Perito Moreno

(NB: If you wish to read of my experiences with chronalogical authenticity, ensure you have read the El Chalten Supertrekking blogs first, then read this after...)

So! Francisco Pascacio Moreno (AKA: El Perito Moreno, as perito means “specialist”): Argentine explorer and Pategonian pioneer. A learned explorer who spent what seems to be the majority of his life searching out the last remaining untouched extremities of South America, and seemingly naming them all after himself. He discovered lakes, mountains, glaciers and rivers, and left a his legacy in uncreative titles. He was even taken prisoner by a Pehuelche aboriginal tribe and condemned to death, but managed to escape. A generous benefactor, he donated some land given to him to create the Nahuel Huapi National Park in Bariloche. Director of the anthropological museum of Buenos Aires, chief of the Argentine exploring commission of the southern territories, and member of numerous European scientific societies, he somehow ended up dying a poor man. Which goes to show the benefits of being tight. But his name endures, confusing backpackers as to where exactly this glacier of his is. Cos it ain't in Perito Moreno, or in the Parque National de Perito Moreno.

The Perito Morano Glacier is in fact in the Parque National de los Glaciares, and is pretty much Calafatte's one trick pony (if that's the correct saying). But it is a trick any pimp would flaunt with pride. This glacier, a good hour's taxi away from town, is rather grand.

The stats: at 257km square, 60m high and between 4 and 5km wide at it's front, it's a glacier with girth. I don't mean to patronise but lets get this in real terms: 5km is just over 3 miles and that's how far I lived from town when I was a kid and it took a good 15 minutes on the bus. Not only is it proper wide but 60m high is the hight of ten men or my block of flats in Leeds City Centre.

And if you think Moreno's big, it's actually just a fraction of the same Southern Pategonian Ice field that feeds the El Chalten glacier we never climbed on the Supertrek. This ice field looks vast on a map. Cos it is - it's 13,000km square of heaving blue ice, slowly plaining the valley and turning solid rock to powder.

Moreno itself is one of the world's few advancing glaciers and the blue ice apparently moves down the valley at an astonishing 2m per day. At its end and under it's own weight, massive chunks of ice drop off into the aquamarine Largo Argentino below. Sometimes in blocks as big as a double decker bus, which are so big they seem to fall in slow motion and bob around the lake as giant icebergs.

It's a noisy old beast too. You can hear it crunching and cracking as it moves. It sounds like a factory of heavy machinery. When it breaks off, the sound resembles explosives going off. I read that the glacier has claimed 38 lives from the days when folk on the bank next to the glacier would get sucked in and under by the waves created from falling ice off the glacial face. Not entirely surprisingly you can't get that close now.

Shame.

I bet the pictures would take the piscuit.

B Dog