Blowing through the Andes by Andrew Bain
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An Andean condor turned on the currents, wheeling across the sky, its wings sawing through the air, fizzing like electricity. Below, in a virtual echo of the sound, our feet crunched across the alpine top of the Cordon Catedral ridge.
Soon, there wouldn’t be even these sounds. On Lago Nahuel Huapi, which shone like tin 1,000 metres below, white-top waves were forming. The Patagonian wind, as notorious as any, was rising. It would quickly become the only noise on earth.
For the next five days this wind would be our constant companion, turning our duo into a trio – me, my walking partner Nick, and the wind – as we trekked through Argentina’s first national park, Nahuel Huapi. Some days it blew hard, other days violently hard, but it was as unfailing as sunrise. Tarns rose into swells of surf, and my sunglasses would be ripped from my face and thrown off a mountain. At times, I’d fight to avoid the same fate for myself.
But on this first morning, Patagonia was modestly calm. A serrated skyline of rock spires loomed ahead, and beyond rose the dominant figure of the Tronador volcano, glaciers wrapped like scarves around its neck, and below us, beech forest spread like a dark paste over the valleys. It was this stark and varied landscape – part Chamonix, part Utah – that led American writer David Roberts to describe Nahuel Huapi as ‘one of the most beautiful places I had ever been’.
Our path cut a line across the ridge’s plunging scree slope and, finally turned into an improbable break in the spires, from where the mountains stepped down into the Arroyo Van Titler valley, taking us with them to our first night’s camp at Laguna Tonchek.
Tents coloured the lakeshore like confetti, pitched in desperate positions – squashed between rocks, pushed into the lenga scrub – in a battle to sleep nearest the lake. We camped at the end of the tent queue; if we strained, we could just about see the water. In the morning I watched as a man stepped from his tent, stretched and urinated in the lake, the water source from which we were all supposed to drink. Upstream, another trekker bathed in a lather of soap. Later, I would see domestic cats roaming freely outside refuge huts, and a sign in one hut announced that a thermos of hot water cost either three pesos or a backpack full of wood, yet the land was already devoid of trees…Nahuel Huapi, Argentina’s most popular national park, was in danger of being loved, or at least lived, to death.
The park’s popularity and uniqueness had been immediately apparent on our arrival in the evergreen town of Bariloche. The fact that this, South America’s trendiest ski town, was inside the national park was notice enough. A recession-proof town that heaved in summer and became only busier in winter, Bariloche was the European Alps transplanted to the Andes. Swiss styling predominated, from the flower-lined balconies and gingerbread colours to the main-street bank with its classical façade capped by a typically Alpine V-shaped roof.
Bariloche stared across Lago Nahuel Huapi, a virtual inland sea stretched over more than 100 kilometres, to a balding line of hills. But it was the mountains hidden behind its back that had drawn us to the town most famous for its chocolates. Our final error was to stock our backpacks with chocolate from a natural-food store – an act akin to picking a bruised apple from the ground when the tree is filled with fruit – before heading deeper into the park to begin our trek.
At Laguna Tonchek, we filled our water bottles far upstream from the lake and retraced our steps to the crest, turning now from our previous day’s route to career down the scree slope into the Rucaco valley. Half skiing and half jogging we hurtled towards the valley like human cascades, entering a gully near its base, where the earth firmed into a stepladder of rock.
A group of trekkers struggled up the gully as we funnelled down, huffing and fuming at the effort required to pick over its boulders. I feared for their moods once they hit the powdery scree. What had been a joyride for us would be quicksand for them, every step a half-step, sliding back, achieving almost no gain. We’d turn regularly in the valley below to watch their futile progress, moving as slowly as oxygen-starved climbers at 8000 metres.
Soon we began climbing again, our time in the valley short as we rose back above the tree line towards Brecha Negra pass. From the pass came the requisite Nahuel Huapi view: a lake below with a hut, Refugio Jakob, perched on a promontory of rock, and an assortment of rock steeples and snowy summits as skyline. Most impressive was the sharpened tip of Pico Refugio, our supposed goal the next morning, but the dense snowfields plastered to its abrupt slopes confirmed the news we’d been hearing for days. The route ahead was blocked. We carried an ice axe but not crampons, Punch without Judy on the Pico Refugio ice that had reputedly killed several trekkers that season.
Our contingency plan was prepared and simple: make a sideways retreat out of the mountains then swing back at the mountain’s other end. We’d lose a mountain but gain two beautiful valleys. The name of the next morning’s section of trail – Los Serpentinos – needed no translation as the Arroyo Casa de Piedra river dropped 300 metres in a series of waterfalls, the path twisting and switchbacking alongside, bottoming out in a forest of beech and an understorey of bamboo.
The valley was sun-drenched but, above, the high route beyond Pico Refugio was smothered by dark cloud, additional – if unnecessary – justification for our timid retreat. We sped on downstream, nothing to slow us now but the valley’s own unexpected beauty.
That night, the cloud that had covered the Cordon Innocentes swelled to engulf the region and by morning the Andes had disappeared into the menacing fug. This day, it seemed, we’d have to climb 1,200 metres into apparent oblivion.
But, as we climbed, things changed. The lakes shrunk to puddles below and the mountains grew to reality above, cloud parting biblically before us. Scrambling over rock and through snow gullies, we arose onto a ridge near the cockscomb peak of Cerro Lopez, turning away from it for a wind-battered final stroll to the lesser summit of Pico Turista, its top furnished with a bolted-down stool.
The descent from Pico Turista would be as frustrating as the wind was strong. The steep gully was tiled in frost-shattered rock, shards both loose and treacherous that slid from beneath our feet, moving then stopping then lurching again. The earth carried us like a turbulent chairlift to the base of the mountain, stumbling and slipping as we went, hands cutting up on the sharp rock edges. The wind would reach its zenith at Laguna Negra, at that day’s end. As we picked around its north-eastern foreshore towards camp, waves rolled across its surface, slapping against the rock faces that dropped into the lake. We stumbled like drunkards, pushed and pulled by gusts, relief coming in the stunted beech scrub, its foliage meshing into a wall that protected our camp. The wind’s banshee scream haunted us all night but the bonsai scrub was as protective as a parental hug.
The next morning we quickly descended into a shielded valley and its merciful forest cover. Our final retreat mimicked the walk of two days before, beautiful but hurried as we now tasted the end. One hour from that end, we rounded a turn in the river to find a trekker coming upstream. He carried not a backpack but pushed a wheelbarrow, in which he’d stowed his trekking equipment. In any other place I’d have been surprised but I’d learned that anything goes in Nahuel Huapi National Park. I nodded a greeting and walked on.