The Long Road North Part II: Buenos Aires

Arrival

My overnight trip from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires was uneventful. The bus showed up more or less on time at the central bus terminal, I wasted a bunch of time once again being thwarted by an unhelpful Argentine information booth occupant who fed me all sorts of misinformation, but eventually made it onto the bus (which I had looked up in advance with the help of Constanza and her mom) to my hostel. It was 8am, and apparently the male hostel staffers were still recovering from the night before because their eyes were bloodshot and they seemed very, very high.

It was too early to check in, but the female staffer ushered me upstairs for breakfast and coffee and I sat there and enjoyed the spotty wireless for a bit before claiming a locker once the dwellers in the room I was checking into woke up, and then going for a walk. A little on edge about being in a BIG CITY again for the first time since Santiago way back in October, I didn't bring much with me and was all paranoid, eyeing everyone suspiciously and peevishly glaring at every bit of graffiti and thinking, "Ugh, humans" every time the wall or sidewalk smelled of piss or feces.

Thank you Buenos Aires graffiti artist.
That pretty much sums it up.

But I eventually got to the spot that was my goal:

The U.S. Embassy.

Calm down, I wasn't in trouble. I was just out of room for stamps in my passport (uuuuuuugggggh firstworldproblems) and needed to get me more before I moved on from Argentina. I showed up at the giant gated complex, walked right around the long line, flashed my passport, and got VIP treatment. Ameeeerrriiicaaaa!! (it made me feel more than kind of bad). They did confiscate all of my stuff, though, not trusting me with whatever electronic devices and mystery liquids (Nalgene bottle of water) I was carrying with me. I took a number, waited 30 minutes, filled out a form, paid the fee and handed over my passport, and was told to come back in four hours.

So I walked across the street to the large green spot on my map which turned out to be a perfectly acceptable city park and curled up on the grass and read a book for a few hours, then getting stiff, got up and walked around, discovering an immense and beautiful rose garden where I stopped and, you guessed it, smelled them roses.

Rose garden. Okay, maybe this city stuff isn't all bad after all.

The four hours up, I wandered back over to the Embassy, skipped the line again, had my stuff confiscated again (although this time I was handed plastic retrieval number 69 with a wink and an obscene comment from the Argentinian guard who thought he was being awfully clever). I then waited 40 minutes behind a VERY ANGRY woman, cut straight out of a SNL-style mold for a middle-aged butch lesbian, who, impatient about her 40 minute wait time, kept turning to me and mumbling variations on "fucking cunt" under her breath anytime the mini-skirted and heavily made-up and bejeweled Porteña in epic platform heels currently being served at the desk loudly vented her difficulties in obtaining a fiancé visa.

Meanwhile, some great propaganda was playing on the televisions hanging in the waiting hall. Fascinating and successful ethnic-looking people talking about how the U.S. is the Land of Opportunity and how they've managed to Maintain their Cultural Identity while enjoying the Great Mixing Pot that is Ameeerrriicaaa and making lots of blonde friends. Features of Women and Muslims Conquering the Business World. A segment on Black History Month. The funny part: 90% of it was recognizably filmed on USC's campus, and of course the "Universities: The Nation's Jewels" was all about TROJAN PRIDE! Fight on!

Anyhow, I eventually got my passport back, now fat with lots of new pages that I'm going to have a hard time filling before the passport expires, especially at my rate of travel (2 countries in over 6 months? Come ON).

By then I was starving, so I rolled into the first not-sketchy looking sandwich shop I found and ordered their biggest sandwich, with fries and a beer, and sat on the street and ate my sandwich and drank my beer, all while attempting to not be angry about being in a city. I felt like crap. I was tired, exhausted. I felt unduly emotional and grumpy. I had weird cramps. I was dizzy a lot. I was bloated. I had been nauseated almost daily for a few hours in the morning for almost two months. It was like really bad PMS, except...I was still months overdue in the monthly bleeding department, so I was also worried, and I worried about that while I ate my sandwich.

I couldn't be pregnant, having not engaged in the requisite activities, apologies to Mary Mother of God. And I'm normally a bombproof regular bleeder: I've never missed a period despite long periods of heavy exercise, crazy travel, serious stress, major illness, and several of those combined. I worried that something serious was wrong, and wondered if I should see a doctor. Or could I be pregnant? That would have pretty disturbing implications involving being drugged and raped, something I assumed I would at least have had a clue about after the fact. I finished my sandwich, and skulked back to the hostel, now in a decidedly worse mood.

I was finally allowed to check in, and promptly claimed a top bunk as My Domain, and sat there catching up on emails and stuff for a few hours, avoiding conversation and avoiding smiling at people like an antisocial jerk. The others in my room were a group of sick Norwegians, which made me even grumpier. Fed up with my sulky self, I kicked myself out of bed, put on running clothes, and went for a run to my newly-discovered park. Which was full of kissing lovers. Which made me even grumpier. I returned back to the hostel in a supremely foul mood, showered, drank a huge happy hour beer by myself, still avoiding people, went out for a lonely and mediocre dinner, returned to the hostel, stuffed the earplugs in, and went to sleep.

Black Market Dealings and My Imaginary Fetus

I went running again the next morning, attempting to shake my funk that had started on the way back from Antarctica and that had been following me like a shouldered albatross. I ran and ran and ran, then did situps until I felt like I wanted to puke, then thought about maybe being rape-pregnant again. To distract myself, I decided to go have an Argentine Adventure and head downtown to do some black market money exchanging. I was wildly successful, shopping around for the best rates, hunting down the best traders, doing shady behind-dumpster deals, discreetly hiding my multiple stashes of cash money obtained from various sources so that nobody would know how much I was actually carrying, and coming away almost twice as rich as I had started the day. I bought myself some semi-stylish, inexpensive sandals to celebrate, my cute Chiloe shoes having been completely worn to sole-less. And I went to a pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test.

Downtown BA

Parktown BA

Then I decided to go explore another of the green spots on the city map, a big nature reserve nearby. It was surprising nature-y and I found a nice spot to sit on a bench and read more of my book, but I couldn't focus. I kept thinking about being pregnant. What if I was?

I thought about it. I've always wanted kids. I sure didn't ever want to have them under the circumstance of having been drugged-raped, but I still thought that if there was a child inside me, I wanted to be its mother. Then I remembered all of the drinking I had done in the past months and felt immediately terribly guilty, and apologized profusely to my imaginary fetus. I assumed everyone I knew would think I was crazy if I decided to have the baby, but an abortion was out of the question for me. I'm not the sort of person to picket abortion clinics because for me it's a personal and not a black and white moral issue (besides, it seems to me that picketing abortion clinics is an ineffective and jackass way of going about an extremely sensitive and personal issue). But for me, ever since seeing a collection of pickled fetuses at various developmental stages at a museum, it's been burned in my head that a fetus is little human, and humans have a right to live, and that right to live outweighs my right to anything except maybe my own physical safety (and in a battle of self-defense, sorry fetus...I've got a bit of an upper hand). I also never bought the "life worth living" argument because who am I to judge what sort of life is worth living? Someone I had the Abortion Conversation once asked me if I would feel the same way if I found out my fetus had Down's Syndrome. Of course! I know it would be difficult, but I would happily be the mother of a child (and adult) with Down's. Some of the nicest, happiest, and arguably wisest people I know have Down's. Anyhow, I knew that was a discussion, and a difficult one, that I would have to have with many of my best friends, most of whom are militantly pro-choice. Not to mention the "no, I don't want to give it up for adoption just because I would be a single mom," conversation with my family.

All that thinking made me need to pee, convenient, since that's what is needed for the pregnancy test, which in the middle of all that thinking, I had sat and read the Spanish instructions for (having never had the occasion to take a pregnancy test before). I needed a 10-second stream of 3-hour old pee. Whatever that meant, but I was pretty sure I had that. I looked around, crawled off into the apparently alligator infested (? really?) bushes, and peed on the end of a little white and purple plastic stick, which yes, was weird.

Modo de uso: How to find out if you've got a 2-month old proto-human incubating inside you in three easy steps. The fact that urine probably shouldn't be blue doesn't seem to bother these people.

Not in the pregnancy test directions but conveniently posted elsewhere: avoid getting eaten by alligators.

Then I capped it, and decided to not spend the next 5 minutes obsessively watching it to find out my fate for the next rest of my life, and went off to walk to the beach. I got to the beach, sat down, held my breath, pulled the stick out of my purse, and...

BAM

Not pregnant.

I was simultaneously relieved, a tad disappointed, and suddenly scared. Because if I wasn't pregnant, then I probably had Cancer Part 4 involving a tumor the size of a basketball that had taken over my overies, or had been infected by aliens, or was otherwise Seriously Messed Up.

The Recovery

Back at the hostel, I vented my concerns to the Former PhD Advisor Known as Frank, who asked me if I was maybe anemic. Anemic! Yes! That would explain everything! I had always had problems with mild anemia, and with the exception of the occasional asado, had been eating very little in the iron department. Excellent, I thought, I'm only in the best place in the whole world to fix this problem: Argentina, the land of Great Steak. So I immediately set out to eat ALL THE STEAK. (yes, I know there are other ways to get iron, but I love steak, and when in Argentina...)

So I asked for advice about where to go to get steak, and was told that if I hurried, there was a restaurant a 15 minute walk away that had a Steak Happy Hour that involved showing up at the door and getting in line 20 minutes before opening at 6:40, getting seated at 7:00 and quickly ordering, and snarfing down the food before the clock hit 8:00, when the classier customers would start showing up and the cheap backpackers would get booted from their tables. Perfect. So off I went, and I found the place, and in line I met Londoner Rob who was a Steak Happy Hour regular, and who suggested we share a table in a sort of blind speed date, "The best part is if we hate eachother, we know we get kicked out in an hour!" Except Rob was a super fun guy to talk to and also knew which steak to order, which meant that we ended up with this:

All that...for me?
(note the look of excitement mixed with terror on my face)
And yes, I ate it. For health purposes.

Needless to say, I immediately felt a whole world better. Seriously. And it was steak for every meal I could get from there on out. And it was like I was a whole new person.

The next day I went running again and didn't mind the lovers making out in the park so much. Good for them.

I braved new adventures, like the post office, which turned into a big freaking fiasco that took two hours and involved me using every trick in my feminine portfolio short of offering sexual favors (actually it was the getting all feisty and argumentative that finally did the job, the whole "I'm going to be such a pain in your ass that you're going to beg me to let you do what I want so that I'll shut up and leave you alone" trick) to get them to ship my damned box. I eventually won.

Just SEND THE DAMNED PACKAGE! uuuuggghhhh

Then I went to go track down a place to buy ferry tickets to Uruguay, since I had heard that Uruguay was the Magical Land of Dollars where I could get more money to smuggle back into Argentina. Except that after a solid hour of wandering around getting lost trying to find the place they would only let me pay in dollars. "If I had them, why would I be going to Uruguay?" I asked. I didn't have any more dollars, and the tickets were really expensive, which totally defeated the purpose. Grumpy again, I consoled myself with more steak. Or rather attempted to, but the place that promised they had what I wanted didn't after I sat down, so I had to settle for chicken smothered in cheese which is what they brought me as the replacement, which both sucks and I'm allergic to. Grumpiness level increased. Plus I had blisters. Damnit.

But then I went with my roommate--fellow transplanted Angelino Emily, a vivacious Hollywood costume designer--back to the steak restaurant and all was well again. Well enough that we decided to go out and get ourselves some tango lessons at a milonga. It was pouring rain when we finished our meal (promptly, of course, at 8:00), so we took a taxi to the dance hall. Lessons, it turned out, weren't going to start for another two hours. So we ordered a bottle of wine. Tango music was playing on the speakers and there was a dance floor, so some intrepid young gentlemen found their way to where we were sitting and spun us around a bit, patient with our lack of skill.

That's me in the green dress

When the lessons started, I was immediately grabbed by a dashing young man who turned out to be a pediatric surgeon doing his residency in Buenos Aires, and who loved to tango and danced very well. Why he picked me as a dance partner I will never know, but I didn't argue, because he was fun, and it meant that I got to go to the advanced class with him. While practicing, I chatted with my partner, Ariel, and half fell in love as he told me more and more about himself and his world-saving dreams, except he confessed that he didn't like snow so I knew there was no future for us. Class ended and we rejoined the rest of the group, but I danced with the surgeon until morning, arriving back at the hostel just in time to sleep three hours before the hostel owner woke me up with a gentle shake, telling me they needed me to check out.

He woke me from one of the most vivid, colorful dreams I can ever remember having, probably a result of all of the iron now flooding my system.

Buenos Aires Dream Sequence

In the dream, I was back in the tango club, except the club not a dance hall but a dingy and cavernous warehouse, dimly lit with a few lamps on the tables scattered by the bar and one hot spotlight on the unpolished wood dance floor. The bare concrete walls were decorated with a chaos of abstract paintings on unframed  canvasses, held together by red tones that were probably pulled straight from memories of La Luna Negra, my favorite Spanish tapas restaurant back in Pasadena. The giveaway that I was dreaming was the massive anatomic heart sculpture, the size of a room, hanging red and bloody looking from the ceiling above the bar, seemingly pulsating slowly to--or was it the source of?--the beat of the nostalgic tango music.

My pediatric surgeon was back, but he was a gaucho now, lost and out of place in this big city but at home among the bola performers and wistful old couples. He took my hand and we danced, not in the solid open frame I had learned, but the close embrace of lovers. He led me through the slow walks and twirls with the pressure of his cheekbones alone and my steps were long and elegant and sensual like how I always imagined tango being.

In the middle of tango-ing, we were treated to a bola show at the Milonga

We melted together in my dream.

"I have a secret." He whispered. "I am a gaucho."
"I know," I whispered back.
"I live on a secret Ranchito in the city."

Then he took me to his Ranchito, except he was driving my car, except my car was white. He parked at a pediatric hospital in the middle of an old neighborhood, and led me to a tall black gate. "Welcome to my Ranchito," he said, as he opened the gate.

Inside was a secret garden. There were bushes of rosemary, jasmine, and thyme. In pots he was nursing a dozen exotic flowers that looked like jewels. He picked one with long red petals, like one of the tubeworms from hydrothermal vents, a tube of red lipstick, and gave it to me with a kiss. I followed him through rows of squash and tomatoes and corn. It was my friend Vicky's backyard garden, except everything was oversized, including an avocado tree the size of a house with avocados like hard, green grapefruits. It was lit through the fruit trees by the full moon. The city had disappeared.

In the middle of the secret garden was a round, orange, one-room earthen hut, sculpted in Cobb, straight out of one of my sustainable building books. On the outside were reliefs of serpentine trees. On the inside, sculpted onto the wall, the word AMOR. Love. Wine bottles built into the earth walls let the moonlight shine through in glittering green. Gritty tango music from a hundred years ago played over a radio that seemed at least as old.

We danced. Kissed. Sat down on his small bed covered in a wispy canopy of mosquito netting. "Do you want a baby?" he asked, "Un pequeño gauchito?"

And that's when I woke up to the shaking of the hostel owner back in the dorm room with Emily, who was still passed out.

I wrote this down because that is how I want to remember Buenos Aires: romantic, surreal, haunted with nostalgia, and saturated with the sound of tango music. And also because when I woke up I found an inexplicable, hard, green, grapefruit-sized avocado and a flower in my purse.

Emily and I decided that the proper course of action
was to leave the avocado as a ritual welcome gift for
the next guest a the hostel, hoping that it would lead
them to their own Buenos Aires adventures.

Epilogue

In various states of hangover and exhaustion, Emily and I went out to brunch to soak up the fun of the night before and then went to check out the colorful neighborhood of La Boca, which turned out to be crazily, but sort of fun in a Disneyland-esque way, toursity. We were both exhausted so we didn't last long, but we had some fun before crawling back to the hostel to take naps: her in a comfortable bed, me on a couch in the computer room since I had been unceremoniously kicked out of my bed.

Me and Emily, reliving our crazy previous night

La Boca

Emily and I and a few others from our hostel room (including the Mexican guy who I had been sleeping on top of the whole week but who had such an opposite schedule to mine that I only knew he was there because every time he rolled over the bunk would threaten to shake me out of the top bed, but he turned out to be really cool) went out to a final dinner, and then I said goodbye to this lovely, bizarre, magical city and hopped on an overnight bus to Córdoba.

Check out the story from Emily's perspective told on her blog.

Navarino VIII: The Feral Swampbeast returns to civilization

Part VIII in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part VII: Blizzards and Beavers. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

My morning view

Although it was cold when I woke up on my final day of my hike, the sun was shining. Having slept a fairly solid 9 hours I was ready for my only early start. I had woken up with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” stuck in my head for no particular reason that I could think of, and so began my day singing out loud in my best gospel voice, alone in the mountains, like a true crazy hermit. After a final breakfast of runny oatmeal while my sleeping bag and tent dried a bit in the sun, still singing, I was ready to go and was on the trail by 8 am.  And this time there was a trail, at least way markers that were more often visible than not for the first few hours.

She's alive!!

Despite the trail, and despite the singing (or maybe because of it?) I was moving slowly. My cold had moved to my lungs and I was wheezing and short of breath, and with my sinuses completely plugged, breathing was hard (and you can imagine how good the singing actually sounded). I would get out of breath walking downhill, when usually I can charge up hills with a pack without too much problem. But I had all day, and although the distance I had to cover was comparable to some very long days I had had, the good weather, spectacular  views, and presence of a trail made me hopeful that I could made good time for a change even at a slow, steady pace.

The hike was beautiful, and the snow lent everything a certain additional air of solitude and romance, but I was very cold and my feet were soaked all day, which they had also been most of the previous days, but the cold made it especially hard. And, of course, I couldn't escape the beavers and once again landed in beaver terrain. Beaverland turned into bog again and my path continued through miles of swamp. I could smell my own feet with each step, which by now smelled distinct from and significantly worse than the bog water in which they had been incubating all week.

Footprints in the snow at the end of the world.

I crested the small pass that marked the longitudinal backbone of the island and suddenly I could see the ocean again, the Beagle Channel. I had returned to vistas where I could no longer say “no humans as far as I can see”. With mixed feelings, I was returning to civilization: looking forward to warming up and drying out my feet and resting off my cold, but very reluctant to leave the delightful solitude I had so much enjoyed. I felt like some feral thing, emerging stinking and filthy from the bogs and peaks and blizzards of the wild south and skulking warily into the habitat of other humans.

And civilization met me that early afternoon with dusty dirt roads and swarms of black bugs that got up my nose and in my eyes and down my shirt and everywhere. And I emerged from the road in the woods into the wood-smoky air of Puerto Williams, simultaneously relieved and reluctant.

My first stop when I returned to Puerto Williams was the info center to ask where I could book a plane ticket, since I needed to meet my friends for my birthday trek in Torres del Paine in a few days. She looked at me and suggested instead that I take the long ferry to Punta Arenas, commenting, “I can see from your face that you have had…an experience. It seems you need time to rest.” I later saw what she meant. I was windburnt, had dark circles under my eyes, bleeding scratches on my face, and matted hair decorated with sticks. And then there was the stench coming from my feet.

View of the Beagle Channel from a crest in the trail

I stopped by the DAP office to ask about the plane anyhow, the ferry would get me to my friends too late. All flights were full for a week, contrary to what I had been told before I left that I should just book when I returned from my hike. But they said to come back in a few hours and check for cancellations. I thought that was a fine idea, maybe I’d have better luck after a shower.

Next I stopped by the Carabineros to register my safe return. The officer on duty seemed surprised when he checked the records and saw when I had left and heard where I had been and asked me about it, saying he had never been out there, or even past the Cerro Banderas. I showed him some photos (my camera having successfully mostly dried out) and told him a bit about the trip. He commented about all of the others who had turned back that week because of the weather and wondered how I got on. “It was cold, wet, and snowy,” I said, “but beautiful. Incredible.” As I was there, two more guys—one a seasoned Pacific Crest Trail distance hiker—showed up. They had also given up on their trek due to the weather and lack of trail.

I walked out feeling like a warrior queen, trailing broken hearts and taking swigs from a flask full of tears milked from her conquered enemies. Although to be fair I had also not finished the Dientes circuit. But give up, tuck tail, and return to town? The thought had honestly never crossed my mind. With the exception of the fall in the swamp, at no point did I feel scared or in over my head. I had only wished I had more time to go back and finish the circuit after my wander to the south. I wondered what it would have taken for me to have actually returned early. A legion of pumas chasing me down off the pass, I decided. Or running out of food. I need to learn how to hunt and clean an animal, I decided, thinking of the beaver. Or a wet sleeping bag that I couldn’t dry out.

Church in Puerto Williams

Finally I returned “home” to Patty’s. I stripped off my gaitors and boots and socks at the door, walked in, and was met by a giant hug from Patty. It was like coming home to mom. “The best time of my life,” was all I could say. Despite the cold, the wet, and the rain, it really had been. “Mira!” She responded with a grin. She saw that I had fallen deeply, madly in love with the island that she, too, loved.

I started to unpack and was about to take a shower when I met my roommate for the evening who appeared in the door and asked if I wanted a beer. Beer. Ohhellzyess I wanted a beer. A cold, glorious, delicious beer (Austral Yagán—a very good dark beer). So I sat, sipping and delighting in the beer, looking like a wild creature and smelling worse, chatting for an hour with Fernando about life, careers, and adventures.

And then I finally showered, clumps of hair coming out as I tried to shampoo my matted head. I put on clean clothes, brushed what was left of my hair, and even put on mascara. And just like that I went from feral swampbeast to domesticated human, but a domesticated human who had been reunited with her strong and independent heart and fiercely wild soul.

I cleaned my stuff, re-packed, and then had dinner with an older Canadian couple who had cycled all the way from Bolivia to Punto Arenas, including the entire length of Argentina’s legendary Ruta 40. The food and shower and beer having made me feel like a new person, I decided to go out to the Club de Yates for a beer—just one beer, to check in with people, I told myself.

Panorama of the Club de Yates

I ended up staying for much longer than one beer, chatting and laughing and dancing until 4 am with the other wild souls who had also been drawn by the gravity of the romance of adventure of the end of the world to land at that bar (and the entirety of the Chilean navy posted in Puerto Williams…as the only woman at the bar, I was popular that night).

Poor Fernando, who also showed up, was obligated to escort me home (I bullied him into staying later and later for round after round of beer, because I’m a terrible person and a despotic drunk, and also had no idea how late it was). The skies were stunning, with the light just coming up and turning the clouds an eerie pastel.

On the walk back to Patty’s Fernando and I shared the stories of our lives: our dreams, our passions, the lessons we had learned from our adventures that had brought us to that night.  When we tucked into our bunks in otherwise empty hostel, the conversation had turned to our love lives, and he said, “You are an interesting person, I think you will find someone very soon.” 

I laughed and replied that the challenge isn’t finding someone. It’s finding someone who enriches your life instead of tying you town and eating your soul. 

There was a long silence followed by a quiet yes, and we fell asleep.

Or rather we both laid there staring at the ceiling for a while absorbed in our own silent conversations, mine between my heart, which the minute I made that comment ached to find that someone, my head, who countered that it seemed relationships are having another person tie you down and eat your soul, and my soul who wrapped its wings around my head and my heart and said quietly “Sssh, it’s okay now, we’re okay now.” And, reassured and agreeing that, indeed, everything was okay, very much more than okay, (and my soul, being fierce and wild, was not about to be eaten without a good fight) the three of them snuggled into the squishy sack of exhausted flesh that was my body and I fell asleep with a smile.

THE END

Splitboarding the Refugios of Bariloche Part I: Frey

I spent my weekdays in Bariloche diligently attending an intensive Spanish course, doing my homework, doing my work-work (finishing up manuscripts from my Ph.D. work), and doing other responsible things like feeding myself and putting together job applications. The minute I was released from Spanish class on Fridays, however, I split for the hills, and spent my Bariloche weekends with my splitboard in the mountains.

Here are those stories.

Part I: Refugio Frey
Part II: Refugio San Martin (Jacob)
Part III: Refugio Italia (Laguna Negra)

Note: A "Refugio" (= refuge) is a mountain cabin, [sometimes] manned by mountain folk (refugieros/as) to provide food (or a kitchen), water, and shelter in remote places to people playing in the mountains. In most of Argentina, they are run by the Club Andino mountaineering club, and usually involve a dining hall and kitchen on the main level, a large attic stuffed with bunks or mattresses for housing sleeping guests, and an attached or nearby toilet facility.

Refugio Frey

The most famous and popular of the refugios around Bariloche, people who have never been to the area have heard of Frey. Refugio Frey sits at the end of Laguna Toncek which fills the bowl at the bottom of a hanging valley surrounded by insanely toothy granite spires. I saw it poetically (and perfectly) described in one blog post by snow writer and Utah Outside owner Jared Hargrave as "the palm of a god hand below fingers curving skyward". It is a mecca for rock climbers, unsurprisingly, since my first thought when I saw the spires around Frey was, "hot damn, bet those would be awesome to climb." It is also a favorite of ski mountaineers due to its easy access from the backside the Cathedral Alta Patagonia ski resort, and also because the steep chutes, narrow couloirs, and broad bowls surrounded by the granite towers poking like claws out of the snow make for quite a winter playground.

Refugio Frey at dusk (graininess = high ISO setting because it was dark, but check out those spires!!)

So it was an obvious first stop upon arriving in Bariloche.

I was a little nervous, this being my first solo splitboard tour as will as my first time out with a bivvy sack in non-summer conditions. I spent the nights before going reading an avalanche safety book to brush up on long-forgotten tests and details, and agonized over what to pack.

But Friday afternoon rolled around and I packed my sandwiches, packed my backpack, waited 40 mins for the bus to the trailhead to show up, and arrived at the trailhead only to realize that I had lost my sunglasses at the bus stop back in Bariloche (my first of many lost pairs of sunglasses on my South America trip). So I did some quick shopping at the little shops at the base of the ski resort--which had closed for the winter but was still hosting tour groups and was thus not completely shut down--and finally found some affordable cotton candy pink hipster shades at a pharmacy.

Me with my awesome new pink sunglasses.

Finally I was off. The ski area had shut down for the season the Monday prior to my arrival in Bariloche, and no wonder. Temperatures were balmy, the hills were starting to brown, and there was no snow on the bottom of the slopes. So there I was, hiking in a t-shirt and capris, through miles and miles of dry, dusty trail, all while carrying a snowboard on my back. I looked--and felt--insane. Some two hours later of climbing slowly up and around the side of a hill while listening to learn Spanish podcasts to keep myself entertained, I still hadn't seen any sign of snow, and was beginning to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake, or if Fernando at the Club Andino was home laughing, having sent me on a wild goose chase.

But then I turned a corner and suddenly saw a snow-draped spire framed between the trees and I gasped. Ooooooooohhhhhhh!! My pace doubled. Soon afterwards I met two hikers coming in the opposite direction carrying their skis, and they said something which I thought was "it was good!" and then "only another 40 minutes!" which gave me another burst of energy just as the trail started to get steep.

Why, hello, pretty.

I felt every gram of my 60-pound pack and my legs were burning and blisters were screaming with every step. The promised 40 minutes came and went with no sign of an end to the climb or anything that looked even remotely like where I thought I was going. It eventually dawned on me that 40 minutes for them--going downhill--would not be 40 minutes for me going up. It was over an hour later as the sky was turning pink before I finally spotted the ridgeline, and then the antenna of the hut. I climbed and climbed and finally staggered up to the door looking confused (I had never been to a refugio before and had only a vague idea of what they were and no idea what refugio protocol was...do I need to check in? are there hours? are people going to be asleep in there? will they hear me if I knock?) just as the sky went dark. Someone saw me and the refugiero, I'm going to call him Gordi because I don't remember his name but know it sounded similar to Gordo, but wasn't (Gordo means "fatty" in Spanish, which would have been an ironic nickname for the wirey refugiero) came outside, helped me with my pack, welcomed me, made me a hot meal, and gave me a beer.

God bless you, Gordi.

Beer and soup at the Refugio Frey, Night 1

I slept that night on a wooden platform under a sky bright from a full moon and reflections on the iced-over lake. I had to burrow into my sleeping bag to sleep. Despite the light, I didn't wake until hours after sunrise. I quickly ate one of my sandwiches for breakfast, divided my things into "snowboard' and "not snowboard" piles, packed for the day, and then set off. Gordi joined me, glad for an excuse to get out of the hut.

Woke up to this view from the bivvy sack

Picking my way around the lake was another example of my inability to traverse on my splitboard. It wasn't long before I ditched the skins, put on crampons, and started to hike up the slope, first to a little lake (Laguna Schmoll), and then up the final ridge of the Cathedral. Gordi stopped near the top, put on his skis, and headed down, after asking me what I wanted to do and I pointed in a general direction and asked him what he thought and he replied, "for me, it's all scary". He handed me his radio before he left and told me to be careful. It was sweet, and reassuring knowing that I'd be missed if I didn't come back that evening. I watched him, then finished hiking to the top to enjoy the views while eating another sandwich.

Enjoying the views from the top of Cathedral

I strapped my board on, took a deep breath, and pushed off. The snow was crusty, but good, fast and manageable. I rocketed by Schmoll and down the second ridge, decided my run was way too short, and hiked up another ridge for another go. This one was steeper, and even more fun, and since I still had plenty of time before evening, hiked up a third side of the valley.

One of the chutes I boarded. It was sweet.

By this point the temperatures had really climbed, the snow was very wet, and my skins stopped sticking to my board. After a few frustrating attempts to re-apply them so I could climb, I gave up, tore them off, threw the board on my back, and started post-holing. I soon had to stop again to put on crampons when the snow got harder and the way steeper. The going was slow. I cursed my splitboard the whole way up, thinking "Why the hell did I haul you and all your trappings all the way up here only just to haul you on my back at the end? I should have just brought my good board." But my mood quickly changed.

Toward the top, "Club Can't Handle Me" came through my earphones, and I had to stop and dance a little, and then ran to the top, and stopped and danced some more. No really, I did.

There's a back story here. The song was put on my MP3 player two years earlier by my friend Vicky when I told her I needed better running music. I never listen to pop, electronic, or hip-hop, and that's what she loaded me up with. Whatever, the beats were better for running than the rest of my limited music collection. But "Club Can't Handle Me" became my Power Song when one day while out on a "short" trail run, after months of physical therapy after struggling with an injured knee and not being able to run more than a mile or two at a time, this song came on and it was so funny, so happy, and so perfect for the moment that I ran a whole 8 miles and felt no pain. From then on it became my "Oh hell yes I can do this" song. Right before my thesis defense, I had this playing on repeat as I set up and paced the lecture hall waiting for people to arrive, mentally substituting "thesis committee" for "club" in the lyrics.

So when the song came on, I really did have to stop and dance. And decided it was the perfect way to mark the tops of all of my splitboard climbs in Patagonia. Hope you like it. :-)

All those lines are mine. Ignore the wet slides...

Once the dance party on the mountaintop was over, I ate another sandwich (I came prepared), then boarded down the steep couloir I had climbd up, skirting cliffs and a waterfall before coming to a stop at the very bottom in the bushes above Laguna Topeck. The snow was great spring snow and the boarding was awesome, but I had stupidly forgotten my GoPro at the hostel that weekend so you'll just have to take my word for it. By the end of the ride, I had a crowd watching, a group of physical education students who had arrived that afternoon and were tromping around in the snow and who had spotted me on my way down, so I returned to the refugio a minor celebrity.

Inside Refugio Frey

Meanwhile Gordi had returned from going out looking for me because it was getting late (despite there still being plenty of light) and he was worried because, as he later told me, "I thought maybe you went over the other side. I mean, usually people come back early. The snow is bad there, but I thought, she sleeps in a bivvy sack. She's a crazy woman. So I thought maybe you went."

Gordi then insisted that I sleep inside the refugio the coming night because the wind was howling and was supposed to pick up; when I hesitated he scolded me and said "no charge! but you sleep inside!" and put me up in the attic of one of the outbuildings. For dinner I sat with him and Santi, the other refugioero, in the kitchen and drank wine with them while the students partied.

My soup in Refugio Frey, Night 2 (love you too, guys)

Exhausted, I excused myself at around 11:30 and crawled up to the attic, where I slept soundly despite the wind shrieking and threatening to tear the roof off. I woke up the next morning next to a lost-seeming Canadian guy who explained that the refugieros had told him to sleep there to avoid the wild students but had warned him, "there's a pretty blonde girl up there, but she's crazy." I'll take that reputation.

Refugio Frey at night

Continued in Part II: Refugio San Martin (Jacob)