Cerro Torre in Photographs

Nov 062008

Selections of Flickr photographs from the Cerro Torre hike in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, Patagonia, Argentina.

Click on any photograph to comment or see a larger version on Flickr.

All photographs by Tanveer Badal.

Cerro Torre, Patagonia

Wikipedia fact: “The top of the mountain often has a mushroom of rime ice, formed by the constant strong winds, increasing the difficulty of reaching the actual summit.” The first “undisputed” ascent up Cerro Torre was made by a team of Italians in 1974. It took them two months!

The bluest parts of the glaciers are the oldest.

Those tiny dots in the foreground are our friends, Alex and the two Dutch girls.

Cerro Torre is the highest peak of the four-mountains chain. The others are: Torre Egger, Punta Herron, and Cerro Stanhardt. Eat your heart out, Jon Krakauer!

It was a beautiful morning for a hike in the park.

We never got tired of this view the entire hike back.

During the hike, we let a group of Europeans go ahead of us and we followed their footsteps on the snow-covered trails. Occasionally, we would come across several sets of footsteps that went in a bunch of different directions. Later, they confessed that they had wandered off the trail in search of a shortcut and almost fell into a not-quite-frozen lake. Ahh, silly Europeans!

At times it was difficult to distinguish between a glacier and a mountain because of all the recent snow that had fallen creating a blanket of white.

With Cerro Torre forever covered in clouds in the background.

The elusive Cerro Torre is hidden behind clouds in the background (you can just see the tip). It was too cold and windy across the open lake for us to hang around for the skies to clear, but we got some good looks on the way back.

During warmer months, it would’ve been interesting to see the lake filled with water at the base of the glacier, but we enjoyed the more rare frozen perspective just the same.