Perito Moreno Glacier

This morning, I took a trip out to the Glacier National Park. It is a Unesco World Heritage Site and home to the world’s 3rd largest ice sheet of fresh water after Antarctica and Greenland.

The park is located 80km from the closest town of El Calafate, population about 25,000. The glacier itself is named after Francis Moreno, who helped map the boundry between Argentina and Chile. Ironically, the closest he came to the glacier was a few km short.

The drive to the park from El Calafate has two very distinctive landscapes. The first is the steppes or balconies of short bushes and ranches.

The second landscape begins shortly before you enter the park, forest.

It was a windy but sunny day, and the glacier sparkled as I caught my first glimpse of it. The viewpoints were full of tourists since the main reason anyone comes here is to visit the glacier.

First up, I jumped onto a boat for a closer look at the glacier and, in particular, the area that continues to calve regularly. The boat ride is about one hour and gets within 150m of the glacier.

Closer View of the south side, still no icebergs

There was calving occurring pretty often, and the huge iceberg that you can see in the pictures above happened while I was helping an older technology challenged lady video the glacier. She has an awesome video of it happening. I’m not bitter at all that I missed it on my phone because I was helping her. Not bitter at all. (No cell service or internet, and a language barrier with an old lady who wasn’t quite sure how to video, so no, I won’t be getting a copy).

Some ice calving that I did capture

After an hour on the boat, I headed up to the viewing platforms that are across from the glacier. They are higher up, so the views are a little different. I could also see the other side of the glacier as well.

Again, if you listened closely, you could hear a sound similar to thunder with the occasional loud clap of the ice falling into the water. It was interesting because you would see it first and then hear it. If you looked towards the sound, it had already fallen.