Waiting for the Ice at Perito Moreno

You hear the Perito Moreno Glacier before you understand it. From the road’s end on the Magallanes peninsula the path drops through a strip of beech woodland, and somewhere ahead there is a sound like distant artillery, or furniture being moved in a very large house upstairs. Then the trees open, and there is the ice.

We had crossed from Chile after Torres del Paine and based ourselves in El Calafate, a town of outdoor shops and wind-bent poplars on the shore of Lago Argentino. The glacier is a little over an hour’s drive west, on a road that follows the lake and then runs into the forest. Clara wanted to arrive early and have the boardwalks to ourselves. We managed it for roughly twenty minutes.

A wall that moves

The scale is hard to hold in your head. The glacier comes down from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field and ends in a front several kilometres wide, the ice standing higher than most church towers above the water. The boardwalks let you stand surprisingly close to it, separated from the face by a channel of grey-green water and a good deal of floating debris.

Up close it stops being white. The face is every shade of blue, from a pale, milky turquoise to a deep, almost violet colour in the cracks, where the ice is densest. Streaks of grit run down it like tide marks. Small bergs, some no bigger than a van, turn slowly in the channel below.

The waiting game

Calving is what everyone has come for, and it keeps no timetable. We settled on a bench with a flask of coffee and a bag of alfajores and did what everybody else was doing: stared at the face and tried to guess. The sounds are constant, cracks and groans and a long creak like a ship’s timbers, but most of them lead nowhere. Each time, a hundred heads turn at once. Each time, nothing.

Then, late in the morning, a section of the front simply leaned out and dropped. It is slower than you expect, and the noise arrives a beat after the movement, which makes the whole thing feel badly dubbed. A plume of spray went up, a swell crossed the channel and slapped at the rocks below us, and the crowd made a single, involuntary sound of delight. Clara missed it. She was looking at a bird.

In the afternoon we took the upper paths, where you look across the surface rather than up at the face. From there the glacier is a frozen sea of pinnacles and crevasses running back into cloud, and it becomes clear that the front is only the frayed edge of something enormous.

South to the end of the road

A few days later we flew to Ushuaia, which calls itself the southernmost city in the world and is generally too busy to argue the point. The approach crosses the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, and I spent it with my face against the window: sharp grey peaks, valleys of dark beech forest with rivers looping through them, and small glaciers holding pale lakes in their laps.

After Perito Moreno, those little glaciers looked almost private, as if we had caught them at home. We spent our last days walking in the hills behind the town, in rain and then sudden sun, and that is a story for another time. What stays with me is the sound of the ice at Perito Moreno: low, patient, and in no particular hurry to get anywhere.