Trip to Glacier Perito Moreno

After more than hour journey from El Calafate to the glacier Perito Moreno you can enjoy a typical Patagonian landscape – an immense windswept plains and moreover snow-and ice covered summits of the Andes.
 

The path leads along the shores of Lake Argentino, which looks from air view like a octopus. You can clearly see that it is of glacial origin – the imposing beauty of glaciers Perito Moreno, Mayo, Onelli, Speggazzini and Upsala ending in the lake and admired by tourists is only a faint shadow of what was once here

.The weather is typical Patagonian here – wind blows, it's snowing/ra­ining and after a while it is sunny again and this repeats again and again.

A few kilometers before the entry to the glacier there is the first outlook of this wonder of nature. From the mountains towering behind the glacier you may get the impression that they may be even 7– thousand meters high. But the peaks have actually around 2500 meters above sea level.

Already the first glance at the glacier will take your breath away. Monumental four and a half kilometers wide and twelve kilometers long valley is entirely filled with ice.

The whole slope opposite to the glacier is covered with wooden sidewalks and outlooks connected by endless staircase. If you want to go through all that, count with around two hours. All these sidewalks are made ​​too massive and unwieldy, so it’s not very aesthetic here.

Every now and then you hear a loud bang – a floe falls into the lake and makes a big wave.

A lot cruising boats sail around the lake Argentino almost up to the edge of the glacier. Although most of them have several floors, they look compared with the glacier like toys.

The paths lead directly up to the water, where you can admire flying floes.

This whole place is unfortunately renowned for bad weather and a lot of visitors are disappointed that they could see only the edge of the glacier because of the mist or rain. So if the sun shines at least a little, you should be a really happy.

Some views may give you impression that you are somewhere in Antarctica – the landscape looks really very harshly and icy.

The highest mountain in the background is pretty jagged peak of Cerro Pietrobelli (2 850 m asl).
 

Floes fly slowly on Lago Argentino and it seems almost impossible that its water level is only in 179 meters above sea level. The surrounding ridges are in around 1200–1400 meters above sea level.