Sunrise at Monte Fitz Roy
- Courtney Wisniewski
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
part two of an amateur hiking guide in Patagonia
With the help of a very popular brand’s old catalogue, I will try my best to explain this image: “Patagonia brings to mind romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors.”
Tim Patterson, a travel writer, commented on his experience, “It was so quiet, apart from the wind. Clouds boiled up from the ice-field and swirled like schools of herring around the peak of Mt. Fitzroy. One minute you could see the mountain, the next moment it was gone.” This same image is what the founder of Patagonia chose to represent his brand back in the 1970s. Look familiar?
After completing a five day, incredibly challenging backpacking adventure known as the W Trek in Torres Del Paine, we kept the momentum rolling and did a shorter 2 day trek in Los Glaciares National Park.
If you want “everything I wish I knew” about the W Trek, click here.
If you’ve come to learn about my experience hiking to Fitz Roy, keep reading.
Where did we leave off?
Right, I was doing my laundry at a hostel in Puerto Natales, Chile. They say there is no rest for the wicked, so we hopped on a bus to El Calafate at 7:00 AM. Apparently there were extreme winds so our double decker bus casually turned a 6 hour trip into an 8 hours. This made us miss our connecting bus to El Chalten.
El Chalten is a hikers paradise—they literally have a large wooden monument of a backpack right by the bus station. Somehow this town is even smaller than Puerto Natales. This little village is within the National Park, Los Glaciares, and part of the Patagonia region of Argentina. It’s a gateway to trails surrounding several famous peaks, like Cerro Torre and Monte Fitz Roy.
The station rescheduled us for the next bus, which was in three hours. So we found ourselves drinking beers with strangers. We grabbed a couple of roadies too.
We witnessed the beautiful towers of Fitz Roy from the window of the empty bus. It seemed like the sun was setting the entire drive. The landscape didn’t change much, there were plenty of Guanaco roaming the plains and a beautiful bright blue lake seemed to follow us.
The next morning we rented some gear and grabbed a few snacks. By midday we started our second trek of the week. The trailhead started right outside of the front door to our hostel with an immediate steep incline. The sun was shining although it was cold. I kept my layers on all day.
We backpacked for 7 miles or so before arriving at Laguna Torre—a glacial lake with a view of Cerro Torre. The wind here is rough so we perched behind some stacked tree branches to eat cheese and prosciutto. How European of us!
The glacier lake, created by Grande Glacier, glistened in the sun while pieces of ice launched at us in the wind.
We found ourselves on the wrong trail but kept going to get a better view of the glacier lodged between the mountains. We walked back down the hill, through a river bed, and over fallen trees until we reunited with the trail.
My feet were begging for a break, more like a retirement. Although our packs were significantly lighter from last week, my feet felt every single pound of extra weight I was carrying.
We followed Madre e Hija, a trail that connects the path from Laguna Torre to Laguna de los Tres. At the time we didn’t know why it was called this because we didn’t have service but a quick google search just now told me that the trail passes by three lakes: Madre, Hija, and Nieta—giving it its name.
The first 2 kilometers were directly uphill. I defaulted to questioning what I’m doing this all for again. Luckily the next 5 kilometers were flat, rotating between a lake view and a dense, wet forest. The last kilometer of this trail faced Fitz Roy’s incredible towers, we walked towards them in awe of how striking they are.
We finally made it to camp after just over 21 kilometers or 13 miles. I immediately went to the river bed to have a snack and dip my feet in the mountain runoff. Either I couldn’t feel my feet at all by that point or dipping them in freezing water actually helped with the pain.
While enjoying hot chocolate and listening to the live stream, the sun started to fall behind Mount Fitz Roy. This was a spectacular event but nothing compared to what we saw in the morning.
Neither of us could sleep because it was so frigid. We set our alarms for 3:30 AM to begin the hike to the base of Monte Fitz Roy. It was pitch black out and my headlamp batteries died not even 2 minutes into the hike. We followed another group just to bum their light for a while before passing them. The proceeding two hours were directly up, scaling large rocks in the pitch black, freezing night.
It was incredibly difficult and the icy rocks did not help. When I would look back down the mountain, I would see lights of other hikers far in the distance, like little stars that seemed galaxies away. Speaking of, the sky was stunning at this hour, full of thousands of stars. Somehow we were the first to reach the base of Fitz Roy, although it’s technically summer, the lake was frozen over and covered in several layers of snow. This made it difficult to determine where we were supposed to stop. We wandered on some ice for a while before picking a rock to shield us from the wind.
Then we waited.
I could no longer feel my toes or hands at this point.
You could see the sun starting to come up from the valley opposing Mount Fitz Roy. The sky started to change into a deep purple, then red, washing out the black of the night. It was getting colder and windier.
The sun rose over the valley, a beautiful pink reflection illuminated off a lake, while the clouds changed into beautiful shades of orange. Finally, the sun rose enough to reflect on the towers we were sitting directly in front of.
This is what we came here for.
Slowly the towers caught the sunrise and reflected a glowing pink. Every second the pink melted from the top all the way to the base of the towers. In just a few minutes the entire range that illuminated right before eyes, went grey and we started our descent.
We witnessed the sunrise of a lifetime. An insane display of color and light.
I could lie and say I was really enjoying the moment but I was actually convinced I was going to freeze up there. I’m not the only dramatic one, my phone froze alongside me, thus I had to experience the sunrise in it’s original format instead of through my lens.
The way down was slippery, the ice started to melt with the sun shining on it. You would think the way down would be easier, although we had daylight on our side this time, the big rocks were almost harder to descend rather than ascend.
We packed up camp, had a coffee, and started the hike back to town. A town described by Patterson as such: “The sheer granite spire of Mt. Fitzroy towers over a ramshackle tourist village that consists of one luxury mountain lodge, about two dozen mom-and-pop guesthouses, and countless tattered tents and rusty trailers” (Full article here). However, I think it is very important to note that Argentina has Starlink now and is no longer in the stone ages (they are very proud of this milestone).
The next several miles we hiked through a flat and open space, turning around every few steps to see Mount Fitz Roy in all her glory, shining in the sun. If you’re referring to this blog for inspiration—do the route the opposite way so you don’t have to break your neck to look at Fitz Roy.
By this point in our week, we covered so much ground that we were exhausted. Thus, we b-lined it for the end. With Fitz Roy looming over us, we crossed rivers over fallen trees and made good time. We ran into some friends we met on the W Trek—that always felt serendipitous.
The last few miles were downhill but my body knew it was over. I was in severe pain, my whole body ached, and my feet. oh my god my feet. Once we finally made it to the trailhead we had another mile to our hostel. That last mile put us almost at 22 miles and it wasn’t even noon.
I slept the rest of the day. When I woke up I journaled. But the same question remains: What is this all for? Does anyone know?
Maybe it’s just to post epic Strava activities on a random Tuesday while my friends are at work.
Or maybe Cheryl Strayed wrote it best in her novel, of which I am currently reading:
“It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental.”
“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was… That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
If you have a better idea of what the purpose to life is, let me know! until next time, xoxo
Comments