Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Well, last weekend I got confused and gave you both photos and fiction ! (I also forgot the title!). This is what happens when I try to get things ready ahead of time, and you can consider it advance payment for the posts I'm going to miss later this month while I'm out hiking. I'd forgotten that after hiking to Laguna Torres, the next day we hiked to a viewpoint overlooking the same lake (Loma del Pliegue Tumbado). It was an incredibly windy day; I remember feeling like I needed to hang onto someone or something to avoid being blown off the summit. We started the day with the fantastic sunrise that features in a number of photos I've already shared. Once the sunrise was over, we raced to the trailhead to get going on the day's hike, which was nearly 12 miles and almost 4000' of gain and loss. I believe we took the next day off! Here are some highlights, again all are Dave's photos: Patagonia has some interesting plants. Dave identified these as Calceolaria...

I'm continuing to delve into the archives and pull out photos, mostly my husband's, from our trip to Patagonia in 2020. It's good to let his art out into the world a little, and it doesn't hurt too much.  We spent about 10 days in El Chalten, hiking the hills around Mt. Fitzroy. In past posts I've shared some shots of the amazing sunrise we photographed one morning, but there was so much more. I'll pick out some of the best to post over the next two or three weeks.  Today, we'll see some photos of Chorillo del Salto and a hike to Laguna Torre, with views of Cerro Torre and Fitzroy.  The waterfall. The valley of the Rio de las Vueltas, a classic braided glacial river (thus the color). Another day we did a hike to Laguna Torre. With Dave and his brother, we always started early, and were rewarded with great light and no crowds. That's me on the right.   Dave was a great one for making panoramas, stitched from high-quality individual shots. Reflecting pool....

  A couple of weeks ago I discovered I'd never completed sharing photos from our 2020 trip to Patagonia. I'm focusing on my late husband's photos from the trip, both because he was a better photographer than I'll ever be, and so that those photos don't just sit there on my hard drive, never seen. Last week we looked at the Perito Moreno glacier from the water. How about a look from the land? (Note: in 2026, just six years later, the glacier has changed from advancing to retreating, and is now something like half a mile from the viewpoint).   We'll end with a couple of videos of the glacier calving--some huge chunks came off, about 7 or 8 minutes apart.   In a pan near the end of this one you can see the huge, clean, deep blue space where the piece fell off in the previous video.   I hope you enjoyed this little visit to a now-endangered glacier (endangered, like all the rest, due to climate change).   I'll find some mountain photos for next week!   ☕ Buy me...

 Yup. Missed that "Friday" thing once again! Back to Patagonia... Moving on from Patagonia National Park, we drove north up the Carretera Austral to Puerto Rio Tranquillo, where the Marble Caves (Cuevas de Marmol) are found on the shores of Lago General Carrera. We arrived at lunchtime after about 2 1/2 hours on the gravel of the Carretera, just in time to gobble our lunch and catch a tour. The caves are truly marble, in its natural state, of course. As marble (metamorphosed limestone) is slightly soluble in water, wave action along the lakeshore for some 6000 years has carved out low caverns into which you can take a boat. It is possible to rent kayaks in the town for a multi-hour expedition, but as we didn't have time, we took the commercial tour in a small open boat. Sadly, the guide's constant stream of interpretation and information was all in rapid Spanish with no pauses, so I was able to catch only a bit of it myself, and couldn't pass any along to my compa...

A year ago I was in Patagonia with my husband and brother-in-law. Part of our trip was a 10-day road trip through Argentina and Chile. I wrote about the early parts of that trip here and here . The center of the trip was Patagonia National Park of Chile, not so very far from the southern terminus of the Carretera Austral. Many of these photos are by Dave Dempsey. Entering the park. Tom and I are rearranging the car in the background, to make room for one of the hitch-hikers hoping for a lift to the campground. The Parque Nacional Patagonia has at its core the Chacabuco Valley, until recently one of the region's largest sheep ranches. It was purchased in 2004 by Kris and Doug Tompkins, to be re-wilded, then turned into a park under the control of the Chilean government. Doug Tompkins didn't live to see his dream fulfilled, but did get things well under way. His widow eventually negotiated the creation of five Chilean national parks through the-profit conservancy that owned the ...