CHASING the WIND

The wild stretches of Argentinean Patagonia draw intrepid souls in search of icy peaks, golden steppes, and raging gales. As Mark Johanson reports, two luxurious adventure lodges provide a stunning home base for glacier-hopping.

- Mark Johanson

The gusts of wind felt like invisible shoves. As my horse clomped along the northeastern face of Cerro Frías hill, I knee-gripped the saddle to stay upright, my leather chaps scratching against the thorny bushes that give the nearest resort town, El Calafate, its melodic name. Tawny grasses swayed in the breeze as we trotted, briskly, to a hilltop from where I could see the vast estancias of the Anita Valley to the south and the milky-blue Lago Argentino to the north.

On the Patagonian steppe, beauty reveals itself in whispers, not screams. In the still valley below I could see a teal lagoon speckled pink with flamingoes. In the sky, a lone condor soared south toward the three granite spires of Torres del Paine, just over the border in Chile.

I would have stayed in this spot for hours, drinking in the chamomile hues of the southern steppe—if I had been able to keep my eyes open. Wind whipped at them, extracting tears and plastering them back on my face. Plus my horse, Al Capone, was getting testy (I predicted he might when I first heard his name). So we trotted back to his home and my hotel, which, as it turns out, was designed with full awareness of the region’s wind—an element that dominates life in Argentinean Patagonia.