Laguna Torre

We awoke for the first day of a week long backpacking trip. The packs were weighted down nicely as we left to go to the Ranger Station before heading out. We were hoping that the ranger that we had talked to the previous evening would be there, but instead there was another lady there. She was still friendly, but not quite as helpful. We asked her if we could stay at the climbers camp to climb Cerro Madsen, but she kind of laughed it off. It made it seem like the peak would be an easy prospect.
We started from the Ranger Station hoping to run into the trail. Dad thought that it started along the river, but the only thing that we seemed to find was a garbage dump. We pulled out the map and sure enough we were off course. We wandered through the outskirts of town before finally running into a string of social trails that took us to our desired trail.

The trail had a slight uphill grade to it, but nothing remarkably challenging which was good since we had a weeks worth of food and gear in our packs. We were hoping that we would get some good views of Cerro Torre, but no such luck. The sky was clouded over and though we could make out a few of the lesser peaks, the main draw of Cerro Torre was not in sight.
We continued on getting to a trail junction that took us along the Rio Fitz Roy. This river took us to Campo de Agostini where we strategically camped near the edge of camp to try to keep the masses of people out of our campsite. This is an
extremely popular national park in Argentina, but there were all two campsites for backpackers in this entire place. Campo de Agostini was the second most popular, but still planned to fill with dozens and dozens of backpackers by the time the evening came along. We set up the tent and checked out the facilities. I expected their backcountry toilets to be something of a high standard. It was filled to the tip top with human waste. Here we were in the height of the season and there was no way to use the toilet. No wonder there were pretty little white flowers (toilet paper) behind every tree.

We could now day hike out to the Mirador Maestri. This was a place to check out the glacier and Cerro Torre. The hike was easier without the heavy packs, but the cold wind pounded us coming down from the high peaks and glaciers. We even spotted some condors flying in the sky as we hiked along. There was no one point that let us know that we were at the lookout, but we figured when the main trail ended and a bunch of little social trails started this was good enough.
We enjoyed the great views and then hiked back
toward camp.

We took a slight side trip near camp and went to where there was a climber access trail across the river. I looked at the set up for the bridge and thought it to be an awesome idea. What better way to keep inexperienced people from accessing an area than to build a bridge where folks with technical skills would be the only one able to cross it. If we could only come up with ideas like this in Zion.

The rest of the evening was spent reading and playing cribbage. All was going well until I could not find my glasses. I had been wearing them because my eye was still not very clear from being poked in the eye by a stick on Checkerboard Mesa. I looked everywhere and did not find them. I thought about it and realized they must be at Mirador Maestri. I even made the attempt to go back out there, but impending darkness and high gusting winds made me second guess my decision. I unfortunately littered my glasses somewhere along the way or out on the lookout itself. Frustrating, but not game changing.
Our camp turned out to be somewhat quiet as we had at least 7 feet of space on any side of our tent. I think we chose a good location, but I couldn't believe that so many people were coming in late into the evening. We got a bit of rain, but nothing major. We only had one night here as tomorrow we were off to Poincenot with views of Monte Fitz Roy.