Glacier Perito Moreno: Way colder than the coast

When I heard that we were going to see a glacier I was thinking, “cool, a glacier, I’ve never seen one before, I bet it’s huge!” Apparently I had no idea how huge. After driving 45 minutes on a straight but thankfully paved road that turned into a curvy and then dirt-curvy road we got our first views of the glacier. We went to the main touristy area with all of the miradors and short little walks. They had recently built a new walkway that was nice. At the mirador itself the view was incredible! The glacier looked so tiny below me though I knew that it was huge. The face of the glacier averages 50 meters tall. I know, Huge. That has nothing to say to the 130 meters that sit below the water. Because it had been warm the day before the glacier was especially active. Every couple of minutes you could see a huge chunk fall and hit the water, and then a couple seconds later you could hear the big boom. I would have never imagined that a glacier could be that loud.

At 1:30 we were rushing a little to get to the port to catch our boats. It was time for Jack, my mom and me to take our boat out to hike on the glacier. Eliot, because he is 7, was not able to hike on the glacier. Instead he was going with my dad on a boat tour. He was really bummed even though we assured him that he was going to have fun too. My mom, Jack and I took our boat to a small little port next to the glacier. We did a little hiking to get closer to the glacier. We were divided into groups of who speaks English and who speaks Spanish. Everyone else in the English group except for us was from Holland. They eventually moved a family from Madrid to our group though because the Spanish group was too big.

We got crampons at little racks up next to the glacier. They worked, but they were not very nice ones. It was just a rectangular outline with spikes. I could not help thinking how much it would hurt if someone stepped on your foot wearing a pair of crampons. They were also incredibly heavy.

The first step on the glacier felt really cool. In truth it did not feel much different than the ground, but to think that I was walking on the glacier was really cool. The walk was not too hard and Jack and I got to walk in the front with the two twin 13 year olds from Madrid. We got to fill our water bottles up at glacial springs. At the end we had alfajores and whiskey on glacial ice (for kids glacial water on glacial ice). After that hike we were all really cold (my hand could barely take off my crampons).

We took a boat back to a disappointed Eliot who was cheered up a little bit by bottle of glacier water and the front seat of our no airbag car. Because the day had really started at about 12:00 it could not be considered long, but by the end of the day everyone felt like they had been on the road since 7:00. Jack fell asleep on my lap, Eliot on my shoulder and me on my shoulder. We slept all the way back to the hostel.

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