On the Way to Buenos Aires; Part I of the Hike

Today I´m on my way from Bariloche, Argentina, to Buenos Aires. It´s been hard to keep up with anything here, since 17 of the last 24 days were spent backpacking in the Andes and Patagonia.

In short, this trip has consisted of two big hiking trips: one in the Northern Chilean Andes (11 days), and one in Southern Argentina (6 days). Both trips had major highlights and included a lot of walking (over 100 miles on the first hike), but beyond that the similarities stop.

The first hike took us to Copiapo, Chile, which is roughly the same latitude as the middle of Baja. As it turns out, everything north of Santiago is basically desert - miles and miles of it - and bus rides are long. The ride from Santiago to the beach town of La Serana took us 5 or 6 hours, and the next day was another 5-6 hours to Copiapo.

From Copiapo we took a bus up a long winding road checkered with raisin plantations. Imagine the mountains of the basin and ranges of Nevada but add one important factor: the mountains are well above 15,000 feet - enough to capture significant amounts of precipitation in the form of snow. As a result, there´s enough water in the valleys to encourage a great deal of life in an otherwise barren desert.

Anyway, this was a trek in the truest sense. After begging for some gasolina for our stove, we walked for 5 days, for an elevation gain of 10,000 feet, all the while hiking through the same canyon. Desert, rocks, canyon, and water. That was it.

But things started to get interesting at 15,000 feet. Most importantly, because of our slow, five-day approach, the usual signs of acute mountain sickness were held at bay. No headaches or sickness, but all three of us suffered from some very unpleasant Cheyne-Stokes breathing (this occurs when the lack of CO2 being exhaled prevents the normal breathing response - basically you stop breathing). There were more than a few nights that I woke up gasping for breath so many times that I just gave up trying to sleep.

However, having broken all previous altitude records for myself (I took pictures where the tops of Mt. Hood, Adams, Shasta, and Ranier would be), I was still enthusiastic about the hike. After five days we reached the crest of the Andes - big mountains that don´t even get started until 15,000 feet.

We managed to top a 16,800 foot cindercone before descending out of the hellish winds of that kind of altitude. Another 3 days in the wind had us all but insane, but we dropped several thousand feet and got back into summer pretty quickly.

Although the hike was mostly a desert slog, it had the particular highlight of allowing us to get to nearly 17,000 feet with no technical equipment. We were also able to follow one drainage from the crest of the Andes, all the way out to the Ocean (on the bus of course).

That´s part one...