Cerro Torre
Amazingly the morning was frosty and bright with high cloud so, at 8.30, we were walking up the trail again. We headed for the Cerro Torre viewpoint we had stopped at and admired the cloud on our first day. Today the towers revealed their impressive sheer walls of rock and ice. A German followed us up the path with his big SLR camera and we often heard his heavy breathing behind as he struggled with his equipment. Where the trail forked he asked if he would see Fitz Roy if he continued along the trail ahead. When we advised that he wouldn’t on this trail but would get a spectacular view of the Cerro Torre towers instead he said ‘What’s the point in looking at some pillars, I want to see Fitz Roy’. We bit our tongues and advised that he would have to take a 2 hour link path to the route he should have started out on that morning. His bottom lip came out and he looked at us as if we were entirely responsible for his mistake. ‘I don’t want to walk another 2 hours’, he spat as he kicked at a tree root. ‘Well, good luck’, we piped cheerily and left him to be annoying on his own. The stream we had previously waded through (4 days ago) now had a new timber bridge across it (!) and within 2 hours we were at the lake eating cakes and empanadas gazing up at the famous towers so many climbers had tried (some successfully) to scale. They were still covered in a dusting of snow and ice and looked beautiful as the high cloud started to disperse. We sat on the split boulder tucked away in the woods below the lake and spent an hour or so just enjoying the still conditions and warm sunshine. By the end of the walk our legs were really starting to complain and the weather had started to close in again with a biting wind. We felt pretty lucky that we had managed to see different sides of the mountain in such perfect conditions for summer. In the autumn and spring the weather is more settled with lighter winds and good views are easier to come by. The wind had returned with a vengeance in the evening and it was back to walking at varying angles depending on the speed. Interestingly, we both seemed to sleep better when the wind batters the tent!?
Cerro Torre
Cerro Torre
