The Way of the Condor

Exclusive! We take to the wild Argentine slopes of the Patagonian Andes for a first look – and to help create – a route to rival Torres del Paine’s ever-busy W Trail

- Chris Moss

Diego scrambled to the top of the tump and declared, “Now I see the light.” Being eternally optimistic is a prerequisite to being a mountain guide. I wasn’t at all surprised when, five minutes later, he had unsheathed his machete and was attacking the dense undergrowth of spiky neneo, thorny calafate and a tough, stubborn plant called mata negra with renewed vigour.

I was the slowest, oldest, least limber member of a five-man hiking party – the others were two super-fit Argentine guides, a marathon-running tour operator and a videographer in his late twenties – that was getting ever more entangled in the mountainous wilderness of Los Glaciares National Park in the south-west of Argentina.

Our plan: to walk south from Estancia Helsingfors to Estancia Cristina, two centenarian sheep farms deep in the Andes. We had five days to cover the 60-70km. That didn’t sound too hard. Torres del Paine National Park’s famous W Trek, just over the border in Chile, was 71km and thousands of people completed it in four or five days. Indeed, so many that just under 290,000 people visited the park in 2018 and that despised buzzword “overtourism” was being uttered.

But Argentine Patagonia presents its own particular challenges. Our first aim was to find a trail where the park authorities had omitted to develop one. We wanted to see if Argentina, lagging far behind Chile in terms of adventure tourism, could offer intrepid walkers a hike in its Los Glaciares National Park to rival those in Torres del Paine – without the heavy (foot and vehicular) traffic, gangs of campers, unnecessary lodges and posh hotels.

Going off track