Martial Glacier

The trailhead for Martial Glacier sits just a short taxi ride from downtown Ushuaia, which makes it one of the easier serious hikes I’ve done anywhere — you can be eating breakfast in town and standing at a retreating glacier’s edge within a couple of hours. Lia and I took the chairlift partway up on a clear morning, more out of curiosity than necessity, and then continued on foot up a steep trail through lenga forest that thinned quickly into scree and exposed rock as we climbed.

The views back over Ushuaia arrive almost immediately and keep improving with every switchback. The town’s corrugated rooftops shrank into a bright, scattered patchwork below us, the Beagle Channel stretched out flat and silver behind it, and the mountains of Isla Navarino rose across the water in Chile. I stopped more times than the trail difficulty justified, purely to look back down. Lia pushed on ahead and later admitted she’d done the same thing, just slightly further up the trail where I couldn’t see her doing it.

The glacier itself, once we reached it, was smaller and more fragile-looking than I’d braced for, and that turned out to be the actual point of the hike. Martial has retreated dramatically over the past century — photographs from the early 1900s, displayed at a small sign near the base, show ice extending hundreds of meters further down the valley than it does now. Standing at its current edge, looking at the exposed, scoured rock where ice used to be, the retreat stopped being an abstract statistic and became something I could physically stand inside. The remaining ice still puts on a show up close: a fractured, crevassed tongue clinging to the upper slope, streaked with rock debris and meltwater channels that ran loud with runoff the whole time we were there.

In winter this entire slope becomes something else entirely. Cerro Martial hosts a small ski area right above town, modest by international standards but notable for a specific, slightly absurd distinction: it’s among the southernmost places on Earth where you can put on skis, a claim that Ushuaia locals mention with evident pride. Further along the valley, Cerro Castor operates as a larger, more serious resort and generally takes the “southernmost ski resort” title in the marketing materials, but Martial’s runs come with a view over the Beagle Channel that I’d argue no other ski slope on the continent can match. I didn’t ski it — we were there in summer — but I stood at the base station imagining it, and it seemed like exactly the kind of thing worth coming back for.

When to go: November through March for the hike itself, when the trail is clear and the glacier viewing is at its best. June through September brings the ski season, short days and long shadows over the channel, for anyone willing to trade summer light for the novelty of skiing this close to the end of the world.