If you haven’t noticed from the photos, southern Argentina and Chile were rather cool places. We broke out the down jackets daily. After our hike in Torres del Paine, we still hadn’t had our fill of cold weather. Since Jenny humored my request to hike Torres del Paine, I was obliged to visit Perito Moreno, a giant glacier just outside of El Calafate. Yes, all that ice was cold, but thank you, Jenny, for the motivation. The glacier was spectacular. I’ll simply give you the stats on the glacier, then you can view the photos and wish you had been there to see this big hunk of millennia-old frozen agua.
Perito Moreno glacier is 60 m high, moves 2 m a day – that’s over 6 feet – and see that mountain straight back in the photos – that’s 9 miles away! Can you imagine the amount of ice moving through this gorge?! Oh, and the ice goes 180 m under the surface of the water. Because the glacier moves 2 m a day, you can hear the ice popping and cracking, and every few minutes, huge chunks of the glacier fall off the leading edge and drop into Lago Argentina, making deep booming sounds that echo against the mountains. Magnificent! In a few of the photos you can see ripples in the water left from the falling ice chunks.
The giant glacier.
Closer view of the leading edge of the glacier.
And an even closer view.
Jenny on the boardwalk with Lago Argentina in the background.
A new boardwalk under construction.
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