The Glacier Road Show, by boat (Day 27)

Since my experience with the Perito Moreno Glacier was so fantastic, I decided to go all out and take the tour of the other glaciers while I´m here. I have to admit that I wasn´t too excited about the thought of sharing a tour boat with 324 of my tourist friends, but I´m pretty sure the scenery will keep my mind on other things.

We all boarded this huge luxury catamaran and headed out for a day of glacier sightseeing.

I somehow managed again to have another clear day- perfect for being out on the water and sightseeing.

I had thought that Perito Moreno was the show-stopper, but it definitely had a run for it´s money today. We weren´t in the boat 5 minutes when the first big iceberg passed by. We chartered about 20min and made our way down the Brazo Norte of the Lago Argentino, passing floating icebergs.

We made our first stop at the foot of the exquisite glacier triplet of Onelli, Bolado and Agassiz. I can´t do justice to the size of these glaciers, but trust me, they´re massive. The reflections of the sun on the ice and snow make for amazing colours in the ice.


Then stopped a walk to have our lunch in the amphitheatre of the Bertachi, Cono and Murallon glaciers. Cono is a hanging glaciers and doesn´t actually touch the water. Murallon is towering off in the distance, leading all the way down to the lake and Bertachi, with its thin face edge, lets off many of the icebergs you can see here that choke off the Onelli Lake channel.


We hopped back on the boat and headed through the minefield of icebergs towards the Upsala Glacier. Every iceberg is a little different, with so many unique shapes and colours. I kept telling myself I wasn´t going to take another photo of another iceberg, but they´re so unique that I couldn´t resist. See for yourself:


All the time we were navigating through this iceberg field, I could see this massive, massive glacier in the distance. Thinking that we wouldn´t get very close, I started taking photos.

Good thing because it´s so big (four times the size of Buenos Aires- it sits in a channel 700m deep), there was no way I could capture even a reasonable portion of it in one frame. Unlike the other glaciers who only let off "small" icebergs, Upsula is relatively thin at the face so the water can errode away huge chunks of icebergs at a time. Given it´s size and the size of it´s icebergs, it´s hard to capture it with my little digital camera. But, these shots should make for some (hopefully) awesome panoramic shots when I get a chance to stitch them together. In the meantime, here are a few bits of this giant.

There was also a really cool waterfall, just kiddie-corner to the Upsala, created by run-off from yet another glacier in the distance.


So by now, I´m sitting on this boat, in the sunshine, completely awestruck. I can´t see how it could possibly get any better....and then we approached Spegazzini.


This icebergs claim to fame is that it is the tallest glacier in the park (130m above water and I can´t even remember its total height). It´s also massively huge and deserving of a panoramic shot to do it any kind of justice. I can´t remember what makes it so tall, but it´s pretty humbling to be at water-level looking up at the towering ice spikes. Check out the glacier stump- from the ice erroding the rock and then as the ice receeds, you can see the remenant rock below.


And because it twists and partially hangs in the neighbouring mountains, there are tonnes of run-off waterfalls too. It´s spectacular.


After this, I think my brain was completely fried. I slept most of the return trip back to the dock, completely overwhelmed by what I had seen. Although I´ve done my best to try to describe and photograph what I got to see today, there really aren´t words to do it justice. This place, Parque National Los Glaciares, is chock full of all types incredible gems and feats of nature, and every one seems more stunning than the one before it.

All I can say is that I hope someday you have the chance to see something like this. ...