Hanging Glacier bush walk

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WELL GOOD morning I’m doing a bush walk today, actually heading across a swing bridge, travelling across this spectacular river here. This is quite an amazing little swing bridge made of wood, and check out the view. This is absolutely awesome here. Looking down the other way. The forest here is very similar to that in New Zealand and I’ll show you that a bit later on. There is a hanging glacier here but unfortunately the cloud’s a bit low so I’m going to stick to the lowlands and do a walk up to one of the lakes. That will be quite fascinating so I’ll see you a bit further along in the bush.

Okay I’m in the forest now and as you can see there’s quite a lot of ferns, mosses, and trees. This does remind me of parts of southern New Zealand, particularly around Milford Sound and parts of the Kepler Track. You can see here little club mosses and filmy ferns. It’s kind of very much like New Zealand but the large varieties (trees) are very different. Obviously South America broke off from the Zealandia continent many millions of years ago so they’ve obviously had some time to evolve. But the mosses are amongst the oldest plants in the world. Some more filmy ferns. Now I’m coming to some really interesting boulders here. So, I could almost be mistaken to think I’m in New Zealand. But there are some varieties like this broadleaf, I’m not sure what it is, but clearly that’s indicating I’m somewhere else and certainly not New Zealand. So, I suppose this is the Northern Patagonia forest on the western side of the Andes which are a lot wetter. In previous days I’ve been in much dryer conditions on the Argentine side, on the lee side of the mountains. So, it’s great to see both sides and great to see how interesting they are.

Okay we’ve just reached the lake now, and it’s quite discoloured because it is glacially fed. If you’re wondering where the glacier is if you look in the distance up the valley there’s a waterfall that you may just be able to see. It looks like a column of cloud descending. That’s descending from what’s known as the hanging glacier. It’s actually above the clouds, but within the clouds there’s a glacier that’s hanging off the edge of the valley and the waterfall is descending from that. That is feeding the glacial water into this lake which in turn feeds into the river that I passed before (at the swing bridge). I think this is as far as I’m going today. We’re going to start heading back soon through the amazing forest.

Okay so I’m heading further downstream from the lake back along the track. I’ve come to this little spot here. The river that the lake feeds comes down this way. Here it meets a clearer river coming down from up there. Where they meet you can see the water mixing. You can see the clear blue water on the other side and the dirty grey glacial water on this side. The river is tumbling down the valley to the bridge I crossed earlier you can probably remember. The river then continues down to the fiord. This is a beautiful little spot here. Shame we didn’t get to see the glacier. The overcast conditions made really interesting for seeing all the bush anyway. It’s a spectacular little area here so I’ll keep doing a couple more nature walks around here over the next two hours. Then we’ll head off a bit further north to our next destination where we’re going to stay for a couple of days, so I’ll see you there.