The boys had talked us into a slow start to the day, so we had the morning to relax, write in our journals, eat and drink mate. Hopped up on caffeine (so mate really is caffeinated!), we sat down with the refugio hosts to plot our our route for the day. Turns out that the trail to our intended destination of Refugio Italia was closed. I guess there had been snow in the area and the water levels are on the rise again, so that trail was out. We also learned that there was a "big storm" (dear God...) coming tomorrow. Awesome. Since we all had plenty of gear and food, we opted to head deeper into the park and make our way to Pampa Linda- the area we had seen long off in the distance atop Catedral the first day, instead of taking the only other trail that would send us back to Bariloche. The map indicated that the trail to Pampa Linda would take us about 11hrs. Since we had a late start and most of us were still heavy from the workout yesterday, we headed out to the trail with intentions to camp somewhere in between.
The trail out of Refugio Jakob had us follow the pitch along the backside of Laguna Jakob, which made a great view in the midday sun
and eventually brought us up to the dayhike lookout for Laguna Los Trempanos.
From here, the trail was pretty sparse- we had to pick our way along and the red markers and cairns from the days before were few and far between. We kept winding around the different ridges (luckily we had a lot fewer up-and-overs) until we finally hit the the Casalata valley which would lead us all the way to Pampa Linda.
The scramble down into the valley was probably the worst we had seen yet- loose ground and stones, amplified by our slow legs and packs that seemed to have gained a lot of weight during the night. To make matters worse, the water level was still fairly high (I can only imagine what it´s like in rainy season), so we had a lot of rock hopping to crisscross back and forth the river. We did come across this really cool snow patch which had been erroded into snow caves by water teeming down (you can seen the water in the photo through the left cave) from the glacier above.
From the other side of the snow patch, you could see all the little waterfalls down the side of the rockface, running into the river. In the sunlight, it made the whole rock sparkle.
As we went on, we had more and more crossings. By now, I was the only one with even remotely dry feet. But, not for long. At about the sixth crossing, I made it 95% of the way across and the last rock before the shore let me down. I finally got to swim in the Andes water, unfortunately my pack and camera did too. I was totally turtled over with my pack (which was probably funny to see) so Ferdinand had to fish me out (Chris: flashbacks to my swim at Camp 2 on the North Rim Traverse in Gros Morne, minus the rock smashing my butt). Other than the 5L of water in my raincover, my pack was dry. I was completely soaked, my feet were now swimming in my poor boots and my camera was very, very angry. So angry that it stopped talking to me all together. Not good.
At this point, we were all pretty much worse for wear and we decided to camp in a nice clearing before anything really disasterous happened. I put my camera away to dry out (fingers crossed that was all it would take) and we made a fire in a previous pit to dry everything out. The site was actually really nice, right down by the river but protected in the forest. In light of the oncoming storm, we managed to eat (and we ate a LOT) and get into our tents just before the rain started. I fell asleep so fast, I don´t even know how much it rained :)
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