It was at the entrance to this prehistoric forest that we encountered our first loner, a man who lived with his dog in a trailer in the visitor parking lot. He was there to guard the landmark from looters who had all but stripped the landscape of its relics. Eager to talk, the man shared his woes. Work was hard to come by in Patagonia, he told us, unless you were employed by the oil industry. But it was to oil that people around here gave up their souls, he said, and he preferred to keep his, even if it meant policing a site devoid of life.
We left the park, our fingers numb from the cold, and soon encountered fields of oil drills burrowing into the tundra, just as the ranger had indicated. By the time we reached Comodoro Rivadavia, a city on the east coast, the landscape had been claimed by cheap hotels, fast-food joints and car dealerships.
The evening upon us, we turned south down Route 3. A full moon appeared, illuminating the Atlantic Ocean, and revealing the sleek outlines of five southern whales. The cars in front of us stopped, one by one. We pulled alongside them and joined the small crowd that had gathered on the cliffs to watch the whales slip through the water.
Early the next morning, we arrived in San Julián — the port where Ferdinand Magellan had landed in 1520. Today, Puerto San Julián has the feeling of an impermanent town trapped in permanent dusk. With only seven hours of sunlight left, we changed our trajectory, and turned northwest to El Calafate.
Accustomed to coming upon a town every 30 minutes, we hardly flinched when the gas light on the dashboard flickered red. But as the road stretched before us with no signs of civilization, and the sun starting to set, we began to panic.
Just as we had given up hope, a rest stop appeared in the distance. It looked like a trucker stop from the 1950s mired in the American Badlands, and consisted of a diner and a gas pump. The outside of the diner was plated with tin. The gas pump had a manual lever. In the throes of impending doom, we felt both saved and spooked.
We swerved into the lot. From the windows of the restaurant, four sets of eyes followed us. They belonged to the owner of the place, his wife and two truckers who, like us, were making their way across Patagonia. We asked for gas, only to be told that the pump had been empty for years.
My friend went outside with the owner to check the gas tank while I stayed at the counter. His wife watched me as I sipped a Coke, sizing me up as if I were a girl who had gone and gotten herself into trouble with the law. A few minutes later, her husband returned, informing us that we had just enough gas to get to the next pump, 37 miles down the road in Esperanza.
Esperanza turned out to be another frontier town consisting of a strip club, a bar and some ramshackle houses. We careened into the station, and promptly ran out of gas. After our heartbeats had steadied (and I had downed a beer), we headed off into the dusk to El Calafate.
El Calafate is the gateway to the 1.5- million-acre Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, where the Perito Moreno Glacier resides. While 95 percent of the earth’s glaciers are retreating, the Perito Moreno Glacier has remained stable, making it a unique phenomenon in a world transformed by global warming.
Until recently, El Calafate was a sleepy town, a trading post for the ranching industry that dominates the area. Access to the glaciers was difficult until 2000, when an airport opened 10 miles outside town. In 2001 El Calafate had a population of 6,500 people. Today, it is estimated to be 22,000.
“Without the glaciers, all of this would not exist,” Bruno Lamenti, the owner of a wool goods store, told me, gesturing at the Avenida del Libertador, the main street of town, which is exploding with hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. On the outskirts, luxury homes are sprouting up so quickly that the roads around them have yet to be paved. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president of Argentina, has a country house on one of these streets. Originally drawn by the splendor that surrounds the valley, the Argentinian jet-set continues to flock to the town, which has developed something of a trendy life of its own.
At sunrise the next morning, we departed for the park, where we boarded the sightseeing boat that brought us to the southern face of the ice mass. Later, a tour bus took us to a visitor center. High in the hills behind the parking lot, Los Notros hotel, where rooms with a view of the glacier begin at $450 a night, was obscured by pines.
The visitor center was the entranceway to a maze of footbridges that snaked down the side of the embankment on the east side of the glacier. I began walking down the pathways alone, and as I got closer to the glacier, I heard the dull rumbling of shifting ice. I hiked for almost an hour before I found a bench overlooking a particularly beautiful vista of the jagged ice field. Exhausted, I laid my head against a post, and allowed myself to revel in the solitude I had sought — and at last found.
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