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I read plenty about Patagonia before I ever came here. First in the not-entirely-fictional novels of Antoine

de Saint-Exupery, Southern Mail and Night Flight, both heavily based on his own experiences as a pilot for the early Aeroposta Argentina service. The Frenchman described this landscape from the air as if his proxy-heroes were sailing through outer space, with the occasional lamplights of farmhouses appearing on the empty cosmic plain as distant stars or planets.

Later, i picked up bruce chatwin’s not-entirely-factual account of his travels through the region in the 1970s, and always remembered his encounter with father palacios – a catholic priest turned esoteric natural historian who claimed that the human race had begun in patagonia, that a folkloric shape-changing creature known as the yoshil was actually our living ancestor, that unicorns and certain species of dinosaur still walked the earth around here, or had until very recently.

Arriving in El Chalten, towards the northern end of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, I find one of its encircling peaks named after Saint-Exupery. The town below is bigger and busier than any settlement that the author-aviator ever flew over while navigating through the Andes and their constant, lethal storms. Chalten means “smoking mountain” in the language of the native Tehuelche people, which may be a reference to the near-permanent clouds around the tallest summits of the FitzRoy Range, or to the active volcanoes lying just beneath the snow-caps. But this town did not yet exist even when Bruce Chatwin passed through – it was founded in 1985 to help secure Argentina’s contended border with neighbouring Chile, and now provides solely for tourists.

Most of them come for the hiking and climbing, I’m told by Carolina Codo, the owner of the El Pilar guesthouse. Codo herself is a serious climber, and first came for that reason in 1991, when El Chalten still had only 40 inhabitants, barely 12 hours of electricity per day, and no phone lines or pavements. She had no plans to stay, but decided while scaling Cerro Torre that this “might be a place to get old”, and built her pioneer-style guesthouse way beyond the town boundaries, closer to the monumental granite spikes of Mount FitzRoy than to any visible markers of civilisation.

The southern Patagonian ice-field is home to some of the world’s last advancing glaciers and stories of foolhardiness, old and new.WORDS STEPHEN PHELAN

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Codo named it “Pilar” after the famously elegant route traced up the north face of that mountain by its first solo climber Renato Casarotto, whose path is now known as Pilar Casarotto. But she doesn’t get much time to oversee the business these days, since she also works as the town’s chief doctor and leader of the local mountain rescue team. Her staff, however, prove an inexhaustible source of helpful advice on walking routes and capricious local weather systems, not to mention some fairly uproarious anecdotes about the most arrogant European climbers to leave a bad impression down here.

And her place itself makes the cosiest possible base for my own expeditions: along the Rio Blanco to Laguna De Los Tres, through a Nothofagus forest to Piedra del Fraile, and across town to the viewpoints at Las Aguilas and Los Condores, where I get a faint vibration from my reading of Saint-Exupery. However much El Chalten has grown in the last 30 years, its little circuit of electric light still seems awfully provisional against the immense surrounding galaxy of rocks, trees, and water.

The city of El Calafate, at the southern end of the ice field, has a more substantial purchase on the Patagonian wilderness. A marginal shelter for wool traders less than 100 years ago, it is now home to almost 20,000 people (including the current Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner) and draws five times that many tourists every year in its capacity as gateway to Los Glaciares National Park. An impressive ice-related science and history museum called The Glaciarium was opened here by Kirchner in 2011, offering visitors a handy primer on two million years’ worth of compacted and pressurised snow.

A couple of hours down the road, they can see the biggest of the park’s 47 major glaciers, Perito Moreno, rising almost 80 metres out of Lago Argentino, the country’s largest freshwater lake. Every day, huge chunks break off the south wall of that glacier and splash down into the lake, a process known as “calving”. My bus has only just arrived when it happens again, and it’s something like watching an sharp-angled, glitter-crusted cliff-top mansion suddenly sliding into the ocean on a clear, bright, sunny morning. (It is currently high summer in Patagonia, which feels more or less as cold as mid-winter in the northern hemisphere.)

In the relatively recent past, onlookers have been crushed by calving icebergs or drowned by the shockwaves they make, obliging park authorities to corral their paying customers into a synthetic nature trail of metal walkways and viewing platforms along the opposite bank. It would be ridiculous to complain about an excess of comfort and safety, and churlish to resent sharing the experience with thousands of well-swaddled fellow tourists, all drinking the same expensive hot chocolate from the onsite cafe, and taking much the same photos from the most crowded vantage points.

But we also know that this is a common condition of modern travel – to recognise how far removed we are from the solitary wonders and dangers of early exploration, and to register a kind of sadness that tends to manifest as grumpiness. As we herd onto a boat to cross Lago Argentino for a mini-hike on the ice, I feel a bit diminished by the prospect of treading

However much El Chalten has grown in the last 30 years, its little circuit of electric light still seems awfully provisional against the immense surrounding galaxy of

rocks, trees, and water.

“The ice raised cities resting on crystal needles,” wrote the great

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda of the Patagonian

glaciers, and it’s easy to see

what he meant.

1.The ever-evolving face of the Perito Moreno glacier.

2. The Fitz-Roy range reflected in the icy waters of Laguna de Los Tres.

3. The other worldly colours of the glacier and Lago Argentino.

4. Piece of ice break away from the advancing glacier.

5. The mountains provide a backdrop for the village of El Chaltén, the starting point for many treks.

6. Argentine swimmer and maniac Ruben Gonzalez.

7. Straddling one of the glacier’s crevasses while wearing crampons. Tours of varying lengths are available across the enormous glacier.

8. Sunlight illuminates the deep blues within the ice.

so meekly in the footsteps of such notable figures as Francisco Moreno, the 19th century geographer for whom this glacier is named (“perito” means “expert”, or “specialist”). I’m also thinking of Doctor Federico Reichart, the so-called “father of climbing”, who set out across it in 1913 to find a route to the Pacific. And the aerial adventurer Gunter Pluschow, who surveyed the ice field from above in his Silver Condor, before engine trouble forced him to ditch that plane into Lago Argentino, killing him and his mechanic.

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Our short ride takes us right past the crash site, and our captain tells us that anyone falling into this water would be dead within a couple of minutes. So imagine his surprise, and ours, when a lone swimmer is spotted off the starboard side, doing a steady front crawl in the shadow of Perito Moreno, wearing only a hat, trunks, and goggles. As it turns out, this is highly irregular, in the sense that it has never been done before. The swimmer’s name is Ruben Gonzalez, a teacher and part-time lifeguard from Buenos Aires who wants to conquer his country’s coldest bodies of water. In 2012, he crossed two kilometres of the Beagle Channel between Argentina and Chile in 24 minutes, and in temperatures of about seven degrees.

Today it takes him a little longer to cover the same distance in water even closer to freezing. “Because I had to swim around that big iceberg,” says Gonzalez, shivering but somehow willing and able to speak when he climbs out at the south shore. More habituated to the warmer waters of private swimming pools and southern Spanish beaches, he started training under the renowned one-legged swimmer Maria Inez Mato three years ago – a regimen that began with cold showers and bathtubs full of ice cubes. “I tried not to scream,” Gonzalez tells me, “and it slowly got easier.”

This latest feat was not especially difficult, he says. He couldn’t really see anything through the dense white particles known as “glacier milk”. But he could feel something other than cold. “Perito Moreno is a beautiful place, and I got to know it by swimming it. The whole time I was thinking about the privilege of being alone in this water, where nobody has gone before.” Or at least, nobody who lived to talk about it. Gonzalez searches for the right word in English. “I felt like a … protagonist.”

Leaving him to his warm towels and rubdowns, I rejoin my group at the Hielo Y Aventura (Ice And IM

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Adventure) staging post, where cheery guides strap on our crampons before leading us up a gritty, well-worn path carved into the glacier. Frankly I could not feel like less of a protagonist, especially when they hold our hands to help us across the crevasses. But the ice itself provides consolations, and chief among them is its deep and mysterious blueness.

Technically, this is no longer the mystery that it might have been to early native nomads or the first European adventurers. A mahogany-tanned guide with mirrored shades and gleaming teeth is quick to explain that blue is an illusion. Solar light, he says, is comprised of every colour in the spectrum. Blue has more energy than red or yellow, and its photons penetrate further into the ice.

The further they go, the bluer it appears, and the stranger it becomes to walk among these gigantic protrusions of cobalt, indigo, and lapis lazuli. “The ice raised cities resting on crystal needles,” wrote the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda of the Patagonian glaciers, and it’s easy to see what he meant. Perito Moreno is roughly the same size as Buenos Aires, some 250 square kilometres, but it might be a city on Mars, or one of Jupiter’s moons, an alien skyline of opaque and oblique frozen structures, flooded with ultraviolet. Here on this planet, most glaciers are now receding, but Perito Moreno is not. For all the pieces that fall from its face every day – there is a crack and a boom as another one goes – it has remained static for decades and may actually be advancing.

This is the real mystery, and scientists cannot yet explain it. The leading theory is a little-understood process known as “glacial surge”. “But nobody really knows,” says our hitherto-informative lead guide, as he brings the hike to an end in a quiet corner of the ice-shelf, where a table has been laid with bottles of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. Sure, it’s a gimmick for tourists, but it’s also a singular touch of hospitality in a nominally hostile environment, like taking tea in the Sahara. We chip a few chunks off the glacier, drop them in our glasses, and drink to its continued good health.

EL PILAR is open from November to March,

with rooms from $830 ARS per night. For

more information go hosteriaelpilar.com.ar.

LOS GLACIARES NATIONAL PARK

is open most of the year, with regular bus

services operating running from

El Calafate to the visitor centre at Perito

Moreno. One-day admission costs $215

ARS per person. For more

information go to losglaciares.com.

HIELO Y AVENTURA offer mini-treks and

longer hikes on the glacier through the austral summer,

for more see: hieloyaventura.com

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