have picked a better time to visit. The trees in the hills around us were blazing oranges and reds and the trails that are typically packed during high season were practically empty. We came to Patagonia to experience nature in its rawest form and truly get away from it all. That is exactly what El Chalten was now offering us… Continue reading →

It was 6am when we left Santiago, Chile to head east towards Argentina. The snow capped Andes far ahead in the distance, a reminder that the border crossing would be at the summit of these peaks, a natural dividing point between the two countries. For hours our bus revved hard and wound switching back and forth up the mountain sides as the temperature plummeted and the beautiful green of Chile melted into the grey and white of the Andean hills around us. Each hairpin turn is marked with a sign with a number on it. 1…12…28…47…and so on it went seemingly unending. As we approached the border station atop the peak our bus was stopped at the entrance indefinitely for a reason that would not become known to us for hours…

At the Chile- Argentina border

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