There are numerous hikes throughout the park, but we had our eye on the “O Trek,” a six to 10 day trek over a span of 130 kilometres.  This would be our longest multi-day trek to date and we hoped we were prepared.  There are a series of refugios (huts) along the trail offering accommodations and sustenance ranging from camping and eating your own pre-packed food, to sleeping your own room inside a cabin with pre-made meals.  It all depends on how much you are willing to spend and how comfortable you would like to be!  We packed in our own food and slept in our trusty MEC two-person tent.

Perito Moreno is monstrous with a width of 5 kilometres, an average height of 240 feet, and a total ice depth of 558 feet. It rests in the Argentino Lake, moving slowly across at a rate of 1.1 to 2.64 metres per day.  This movement is due to the pressure and force of the glacier’s weight. It is one of the only glaciers in the world that is actually advancing, not retreating.

The Carretera Austral (otherwise known as Chile’s Route 7 and translated as “Southern Road”) is a highway that runs from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins over a span of 1,240 kilometres through Northern Patagonia.  In 1976 Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (what a guy!  Check out this Wikipedia article for his messy history) ordered the Chilean army to commence construction of the road.

More than 100 years ago Chilean cattlemen made their way by foot through the Cochamó Valley to the Argentinian border to trade dried and smoked fish and shellfish for Argentinian beef cattle.  Rumour has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid drove their cattle from their ranch in Argentina for this exact purpose.

Anyway, we got to chatting with Ian after seeing his British Columbia license plates and he mentioned that during his time in Chile he housesat for an American woman and her two dogs. This piqued our interest so we e-mailed Lorraine (a fellow Pan Am traveller; check out her bio!) to see if she needed anyone for the month of January.

From the Paso Internacional Los Libertadores (Argentina/Chile border) we snaked our way downwards from 10, 500 feet, completing the 29 hard switchbacks carved into the Andes.