Around Ushuaia - Cerro Guanaco & More

Over the past several decades, I’ve made at least ten trips to Ushuaia, often visiting the nearby Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego for its scenic mountains, forests and seashore. I’ve walked many of its trails on day hikes but, until last Friday, the weather had never cooperated for a climb to the slopes of Cerro Guanaco, a 967-meter summit that overlooks Lago Acigami (ex-Lago Roca). For what it's worth, there are no guanacos on this part of the island.

When I first saw Acigami, lenticular clouds hovered above it.

When I first saw Acigami, in early 1979, spectacular lenticular clouds hovered above it and, even though the scan of my old slide may be imperfect, it still brings back fond memories. Later, I hiked the undulating trail along the lake’s north shore to Hito XXIV, a marker that indicates the border between Argentina and Chile (on the Chilean side, its name is Lago Errázuriz). In fact, I have crossed the border there—technically illegally, even if the chances of being apprehended in an utterly unpopulated area are slim (it’s worth mentioning that a Chilean friend, exploring the other side of the border, got lost here, eventually needing help from Ushuaia’s Chilean consulate to return to his own country).

Where the trail divides...

A (somewhat exaggerated) warning at the trailhead

This time, though, my wife and I took the fork that leads along the Arroyo Guanaco and then steeply—very steeply at times—to the summit of the peak. Signs at the trail’s starting point inform hikers that it’s difficult and requires good footwear and clothing, but we found ourselves removing layers in this notoriously capricious climate. Part of it goes through turbales (peatlands) that can get soggy, but there was little evidence of any recent rain—if anything, the rocks and soil along the route were mostly slippery dry. Another hazard was the density of tree roots from the southern beeches that lined the trail—it would be easy to trip over them.

The dense southern beech forests of Cerro Guanaco

We got an early start, around 10 a.m., but before long we found ourselves being passed by younger hikers. That doesn’t especially bother me, as hiking is not a race, but it was annoying that a couple of them found it necessary to share their musical preferences on a quiet backwoods trail. Fortunately, they were fairly quickly out of sight (and audio range), and the rest of the hikers who passed us were polite and quiet.

A footbridge over the Arroyo Guanaco, about midway to the mirador

It’s worth adding that the few signs and trail markers are unclear about the distance and elevation, so we weren’t quite sure what distance was left to the summit. Still, after two hours or so, we came upon a mirador (panoramic point) that gave us views of the lake and surrounding summits, and the end-of-the-road at Bahía Lapataia. It’s there, 3079 km from Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, that coastal Ruta 3 reaches its terminus.

A view of Acigami and surrounding peaks from the mirador

After a breather at the panoramic point, with our legs and lungs resting from the effort, we decided not to continue to the summit (according to my phone, we had walked only two miles [about 3.2 km] to an elevation of about 1,350 feet [some 410 meters]). That left quite a climb to the top, and we had hoped to visit Estancia Harberton that afternoon but, after a quick lunch at the park’s Alakush visitor center, we decided it was logistically impractical, even with long daylight hours.

A view of Lago Escondido from Paso Garibaldi, on eastbound Ruta 3 from Ushuaia

Perhaps it was a rationalization, but my wife also wanted to visit other sights in the park, such as Lapataia and Bahía Redonda, and we also thought we’d take advantage of our rental car to see the mountains east of Ushuaia, beyond the Harberton turnoff as far as Paso Garibaldi, with its views of Lago Escondido. We eventually returned to our accommodations around 8:30 p.m., in time for dinner at a fine new restaurant—appropriately named Paso Garibaldi!

New in Ushuaia, Paso Garibaldi is an excellent dinner choice.

Two years earlier, on my previous visit to Tierra del Fuego, I had attempted to visit Arakur Ushuaia, a mountainside spa-hotel with panoramic views of the Beagle Channel and the nearby Cordillera Vinciguerra (part of which lies within the national park. At that time, though, I drove into a whiteout snowstorm about halfway up, and that obliged me to return to sea level. With an early departure the next day, I was unable to see the hotel, but this time we had a free morning that allowed us to take their hourly waterfront shuttle to the top.

From its promontory, the Arakur Ushuaia offers expansive views of the city, the Beagle Channel, and other sights.

Though we didn’t stay at the Arakur, we did enjoy a hike through their own hillside Reserva Natural Cerro Alarkén, which offers more than 100 hectares of southern beech forests, peatlands and wildflower literally just outside the hotel’s doors. Later, we sat down to lunch at La Cravia, the main restaurant at a 131-room hotel that houses substantial numbers of cruise ship passengers (Ushuaia’s a key airport for round-the-Horn cruise changeovers and for Antarctica-bound vessels). On this afternoon, though, the cruisers hadn’t yet arrived, and even the spa had only a handful of patrons in its indoor/outdoor pools.

From the Cerro Alarkén reserve, there are both ocean and mountain views.

Reaching My Peak (in the Andes)

As I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Mt. Rainier was always a looming presence – at least when the rainclouds cleared enough for us to see it from my hometown of Tacoma or the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Its 14,410-foot (4,392-meter) summit inspired me to think of climbing it one day, but that was something so far beyond my parents’ experience that, when they dismissed the idea, I never pursued it further. Rather, I had to settle for car-camping within Rainier’s shadow.

After moving to California, though, I became an enthusiastic hiker, if never a true mountaineer. I spent weekends and weeks hiking through the Sierra Nevada and, whenever possible, I’d climb the most accessible peaks. I never did any technical climbing, but I did reach the granite summit of 13,060-foot (3,981-meter) Seven Gables in the company of Bronski, my beloved first malamute (pictured above).

Then, in the early 1980s, I spent most of a year in northernmost Chile, researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herders in Parque Nacional Lauca. I lived in the tiny Aymara Indian village of Parinacota (pictured above), which sits at 14,400 feet (4,400 meters), near the snow-covered sister volcanoes known collectively as the Pallachatas (6,336- meter (20,782-foot) Parinacota and and 6,282-meter (20,610-foot) Pomerape).

That sort of mountaineering was beyond my abilities, but I kept an eye on nearby Cerro Guaneguane, an extinct volcano with no permanent snow (it's obscured by cloud in the background of the photo above). The base was easy walking distance from my accommodations with the Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF, which manages Chile’s national parks), but it still took me a while to work up the initiative to climb it. At that altitude, my throat was dry every night and even sleeping could be an effort. Parinacota now has a simple accommodations in Aymara-run Albergue Uta Kala (pictured below).

At 5,097 meters (16,722 feet), Guaneguane never presented the technical challenges that Mt. Rainier or Parinacota would have, but it’s not a casual hike. In the first instance, there’s the altitude but, living in the village, I was already acclimated. Secondly, there was the terrain – it was unrelentingly steep and, in many parts, soft. Hiking up volcanic ash often meant two steps forward and one step back, but the reward was spectacular panoramas of the snow-topped Pallachatas (pictured below) and the Bolivian altiplano (high steppe). It was, literally, the high point of my life.