Laguna Torre

Everyone who treks in El Chaltén does Laguna de los Tres. Fewer people make time for Laguna Torre, which I’ve never understood, because it might be the stranger and more haunting of the two. Lia and I set out on a grey, low-cloud morning when the forecast for Fitz Roy looked hopeless, and the trail to Laguna Torre turned out to be exactly the kind of hike that grey weather suits. It follows the Rio Fitz Roy upstream through lenga forest and then out into open, windswept valley, the peaks staying hidden for most of the approach, which somehow made the eventual reveal hit harder.

Cerro Torre is a different kind of mountain than its famous neighbor. Where Fitz Roy is broad-shouldered and cathedral-like, Cerro Torre is a single needle of granite, ice-plastered near its summit, so narrow and so vertical that it looks almost unfinished — like the rest of the mountain got planed away by wind and left only the spike. Its first claimed ascent, in 1959 by Cesare Maestri, remains one of the most disputed climbs in mountaineering history; Maestri’s account was challenged for decades, and the ambiguity still clings to the peak like the cloud that usually wraps its summit. Standing at the lake and looking up at it, I found the controversy entirely believable. It’s hard to picture anyone getting up there at all, let alone the way he described it.

The lake itself sits at the base of the Torre Glacier, and the water carries a heavier, greyer cast than the turquoise you see elsewhere in the region — glacial silt in a different concentration, our trekking guide told us, though I suspect the low light that day had something to do with it too. Chunks of ice calved from the glacier drifted near the shore, and every so often a distant crack echoed down from somewhere up in the ice, a reminder that the mountain in front of us was still actively shedding itself. We sat on a rock at the shoreline eating the sandwiches we’d packed that morning, wind cutting straight through my jacket, and watched the cloud lift for maybe four minutes total — just enough to see the full needle of the summit before it vanished again.

The trail continues beyond the main viewpoint to the Maestri camp, a base used by climbers attempting the peak, and further still to a mirador that gets you closer to the glacier’s tongue, though the wind up there gets serious enough that we turned back before reaching it. What I appreciated most about the day, in hindsight, was how few people we shared it with. The Laguna de los Tres trail can feel like a procession by mid-morning. This one, even at the height of season, left long stretches where it was just Lia, me, the wind, and a mountain that seemed determined not to fully show itself.

When to go: October through March for stable trekking weather, with the same caveat that applies to all of El Chaltén — the mountain sets the schedule, not the calendar. I’d actually recommend attempting this hike on a day when Fitz Roy looks socked in; Cerro Torre’s drama holds up in flat light in a way Fitz Roy’s doesn’t, and you’ll have the trail closer to yourself.