When my friends showed me the spires ringing the cirque outside the Frey Refugio, I was an immediate yes to join them on their trip down to Argentina, centering on Bariloche. This isn’t the High Andes, but it’s definitely the Andes, Patagonia and alpine. The prominence here makes 7,500-8,500 ft summits provide a great view from a valley floor around 2,500 ft. It was a great zone to climb interesting spires, get on top of the highest thing around and stumble our way through a mix of information for a memorable keystone to the Central Patagonia trip. You can read my climbing trip here, but this post is about the logistics part which I found difficult to get a full picture abroad before the trip and only slightly better locally.

Bariloche is the ski-epicenter of Argentina, a major summer trekking destination, the main airport for the Lakes District in Central Patagonia and is incredibly beautiful in all seasons. This is a small city of 140,000 people sitting on the shore of Nahuel Huapi Lake. Nahuel Huapi Lake has the equivalent surface area to Lake Tahoe but 3x more shoreline as it is drawn into fjord-like inlets and permeated by an archipelago of islands and peninsulas both big and small. Over the ’25-’26 new year I spent three weeks in the Lakes District and two in the Bariloche area climbing, hiking, running, eating and visiting its lakes and beaches.