Operation White Witch

March 29, 2023. From the Itinerary:

Exploration 1 - Laguna Negra horseback ride. Rated easy for a 90 minute, 2.5 mile, half day ride. We depart from the stables and ride across rivers, forests and pampas as we ascend towards the viewpoint of the Negra Lagoon. On the way we pass by several lagoons, ideal for spotting different species of birds such as Queltehues or Magellanic geese.

Exploration 2 - Sarmiento lake hike. Rated moderate for 2.5 miles and 328 feet of elevation gain. We will walk along a trail with low vegetation and views of the Paine Horns and Almirante Nieto. We then go down to the beach on the shores of Lake Sarmiento, where we will have the chance to walk among incredible calcium carbonate rock formations.

Weather was sunny and windy. An easy day after yesterday's harder hike.

We started in the morning by the expedition board where we met our guide and others on our activity.

Met Kathy who lives in Montana and has a ranch with horses. She was supposed to come to El Chalten 2 days after we did, but she never arrived, so we wondered whether she got a bad horse on a later ride. We never saw her again.

The afternoon hike was basically walking around a dead lake, so not so interesting. The lake has a very high PH and is a closed controlled system, but there are shells in the lake. We saw some guancaos and some guanaco bones, but no pumas.

After we got back we had some drinks in front of the beautiful view.

Dinner was a big drama - Operation White Witch. We got so tired of a lady who would scope out the corner table at dinner with the best view and she would rather aggressively get the table each night. She had short white/grey hair and was German, her husband from England. We developed "Operation White Witch" (hair color and gender) to snatch the table from her. Dinner commenced at 7:30. We watched to see when she showed up and started circling. Chris moved into the table at 7:15 when we saw her arrive. He sat at the table and pretended to do a time lapse photo. The restaurant workers had no issue with it, but we heard her asking everyone if dinner started now at 7:15 and complaining. It was wonderful and it was our last night so we didn't have to deal with her again:). Here is the dining room and the infamous table

The only part of dinner I remembered to take a picture of was desert - vanilla ice cream and fruit ice cream.

After the sun went down, we did a bit of stargazing. The stars were amazing and it was one of the few times that there was enough darkness to see the Milky Way - not great pictures, but it's there:). And later a full moon.