Argentina
Deep in the spectacular backcountry of Argentina, Christopher Bagley discovers a network of cozy, convivial mountain shelters where getting away from it all takes on a whole new meaning
“You’re heading the wrong way, my friend.”
There are some things that you’d rather not hear when you’re in the middle of a five-hour uphill trek in the Andes, carrying a heavy backpack and running low on granola bars, and this is one of them. I’ve been walking through a forest, admiring the magnificent 150-foot coihue trees that are native to this part of Argentinian Patagonia, when a hiker coming the other way tells me I’ve strayed from the trail. He says he made the same mistake an hour ago and is now backtracking toward the main path, which eventually leads to a refugio, or mountain shelter, where I plan to spend the night. So I turn around and try to retrace my footprints, and that’s not easy since most of them have disappeared into the muddy ground. Today is the first clear day in these mountains after two straight weeks of rain, meaning that many trails have temporarily turned into streams, and meadows have turned into swamps. My five-hour hike soon turns into a seven-hour hike, as I maneuver around fallen tree trunks or use them as makeshift bridges to cross puddles, brooks, and rivers.
Finally, in the late afternoon, a log cabin with a hand-carved sign reading BIENVENIDOS—REFUGIO HIELO AZUL comes into view in a clearing, smoke rising from its chimney as if in some Alpine mirage. “Hola, soy Lucía,” says the young woman who greets me outside with a kiss on the cheek and suggests that I take a seat indoors next to the wood-burning stove, where three hikers from Buenos Aires are sharing rounds of yerba maté tea. After a few minutes of comparing soaked boots and sore knees, we’ve bonded in that insta-friend way which is common in spectacular high-altitude settings, and we soon switch from maté to the refugio’s home-brewed beer as we agree on a plan for tomorrow: a hike over a nearby crest to a glacier that flows into a half-frozen lake whose water is such a vibrant shade of turquoise that it glows as if lit from below.
It’s a promising start to my trek along a circuit of Argentinian refugios in northern Patagonia, all in the vicinity of the town of El Bolsón. The shelters, like many hikers’ huts in the Alps and elsewhere, are deliberately simple places whose main function is to provide walkers with a roof and a warm meal, eliminating the need to carry a tent, a camping stove, or packets of dehydrated peas. With hot showers, homegrown vegetables, homemade bread, and limitless campfire camaraderie, they make exceptionally welcoming bases for explorations of the Andean backcountry. And since most refugios are linked to one another by paths of varying length and difficulty, one can travel among them for days or even weeks while carrying little more than a sleeping bag and some cash. (Not much cash, in fact, since lodging rates are about fifteen dollars a night for a mattress on the floor in a group dorm.) The main expenditure is the effort required to reach the refugios since they’re not accessible by car; most are at least a four-hour walk from the nearest road.
In truth, I’d harbored a few doubts about spending almost two weeks on the refugio circuit, not least because it would require complete smartphone withdrawal: The huts are beyond the reach of cellular signals and are connected to the outside world only via two-way radio. Also, I’m literally a fair-weather walker; even though I’m always game for a vigorous day hike, I don’t even own a pair of waterproof pants, let alone a set of trekking poles or crampons. And I usually avoid any sleeping arrangements that put me in proximity to the snores of strangers. But I’d briefly sampled the refugios during two previous trips to Patagonia, after a local had told me that these laid-back, little-known huts epitomize the Argentinian notion of buena onda, or good vibes. And indeed, a couple of nights in the shelters had left me not only with stronger legs and clearer lungs but also with my address book full of new best friends with names like Ignacio and Mariela.
This time, my mission is to visit most of the network’s thirteen huts and map out an ideal route linking the best ones. I consider it an encouraging sign that two of the first people I meet are a pair of brothers from Switzerland, Alex and Tomas, who live with the Alps at their doorstep but who’ve opted to travel almost twenty hours to do their hiking here. Tomas, a risk manager for a bank, tells me that some of the mountain shelters in Europe are now so regimented that they require advance reservations with credit cards. And the supplies are delivered by helicopter. This is unthinkable in El Bolsón’s shelters, where most provisions arrive by horse and where the kitchen faucets dispense pure, untreated river water. (Even the water along the trails is safe to drink—a rare luxury for American hikers used to carrying iodine tablets or filter kits.) Although a couple of the huts have small generators, most rely on solar panels to provide just enough power for a few light bulbs and a radio. “Here, it’s like I imagine it was in the Alps fifty years ago,” says Lucía Saquero, who runs Hielo Azul with her husband, Lucas Angelino. “It never really gets crowded because very few travelers bother to walk up from the valley.”
Those who do are likely to visit only the most fully equipped refugio, Cajón del Azul, which I reach via a punishingly steep downhill path from Hielo Azul. (There’s also a shorter and easier trail that begins closer to town.) When I arrive at the cabin on a sunny afternoon, the scene looks so idyllic—with sheep grazing amid timber huts and babbling brooks, against a backdrop of granite cliffs and puffy clouds—that I half expect a unicorn to prance over and offer me a ride to the front door. The relatively low altitude (two thousand feet) means that chard leaves can grow to indecent proportions in the organic garden; refugio novices can remain at ease since the pantry is stocked with packaged cookies and the modern bathrooms feature flush toilets instead of the usual latrines. I reserve my spot in the dorm upstairs by unfurling my sleeping bag on a mattress, then lounge on the lawn before joining a French exchange student and an Argentinian kung fu instructor for an impromptu dinner of rice and vegetables.
Rob Howard captures the rugged beauty of the Patagonian backcountry. view slideshow
The owner, Atilio Csik, who is bantering with a couple of staffers and hikers in the kitchen (guests can cook their own food or order from the menu), has been living here year-round since he bought this plot of land more than thirty years ago. With his white beard and twinkly eyes, Atilio fits the prototype of the solitary refugiero—part wilderness sage, part cranky hermit. “There used to be nothing in these woods, nothing,” he says as he joins me for a glass of wine. “It was a place only for fanatics, like me.”
Cajón del Azul started out as Atilio’s house, built with his own hands—and with an obvious aversion to straight lines: Knotted trunks from the surrounding forest serve as the raw material for just about everything, from the walls to the sheepskin-topped chairs and the jumbo Flintstones-style doorknobs. During the nineties, as more and more people began to visit him unannounced, he turned the cabin into a refugio. Nowadays, on some nights during high season in January, more than 150 people pack the shelter or pitch their tents on the grounds. During the rest of the year there are often fewer than a dozen guests. Signs on the wall, in Spanish and English, explain refugio etiquette, which basically boils down to one golden rule: Leave everything as you found it. There’s a conspicuous lack of garbage cans, since guests are expected to carry their non-biodegradable trash away with them.
As I make my way deeper into the mountains, I begin to see that each of El Bolsón’s refugios are as unique as their caretakers and their settings. The most remote shelters are generally the most rustic, and when they’re in the right location—say, alongside a pristine lake at 4,700 feet, which is where I find Refugio Lago Natación—the lack of services can actually appear to be an advantage, like some hard-earned proof of authenticity. On the day I arrive at Lago Natación, the horses haven’t shown up with provisions, so there’s no milk for the coffee or cheese for the homemade pizza. Upstairs, the tattered foam mattresses look like they probably lost their bounce at some point in the 1990s. And unlike at most refugios, where staffers light a wood-burning furnace every evening to heat water for the shower, here we make do with icy water redirected from a nearby stream. But as five of us share a delicious pasta dinner, lit by a single candle (the guests tonight include an Argentinian professor in his fifties and a guy from Madrid who contributes some carrots for the sauce), the talk is not about what’s lacking but about how we’re all tempted to change our plans and stay an extra night.
A guide to trekking the Patagonia refugio circuit with recommended hiking routes, a trip to the Hielo Azul Glacier, and places to stay.
In the morning, one of the refugio’s helpers, Julien, asks me what day it is, with the matter-of-fact air of someone inquiring about the time. I make him guess. “Monday?” he offers. It’s Friday. He laughs and says, “It doesn’t make much difference up here,” then invites me to join him on his daily outing to collect the snow that’s used to preserve meat and dairy products in the refugio’s cooler. After five minutes, we arrive at a vast plain backed by a dazzling semicircle of snowcapped mountains. In some parts of the world, this kind of setting would rank as a major attraction in a national park; here it’s just one more unsigned, unexploited, empty piece of land. I count twelve separate waterfalls, some probably two hundred feet high, flowing into the grassy plain.
By the time I reach my fourth refugio—the particularly cozy El Retamal, which will become my favorite—the exhilaration and exhaustion from the walking has reached an ideal equilibrium, and I enter into that precious zone where relaxation comes on its own, without thought or effort. I’ve become a serious aficionado of maté, the warm herbal infusion that in this country is typically shared by groups of two or more—passed around in a hollow gourd with a silver-plated straw, as everyone takes turns sipping and talking (and talking). Although the centuries-old maté ritual, with its unrushed simplicity and easy conviviality, is probably more essential to the Argentinian identity than the tango or Eva Perón, many tourists in Buenos Aires never even manage to taste the stuff, since it’s usually shared privately, at home or among friends. But in the refugios, where most hikers and staffers are affably outgoing Argentines, “¿Quieres maté, Chris?” is a proposition I receive about five times a day. One drizzly afternoon while we’re sipping it in El Retamal’s kitchen, a hiker named Santiago offers to initiate me into another national pastime: truco, the bafflingly intricate card game that’s played with a forty-card deck featuring images of swords and gold coins. “Truco is not really about how good your hand is but about how well you can fake it,” Santiago says as he shuffles the cards. “Very Argentinian, no?” We play several rounds and I lose them all, but I gain a hiking partner for the next couple of days, as Santiago and I agree to walk together to a virgin lake about fifteen miles north of here.
But first, it’s New Year’s Eve, which even at these altitudes is synonymous with the traditional Argentinian asado, or barbecue. Word has been spreading on the trails that El Retamal’s caretaker, a wry Buenos Aires native named Mariano Monasterio, has ordered two lambs that he will spit roast for the occasion. Alex and Tomas, the Swiss brothers from Hielo Azul, are here, mixing with about a dozen of Mariano’s visiting relatives along with a typically diverse crowd that includes two bearded architects, a professional cellist, and only one other American—a writer based in India. As darkness falls and Mariano artfully shifts hot coals around beneath the two sizzling carcasses, the barbecue pit begins to double as a campfire, and a girl picks up a guitar and starts singing folk classics like “Zamba de Mi Esperanza,” a melancholy ballad about lost love and bright stars.
In the morning, I buy homemade bread for the road and set off toward another far-flung refugio, Los Laguitos. The following days, Santiago and I head out from there on a trek to the shore of immaculate, trout-filled Lake Soberanía. We’re now about thirteen hours from the nearest trailhead, which might explain why we have the entire lake to ourselves—and why, when we catch a small lizard that’s crawling on the rocks, it seems oddly unafraid of us, sitting calmly in our hands.
By now I’ve spent nine days in the woods, and heavy rains are said to be approaching, so it seems like the right time to head back into the valley to wash my clothes, ask if any world wars or plagues have broken out, and explore the town of El Bolsón (population roughly 25,000). Less well known than El Calafate and other tourism hubs in southern Argentina, El Bolsón offers most of the recognizable hallmarks of an Andean settlement—sublime scenery, poncho sellers, diesel fumes, and foreigners in Gore-Tex—but here it all comes in a New Age package.
Since the 1980s, when it declared itself the first “nuclear-free zone” in Latin America, El Bolsón has been Patagonia’s answer to Woodstock, with permaculture farms and Buddhist temples galore. (It’s also the hops capital of Argentina, which explains why most refugios brew their own beer.) Three days a week, there’s a popular outdoor market in the main square, where vendors hawk crafts and artisanal jams while casually smoking joints just yards away from the police station.
Lately, the town has been experiencing growing pains as waves of newcomers stream in to take advantage of the lax regulations by building clusters of homes on unoccupied land. But away from the center are some attractive new projects such as the ecolodge and organic farm La Confluencia, run by California native Mark Jordan on his prime six-hundred-acre plot. Conceived as a “luxury refugio,” the lodge has seven private rooms as well as a spa, a yoga studio, and a huge communal kitchen to encourage mingling; farm-to-table meals are prepared by a wisecracking young chef named Guillermina Lahitte, who informs me at breakfast, “We are milking a cow at eleven, if you’re interested.” Indeed I am, and when we head together to the barn, I meet Mika, the Jersey cow that had contributed the milk in my coffee.
But the skies are clearing and I’m eager to get back on the trail. So I’m glad when Nico Mazzini, a mountaineer and El Bolsón native I’d met on my first trip here, offers to join me for a couple more days of refugio-hopping, with some off-trail adventures thrown in. And so I find myself in a harness one afternoon, sliding down a sheer granite face in the company of three experienced climbers. We’re near an overlook called Paso de los Vientos, not far from El Retamal, when Nico points out a rare Andean condor—the first I’ve ever seen—with its ten-foot wingspan. Then he spots three more, which leads me to believe that condors have been soaring overhead all along and I just hadn’t noticed them. Nor had I noticed the tiny wild orchids he points out along the paths or the pink chaura berries, which are edible and delicious. “There’s so much wild fruit here—even strawberries—but most people walk right by without seeing it, let alone eating it,” Nico says.
The next morning, the four of us are above the tree line on a path below the 6,700-foot peak Dedo Gordo, heading toward the refugio of the same name, when Nico leads us to a massive snowbank with a stream running under it. In recent days, the sun-warmed water has melted away a tunnel beneath the mound of snow, creating a dramatically arched ice cave. We’re awestruck when we crawl inside and discover that it’s basically a fifty-yard-long igloo with a liquid floor. In the stream we spot a little tadpole, or renacuajo—one of those tongue-twisting Spanish words that, when pronounced with my thick American accent, elicits loud peals of laughter from the Argentines. As we walk for another hour, I’m asked to entertain the group by saying renacuajo several more times, until we come upon a swimming hole. The water is frigid, but we all exchange knowing looks: Some things simply must be done. We strip to our shorts and jump in. That night at the refugio there’s another campfire, more maté, and an improvised cheese fondue that, like any meal eaten after an eight-hour walk in the wilderness, tastes pretty much perfect.
Of course, there are a few low points during my refugio odyssey—some of them related to swollen joints and mysterious bruises. I spend one morning on the trails trying to convince myself that the sharp pain in my right knee is a good thing since it helps distract me from the dull ache in my left heel. Another downer: my many encounters with swarms of demonic tábanos, the blood-sucking insects—part jumbo horsefly, part Predator drone—that flourish here in January. (Tábanos are impervious to bug repellent, and are so annoying that some Patagonia travelers plan their entire trip around avoiding them.) And there is one distressing moment in El Retamal at 3 A.M., when a Belgian hiker sleeping a few mattresses over pierces the darkness with a panicked scream. “There’s something in here!” he says. “It keeps touching me!” Headlamps are turned on, and the perpetrator is located: It’s Mariano’s cat, Bettina, who on cold nights likes to sneak into the refugio and sleep on top of the guests.
Fortunately, however, like seemingly everyone on the refugio circuit, I spend most nights in a deep eight- or nine-hour slumber, which leaves me pondering one of the great mysteries of this trip: Why is it that I manage to sleep better on a rickety floor in a hut, surrounded by ten strangers, than I do at home in my own comfortable bed? Certainly the long walks have a lot to do with it, as does the pure mountain air and all those leisurely rounds of maté. But I suspect one key reason is Mother Nature’s de facto embargo on all phones and glowing screens. If the asado at El Retamal was my most memorable and genuinely gratifying New Year’s Eve in ages, that might have been because as the clock struck twelve, in a group of about forty people, not a single text or tweet was being sent, or received, or guiltily ignored.
Only once is there a jarring surprise. Near the Lake Natación refugio are small pockets where a telephone signal somehow gets through, and one afternoon, as a few of us are sitting around on the grass and staring at the lake, the silence is broken, violently, by the ringing of a woman’s cell phone. Clearly unnerved, she looks at the screen and says, “Oh, it’s a friend from Buenos Aires,” before putting it back in her pocket. We return our gaze to the water, where a kayaker has paddled out of sight, leaving the surface perfectly still.
Christopher Bagley
Based In: France and Spain
The most memorable moment reporting this story was... "Coming down from the mountains after nine days with no news or email. On the taxi ride to town, I asked the driver if I'd missed anything. 'Nothing!' he said. 'Just the usual b.s. If I were you, I'd go right back into the woods.'"
Bagley writes for W and other magazines. Recent assignments have taken him to Sri Lanka and the Basque Country.
Rob Howard
Based In: New York
**If I were to go back to Patagonia, I would make sure to... **"Ski. And actually, I am going back this month, to do just that. I've been to Patagonia many times, and the skiing at Bariloche is amazing."
Howard is working on a film about Delaware County in New York's Catskills, where he owns a farm.