Patagonia - El Chatlen and Monte Fitz Roy Small. Not the mountains. Us. It was both a feeling and a physical detail. In stature and in spirit. That is how it felt. The drive from Calafate started off in the bright warm air of Patagonia and ended in the chill and blowing grey mists of El Chatlen. A night spent listening to metal roof slats clattering and wind making eerily moaning through the vents. The following morning greeted us with pelting rain, that ting, ting, ting as it hit the metal roof. Raingear donned; a dirt road took us along the Rivas de las Vueltas. Then a hole, clouds parting, sun punching its way through onto our faces. Raingear gone. 12 miles to go. Small. The instant the clouds broke on the granite towers, the scale dwarfed us. Rivers of ice were everywhere along the horizon. Large lenga trees covered the valley floor. As you climbed ever upwards, the giant lenga diminished in size, until they were nothing more than miniature shrubs at the feet of these giants. Raw and rough, walls of red granite constraining the icefields to the west, rose upward, blocking the skyline. Then it was there. The apparel company's trademark, Monte Fitz Roy. Not just lofty monuments of natural stone. These are massive monoliths with no slope - straight up out of the earth, ruling monarchs of all that lies below. The trek to the turquoise lake at the foot of the Fitz Roy, rose ever upward until the shattered scree was all that was left. The hikers nothing more than tiny pilgrims, who having made that trek, were forced to their knees in submission. Forced by the violent vortex of the super charged compressed air , katabatic winds that tore down across the frozen icefields as they screamed, headed towards the heat of the distant pampas. Then the mountain was gone. Clouds once again clothed the Fitz Roy, a curtain call followed by an epilogue. “You came and saw how magnificent we are, know how small you are”.
There is more than the Fitz Roy in this region. It is part of a national park system that includes icefields, forests and large u-shaped valleys. Exploring other valleys around El Chatlen, the rain is our frequent companion, creating photographic challenges, but softening the harshness of the chisel marks made by ice. Places where the receding glaciers have left their mark in the rocks of the forests. The giant Roche Moutonnée laying in the middle of the valley, rocks that resisted being demolished, but instead are smoothed and rounded on the upstream side and plucked into cliffs by the physics of refreezing on the lee side.

We are tiny and small in this landscape. Almost invisible even to the Magellanic woodpecker and their partners who oblivious to our presence.