Mount Fitz Roy hike El Chalten, Patagonia
Mount Fitz Roy and Laguna De Los Tres, Patagonia.
Mount Fitz Roy and Laguna De Los Tres hike from El Chalten, Patagonia. A stunning one-day hike. Our experiences and everything you need to know.
El Chaltén is harsh, isolated, spectacularly beautiful
El Chaltén is a hiking hotspot in Patagonia. It’s harsh, isolated, spectacularly beautiful and quite unlike anywhere we’d been before. It also requires a bit more planning than many other options - we hope this blog can help you with some tips that we learned along the way.
Firstly, to consider before you arrive:
● Bring layers! We were there in the middle of Patagonian summer and it went down to 3°C in the town and colder higher up.
● Due to the changeable and unpredictable weather, you need a few days there to more reliably target at least one of the big hikes. They’re exposed and the winds really are savage, making them potentially unsafe.
● Be ready for “off” days hanging around the town when the weather isn’t doing you any favours. The internet is patchy-at-best everywhere in El Chaltén and there’s no 3G/4G (the dreaded “edge”), so get your downloads done before. Possibly you could do a trip elsewhere; Perito Moreno glacier perhaps being your closest bet but still not close at 2-3 hours driving away. We did this from El Calafate, which requires less driving, and would recommend!
● Stock up on pesos. Many places don’t accept card - there is an ATM but it isn’t reliable and has withdrawal limits.
El Chalten, Patagonia
Mount Fitz Roy and Laguna De Los Tres
Had we missed our weather window?
Arriving into El Chaltén on the bus from El Calafate in the evening, we were immediately feeling hard-done by. Blue skies and little breeze, we were convinced we’d missed our weather window. Nonetheless, the buzzy little town picked our spirits up again - the many cheery down-jacket clad people milling around and the awe of the scenery with the encompassing snowcapped mountains was special even just from the town.
El Chaltén is centred almost entirely on catering for hiking, giving it a “base camp” feel and offers an air of anticipation as people plan their next days’ adventures. It’s small (end-to-end is 10 minutes’ walk) but is packed with charming and varied cafes, bars, restaurants and places to stay.
Hoping to enjoy the tail-end of the good weather, we decided to do get straight on a big-hitting hike first and set our alarms for 6am departure for Laguna de los Tres the following day.
Luck was on our side
We awoke to dream conditions and set off with more sandwiches, empanadas, fruit, biscuits etc than we could get through in a week. The track is easy to find and signposted clearly throughout though we used the maps.me app to track progress as it gives a neat little elevation profile (and is free!). The route kicks up pretty sharply from the start but rewards you with view after view after view. The valley on one side then inching closer to Mt. Fitz Roy on the other.
Two hours in, having the best morning, we reached the final ascent. Having read some blogs for the walk, there was repeated mention of the final 400m somehow taking an hour, which we naturally disregarded as not being applicable to us, sounding like preposterously slow progress. Of course we were humbled and it took the requisite hour - super steep and technical with big steps up and lots of loose rock (not quite “scree” exactly but close enough), so good hiking footwear felt essential. We made it though, with Fitz Roy and its Laguna looking in full glory, probably the best view I’ve ever been lucky enough to see. So striking and rugged. We settled down for some well-earned lunch at the lake, making a small dent in what we then realised was an embarrassingly large amount of food, watched the condors watching us way overhead, with their enormous 11 foot wingspan.
That humbling 400m was just as difficult in reverse, though the hiking poles we’d borrowed from our hosteleria came into their own. After an hour of focus and thankfully no spills, the rest of the route was easier going. The up-route got busy with other hikers, providing lots of opportunity to practice our “gracias”s, “de nada”s, nodding, smiling and all that fun stuff, while passing / letting people pass. By the end we were pretty shot - around 7 hours walking in total, but grinning ear-to-ear after what we agreed was our favourite ever day’s hiking.
El Chaltén is centred almost entirely on catering for hiking, giving it a “base camp” feel and offers an air of anticipation as people plan their next days’ adventures.
The following 3 days were accompanied by customary Patagonian weather with winds that felt like they’d take the walls off where we were staying. But we didn’t mind, still with our post Laguna de los Tres glow. So day 2 we just chilled around the town, coffees, maté and Kindles.
Hiking to Laguna Torre
With the forecast (wholly unreliable though it was) showing less wind for day 3, we set our alarms for another 6am leave for another of the bigger hikes - Laguna Torre. The early starts were worth it, though we weren’t hardcore enough for the summit-by-sunrise gang, we felt like we had the trail to ourselves until the return journey. It was cold and visibility was less perfect than day 1, but was another superb hike.
Quite different to Laguna de los Tres - by the river for much of it and with more vegetation and wildlife (spotted Andean Hares and Deer, plus the condors continuing to check we were behaving). It was less demanding too, “only” 5 hours and less technical, but Laguna de los Tres kept number 1 spot for us.
Our final day was another windy one so we did a couple of the shorter walks that didn’t get too high, each around 1.5 hours: Mirador de los Cóndores and Chorillo del Salto. Mirador de los Cóndores has some excellent views, particularly of El Chaltén and Lago Argentino and some boards so we could learn about our carrion-eating guardians. Chorillo del Salto was ok, flat which offered some relief and ending at a waterfall which was nice but not so special, by comparison.
How spoiled we’d become!
Cost-wise, once you’re there, it was relatively inexpensive
You will pay roughly £50 a night for accommodation including breakfast and then £30 or so for packed lunch and an evening meal out for the two of us (hikes were all free). If you pay for your accommodation in local currency when you arrive, you’ll save roughly half what is quoted in your home currency. This is due to the differences between what the “official” exchange rate, which is what booking.com etc use, and the real one. It’s all rather complicated though - I recommend reading up on it before you come!
If you have the opportunity, we’d thoroughly recommend El Chaltén, we’d gladly go back (there are plenty more hikes that we didn’t manage to fit in).