wandering, not lost: Craggy mountains and lots of weather...

Coming up through the pampas region of Argentina there have been several times I've been reminded of west Texas and that has continued a bit here in El Chalten... Apart from the rocky spires splitting the sky interspersed with glaciers...

On my first hike I was lucky with the weather and has clear sunny skies for most of the time. Which was really handy because as my then hostal roommate said 'sometimes you just have to do something different'... I went hiking in a skirt!

Laundry day, don't you know... And it was great, liberating even! And I felt a bit "on the other side of the fence"... In hiking at Torres del Paine and here I've seen so many makes and models of people and preparedness of gear... Which is really neat that these spectacular areas are so accessible to whoever wants to experience them bit it does make you wonder and hope that some folks don't get into difficulty... And I'm sure based on some of the looks I got that people were honking the same of me! But I had enough gear with me just in case but the weather was great so all was good.

The forests along the trail felt solid and old

which was a nice feeling of longevity after seeing the effects of the huge fire at Paine... A reminder that such solid things are existing depending on us humans not to make a misstep... this forest area (back to my original thought) was in many places like the open oak woodlands of the high Chisos, with the same granular granite-y soil, but here the trees are beechs instead of oaks.

It makes me wonder that similar to convergent evolution in animals (where for example you get ostrich in Africa and rhea in South America not because they're genetically related but because there are similar habitat niches in those different places into which local life forms evolve and they end up with similar physical properties)... Perhaps it's the same for habitats, where with similar soils, climate, etc you get similar landscapes... With differences obviously since there are no glaciers in big bend but in the foothills there are a few similar vistas.

In any case it was a lovely day.

Then the following day I wanted to see the front side of the range and get closer to Fitz Roy the highest peak... But the weather was showing itself... Amazing wind was howling down the canyon...

I'd booked a transfer to make a one way hike back to town ( el pilar to Chalten )

so I went with the plan and though saw basically nothing of the high mountain scenery it was an amazing day of Patagonian mountain extremes, getting tossed about by gusts and seeing how the trees get their rugged windswept appearance... One way a sunny valley, the other misty denseness...