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"Por favor, por favour, don't call them 'ippies, because they are not 'ippies!" Josefina's voice was anguished. "They are artesanos - craftsmen - but not 'ippies." Josefina worked in El Bolson's tourist office and she was stressing that the folk outside the window, industriously setting up stalls for the Saturday hipp...oops, sorry...craftspersons' market, were not a bunch of long-haired, tie-dyed dropouts but, rather, hardworking artisans.

And I’m sure that's just what they were. Certainly plenty of them were skilled in their chosen crafts, and few enough of them actually looked like Catweasel or that fey bloke who use to warble 'Mellow Yellow.' But, then again, amongst the silversmiths, jam-brewers, rawhide braiders, woodturners, glass painters and the chap who apparently made a living constructing and then selling hurdy-gurdies, there was more than one trestle table given over to sculpted figurines of duendes, a kind of Patagonian leprechaun. Numerous little models of these long-haired, wizened-featured, bucolically-costumed gnomes squatted on miniature logs or rocks, wearing blissed-out expressions and sporting price stickers on their bums. According to some people - people who, perhaps, tend to buy more Rizla rolling papers than the average consumer - it's quite common to see real, live duendes frolicking in El Bolson's woods and up its mountainsides, just like you might spot condor, wild boar, puma, and other, more expected, local fauna.

Strangely many of the little duende dolls seemed to be remarkably accurate self-portraits of those selfsame 'not-hippies' who'd actually made them. Other duende effigies appeared to be close caricatures of the preoccupied hombre busy cobbling uncomfortable-looking sandals at a sidewalk bench, and of the earthy woman languidly knotting feathers, creepers and bundles of assorted twiggery into dream-catchers, or dust-gatherers or whatever those dangling plumed and netted hoops are called.

Argentina! A nation of impassioned guitar pluckers, vigorous accordion throttlers and lithe-haunched tango twirlers? For sure. Country of silver-spurred, horse-straddling, narrow-eyed gauchos riding the pampa with lasso in hand? Absolutely. And Argentina, the South American state that's gone through five presidents in the past year and a half alone, and is trying to run its economy on a currency that's lost 70% of its worth in the same period? Well, that too, and very good value it offers if you're planning on visiting in the near future.

But Argentina as a haven for hippies? Well, in truth, only around this one corner of the country's Lake District region. Only here, amidst the Rio Negro and Chubut provinces' impressive tumults of sapphire blue lagoons, brittle-peaked mountains, cathedral-solemn forests, glaciers as white and confident as toothpaste, and numerous sunny valleys scattered with streams and woods and rustic pastures and log cabins. And Josefina was, sadly, right; in El Bolson genuine loon-panted Utopians with ZZ Top beards and beatific smiles were far outnumbered by business-minded artisans, and new-comer youngsters who'd fled Argentina's big cities to live the 'good life' on small, self-sufficient farms.

And those few certified 100% organic hippies actually left were now as old and outdated as a Jefferson Starship lyric. And that's because El Bolson got its dose of the Woodstock generation way back in 1969 when the whole cast of the Buenos Aires production of the rock opera Hair, and most of the technical crew - and, given the military weighted political climate of the time, probably the theatre usherettes and the girls who sold icecream as well - decamped from the capital to set up communes in give-away-priced farmland. Word soon got around that El Bolson - until then no more than a one-hundred-horse town serving the cattle ranches out in the surrounding hinterland - was paradise. More folk rapidly followed in the sandal-prints of the Hair mob.

By the time I arrived in El Bolson the eco-friendly, blow-in idealists, along with the locals - still a mix of cattle raisers, cowboys and the descendants of the region's indigenous Mapuche Indians - had already had some 34 years to get orchards a-growing, micro-breweries fermenting, low-key comfortable guesthouses running and restaurants fired up and ready to dish out good organic food and even better wines. And, give 'em their due, the El Bolsonites had also kept the rivers - with some of the best trout fishing in the country - sparkingly clear, and put in hundreds of kilometres of walking trails through the woods that led to numerous comfortably rustic refugios sited high up under the mountains snowy peaks. And they'd set up businesses, too, offering paragliding, horse trekking, canyoning, mountain biking, rock climbing, rafting and farm stays. There were longer walks, too, and even bigger country, out in the near-by Parque Nacional Lago Puelo which one could reach on the Old Patagonian Express - the trencito or little train - running from nearby Esquel. Back in town the not-a-hippy-market ran as a thrice weekly event, and there were Medieval miracle plays performed, in full Haight-Ashbury loonyhood, out on the edge of town on Tuesday nights. The UFO spotters club was thriving. El Bolson - or 'the bag' as it name happily translates - could make a good claim for being perhaps the most rewarding, certainly the most pleasant, one-stop destination in the whole of Argentina.

Walking around El Bolson my eyes, and my thoughts, were constantly drawn to higher things. The town is small anyway, and has trees and an open park at its heart, but it's further dwarfed by lying in a corridor between two chains of mountains. So, to the main drag's east, Cerro Piltriquitron soared up to an impressive 2,260 metres summit, whilst along the town's western side a row of high shark-teeth peaks culminated in the Cerro Hielo Azul which was ten metres higher than its opposite number. And, usefully when I was deciding whether to go right or left for a few days' walk, Hielo Azul is not only higher but also has, as its name suggests, a slab of 'blue ice' glacier oozing over its flanks.

I met John, from Cornwall, late one night in El Bolson's roughest bar. Over tumblers of Malbec and after a pool-table duel we agreed to join forces for the assault on Cerro Hielo Azul's glacier. But it was well into the next afternoon when we actually met to heft our rucksacks and set off up the trail towards the refugio Hielo Azul. A notice on the far side of the pendulous suspension bridge that carried us across the Rio Azul suggested that it would take us some 7 hours to reach the refugio. We had four hours of light left. But went anyway. Perhaps we'd stopped taking signs too seriously when we first noticed the numerous fire prevention warnings erected by the Servicio de Prevención y Lucha contra Incendios Forestales, or as they signed themselves, SPLIF.

Once started into the forest, striding amongst the soaring trees and skipping and climbing over tangles of roots and piles of boulders, the existence of duendes suddenly seemed more plausible. Though they, like us, could probably have done with ladders, ropes and grappling hooks to get around. The path had seemingly been pioneered by folk of Olympian fitness and agility. Or perhaps by the rare but agile Argentine huemel deer. Whatever the trail eschewed gently inclining planes, contour-following or any other sops to trekking sissyhood. So when the land went up, the path went straight up with it. And from the moment we left the river, the land was busy going up some 1,500 metres in as short a distance as it could. We sweated and strained on, whilst a rota of annoyingly familiar little brown birds with big birds' voices, whistled and whooped encouragement at us from the thick tangle of undergrowth. I wouldn't have minded having a catapult. Or an oxygen mask.

Arriving at the refugio, just before dark, was a relief. Lucas, the warden, was downing tools after his day's work, which seemed to consist of occupationally therapeutic chainsawing. The original refugio was an old log-cabin, but Lucas in a few brief years of tenure had already added on a log-annexe, and a log-sleeping-loft which was reached by a log-staircase from the log-outhouse. And then, more recently still, he'd started on a scatter of log-sheds, log-huts, log-loos and log-showerblocks. It was a tribute to the sheer scale of the forest around us that all this loggery and construction, dwarfed as it was by the many trees that had withstood Lucas' trusty tool, still seemed no more than the most understated of duende hamlets, barely a dormitory town for hobbits. Lucas was a nice guy, who'd worked out that if everything had to be brought up a 170º path, from 15 kms away, then the more he didn't have to bring up the better. So, in a necessary nod towards self-sufficiency, he brewed beer and baked bread in the log-annexe. Which was lucky, because we'd forgotten to bring supper with us.

The next morning we scrambled up the ridge at the valley head to reach the glacier. It was impressive in a white, 'gee, it's a glacier' kind of way. But, even better, a rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle chose the exact moment we started crossing the ice to begin sliding down from high above, gathering speed as it tobogganed on, then jumping as it hit bumps and the lips of crevasses, flying ever faster in great zigzagging leaps and bounds, before passing us in a rush of wind and explosion of ice shards and finally plummeting over the ice cliff to send up a mushroom cloud of icy green water from far below. That was the kind of value that all glaciers should provide.

We were back in El Bolson by dark. Though my knee joints had seized solid by then. I knew, of course, that there were crystal healers, Ki masseurs, chacra alligners and psychic healers dotted around the town, all of whom would have been eager to put me right. But I went for the more obvious and Butch Cassidy-style cure; a hot shower, a steak as big as a telephone directory, though juicier, and a couple of glasses of Mendoza's best wine.

And why Butch Cassidy style? Well, because actually, the hippies weren't the first outsiders to discover the benefits of El Bolson and its surrounding lands. In 1902 Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on the run from North America where their notorious bank raids and train robberies had put a few too many Pinkerton men on their trail, arrived in Argentina. As 'James Ryan,' and 'Mr and Mrs Harry Place,' (the 'Kid' was travelling with his girlfriend, Etta Place), the American outlaws bought 5,000 hectares of grazing land near Cholila, only 70 kms south of El Bolson, This happy menage a trois stayed down on the farm, on and off, until 1907. Some stories say the trio's time in Cholila only ended when they went back to bank robbing in Patagonia. Others claim that Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were making good and easier money raising cattle and horses, and it was only when other yanqui banditos arrived in Patagonia and pulled a few jobs that the law, and the Pinkerton detectives, became interested in the foreigners living in Cholila. One way or another, the outlaws were forced to move on.

Bruce Chatwin's account of the Butch Cassidy story is one of his better synthesises of research, supposition and imagination in his book In Patagonia. He was at the Cassidy homestead in 1975, when the Sepúlveda family still lived in the cabin. Twenty-five years later in the late afternoon I rode a chestnut horse, bareback, from Welsh Patagonian Rene Griffith's land down to the Cassidy log cabin. It had been abandoned for several years. But there was a pile of empty champagne bottles up against one log-built wall. A local landowner had married his eighth wife there the week before; he was in his 70s, she in her twenties. I walked through the empty rooms of the cabin. It was eerily quiet. Peaceful. The ghosts of the outlaws were somewhere else.

Back at Rene's cabin we waited for two gauchos - cowboys - to come round and help us roundup a hundred head of cattle and drive them over the hills to another estancia to be vaccinated and branded. Rene and I passed a small, polished gourd containing mate tea, back and forth between us, sucking the thick green liquid through the silver straw in turn. Rene was filling me in on local history. He had good English, but we spoke in Spanish. His dog - "Pinkie, bach" - and his horses, though, he addressed in the language of hen wlad fy nhadua, the 'land of the fathers,' Wales.

"They call Ernesto 'el gringo,' or some people call him 'the sheriff,'" Rene explained, "because his grandfather was one of the detectives sent down to arrest Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" He trickled hot water into the mate gourd and passed it over to me. "The grandfather didn't arrest Cassidy or even try to - but he saw what a wonderful land it is down here, so he never went back to America. They say he became a friend of the outlaws. Maybe. Why not?"

Just at dusk the two gauchos, Ernesto and Ruben, rode up on their strong horses, a pack of dogs at heel, driving a packhorse with half a sheep slung over its pad. Ruben had a stove-pipe hat, a thick beard and said nothing. Ernesto, his uncle, was talkative, telling stories and laughing even as they both unsaddled their mounts, and then untied the heavy, hairy chaps that looked as if they were made from whatever skin and sinew was left after a medium sized steer had been eaten.

Coming into the cabin both Ernesto and Ruben reached behind their backs. Each pulled a revolver out from his belt and put it on top of the cupboard. Relaxed, now, they put a large slab of the sheep on a spike in front of the fire. Its fat spat and flared. A box of wine was pierced open and we passed it back and forth. In the firelight the ghosts of Cassidy, (who very possibly died in an old people's home back in America in the 1930s), and the Sundance Kid, who more than likely was shot in a botched bank raid shortly after leaving Patagonia), seemed to have found a way to return to Argentina.

Back in El Bolson, a week later, I was going to ask in the tourist office about the American outlaws, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I didn't but maybe I could have guessed the response I’d have got from Josefina. The same pained look. The same anguished tones; "Por favor, por favor. No fueron outlaws - no, no, not outlaws! Fueron estancieros, los dos...they were both ranchers...but no, not outlaws." Sure, why not. El Bolson likes to think the best of everybody. Whatever, Cassidy and the Sundance Kid certainly weren't hippies. But then they weren't Robert Redford and Paul Newman either.