Picture this. It is almost fully summertime here in Patagonia. This means we have been enjoying 80 degree days full of blazing sunshine and milder nights in which you can leave your zero degree sleeping bag a bit unzipped. Beach days (without the beach) on the grass in front of the house, chatting, drinking mate, and sunning our faces. Also, as a by product of the heat, we've been enjoying competitions on how many tabanos (flies from hell) we can kill at one time. The little beasts are incredibly slow and if you let them land on you, you can give them a good swat with one hand and successfully kill more than one in a go. Last week, a bunch of us traipsed down to the confluence of the Baker and Chacabuco rivers to camp. We all went for dips in the water and then sat on the shores of the Baker river sunning in only our bikinis. We fished and made a small beach fire and roasted trout by the fire for dinner. Woke up in the morning and fell out of my tent into the water of the Baker and although cold, the warm wind and air dried me off fast. We were also rewarded with one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen and managed to make it down to Cochrane for the late spring rodeo, which was a pretty awesome time.
In light of all of this beautiful weather, Justin and I decided to take a hike one lovely day when the weather had turned a bit cooler and the hope of escaping the tabanos was high in our hearts. Up up up we went to Tamanguito - a mountain right by the estancia. As we reached near the summit of Tamanguito, we noticed an ominous cloud building just to our right, right over Tamango, the mountain we were trying to summit that day (just a few hundred meters higher than Tamanguito, but a fair way of hiking across the ridge to get there). The cloud got closer and closer and with a grin on both of our faces, we scampered across the ridge towards Tamango. Not moments later the snow began to fall. And then the snow REALLY began to fall. 45 minutes later, we were covered in snow, laughing hysterically, and trying to take pictures without getting our cameras too wet. It actually felt like Christmas back home to have snow falling all around us on the top of the mountain. We couldn't actually see the summit of Tamango, so we decided to turn back. I think we were actually quite close to it now that I can see it from my comfy place in front of the fire in our lovely house. We stopped briefly in the downpour to try to drink some mate but were quickly driven on by wet cold feet and hands. Quickly going down the 4 hours we went up, we dropped out of the snow line in 4 kilometers or so and had a nice open valley open up in front of us as we left the clouds of Tamango behind.
All in all, it was a pretty spectacular day and a lovely surprise for Christmas in the middle of summer in Patagonia.
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