El Calafate 1rst glacier tour (Patagonia con't)

We are still playing catch up with our blogging. This is El Calafate known for its huge glaciers and mountian terrain. The town of El Calafate is about 50 miles from the mountians and has a desert like terrain (most of the places on the east side of the Andes are this way). We have a lot of pictures and videos for this one as we took a boat tour of the southern part of the national park to see our first glacier.



View from inside the Taxi comming from the airport. You can see the mountains in the background.

One of the many four legged friends I have been making. Lots of strays but they are well fed and very friendly every one seems to pitch in to help them out.

We thought it was funny that the name of the place we were staying was called Santa Monica aparts (Go figure).

Ok so lets cut to the chase. Fist we took a bus (check out the rainbow out of the window)

Then a boat and yes it was cold on the boat!

Then we started seeing these little guys.

Then we saw big ones floating by like this one.

And yes they really are that blue color. They told us the darker the blue the more compacted the ice is. It is actually compressed snow under years and years of pressure then it turns into ice.

And then finally we met up with actual ice shelf - it is huge! At least 300 to 400ft high and about 1 mile wide. This is the Upsala glacier at the south end of the park.

It goes all the way back into the horzion over the mountains. Crazy!

This is a good video of the Glacier. On the left side of the Glacier I zoom in on a white dot. That is a boat a big boat (200+ people on board) just to give you an idea of the enormous scale.

Here is a good picture showing how it flows down from the mountains.

Hey where did you get that from!?

A good fade away shot as we're leaving it is at least a mile wide.

We cruised over to the left side of the glacier and got a little closer right before we left. This is another video.

As we were heading away from the glacier on the boat we saw this one floating by. The hole is probably 20ft or more in diameter.

They say the hole starts out small, usually caused from water running through it when it was still attached to the glacier, but widens after it breaks off, due to the wind whipping through it.

The last part of the trip before the boat took us back was to hike to another glacier. Acually it is three glaciers that at one time all connected.

We docked in a small little cove next to the mountian. They dropped us off for about 1 1/2 hours. (thats our boat, pretty big and yet next to the glacier it is tiny)

The odd thing is, even though we are around all this ice there is not a lot of snow nor is it that cold. We had to walk through a lush dense forest to see the other glacier.

A lot of green here, very surreal!

So it is kinda hard to see but after hiking through the forest for 15minutes there are 3 glacial flows combining at this point. One of them straight down the middle of the river, the other can be seen coming down the mountain on the right and the third is on right also but further back into the fog (can't really see the 3rd one though). At one point these were all touching 30-40 years ago.

Here is a close up of the one on the right.

This a good video of the lake and the glacier that we hiked to, there are lots of small iceburgs floating around.

As we were heading back the sun came out and reflected off the water. This is the actual color of the glacial water. They call it a milky turquoise from all the sediment that the glacier drags in off the rocks.