Thursday 3rd December 2015
With Francesca and Alex, we woke up and decided to go for a hike to Piedras Blancas and Piedra del Fraile, do a loop and come back.
Here is Alex, starting to walk on the path.
On this map you can see in the middle Poincenot campground. From there here is what we did all day: we walked up north to Mirador Piedras Blancas and then to Hosteria El Pilar, walked along the river, found the path, walked to Piedra del Fraile and then walked back on the other path to Poincenot campground.
View to the left
Walking in the forest
View from the Mirador Piedras Blancas
Zooming in, here is the Glaciar Piedras Blancas.
Another map showing the first path on which we were walking from Poincenot towards Hosteria El Pilar.
At some point, we stopped and had a break and we could hear a “carpintero” picking the wood on this tree here.
I walked really slowly and got closer and got that shot of the female carpintero.
We continued walking, alongside the river.
Pretty view to the right.
We arrived at Hostel El Pilar and went over Puente Rio Blanco.
View of the river and scenery from the bridge.
Two travel cyclists passed us after the bridge. Such a cool idea to cycle here!
Sign indicating the risk of fires.
Walking towards the second bridge setup above Rio Electrico.
Before the bridge, we took the path to the left going towards Piedra del Fraile.
Walking across the river on a few rocks and branches.
We got a bit lost and then found the path again.
Crossing another stream on branches.
Walking through more forest.
We saw a few cows grazing there. For sure that meat must be very organic. 🙂
Mummy cow and Baby cow.
View to the left. Climbers come from all over the world for the rocks here.
Lunch break.
It is quite expensive to camp at Piedra del Fraile or go on the path located after the campground.
Passing this river before to arrive at the Piedra del Fraile campground.
We went up this path near the campground to check out the view.
The view was awesome.
Here is the Piedra del Fraile campground. Someone else also had the Big Agnes Flycreek tent I have. Very popular tent! 🙂
Cool sign. What about we went left and right or here or there??
Really cool setup! 🙂
We started walking back on the other trail towards Poincenot and saw the male of the carpintero.
Here are more photos of that afternoon walk going back to Poincenot. The walk was longer than we expected and pretty full on, we climbed rocks, crossed rivers, went through some mud. We had planned to go check out the lake and glacier from closer but ran out of time. We didn’t expect that the full walk would take us so long! All in all, it was a beautiful hike though!
If you wanted to go there in a clockwise direction instead of anti-clockwise as we did, you would get presented with this main path in front of view and the path we came from is that one towards the right.
Walking back.
We got to the campground pretty late around 9.30pm and cooked. Lucky it became pitch dark only around 10.30pm!
Tomorrow, let’s go try to check out Laguna Sucia and then shoot off to Campamento Agostini!
Pom explores 