Looking back towards Bariloche with view of the Nahuel Huapi Lake from Cerro La Mona.
Between Bariloche and San Martin de los Andes is the Seven Lakes Road section of Ruta 40 that really encapsulates so much of the Lakes District reputation of beauty. Every twenty minutes in this 100 mile stretch of road there is another beautiful view and another short side-road to explore a valley, lake, river, town. I said “wow” so many times on this section of my trip and each peak > 7,500 ft offered incredible views of glaciated volcanos, peaks, lakes and the Chilean-Argentinian Andes.
My favorite sculpture of a female backcountry skier
El Bolsón is described as a hippy town and that is kind of true with a large artist market and many wood sculptures at the center and nearby Lago Puelo. That said, it is kinda a commercialized artistic center with large breweries and a fair number of tourists. However, I did have a great time there with my primary goal of visiting the ultra unique live wood sculpture exhibit of El Bosque Tallado on a mountain side. Along with some hiking / running of peaks and a popular blue river. The sculpture art installation was of a like I’ve not encountered outside of Burning Man which meaningfully incorporated the landscape.
From the Frey Refugio, it’s hard to count all the climbable towers circling the Laguna Tonchek, but it’s easy to imagine their shapes as cannons, faces, animals, chopsticks and hand gestures. The uniqueness of climbing in this area made the trip to Bariloche in the Lakes District of Central Patagonia an easy “yes”. I speak about logistics in this blog post, but this is my climbing primer from getting on top of some amazing spires!
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.
Excited to get back to South America and traveling instead of just vacation, Sadie and I took off to Colombia for three weeks. We spent about a week in Medellín, Minca (North Coast) and Salento (Central Coffee Region) respectively. The big thing to know is that Colombia is pretty safe now (aside from a couple specific regions) with a very active tourist industry that seems likely to keep it that way. If you follow basic traveler safety tips for any foreigner who is rich by local standards, you’ll have a fine time.
View of Tolima in the clouds with Finca La Playa in foreground
One of the things we were most excited about in Colombia was a summit attempt on a 17,000+ ft glaciated volcano in the Northern Andes: Nevado del Tolima. The ascent is pretty non-technical and guides don’t require any previous mountaineering knowledge or fitness restriction. There are multiple guide services and itinerary for this trek between 3-5 days, some with a stop over to a natural hot springs, some extending to hit the two other nearby glaciated peaks. We booked a guide for four days with SAWA Travel with 12,000 ft of gain and picked up one extra person on the itinerary for a little lower cost (still $450 pp). We wanted to use a guide to help us navigate logistics, local weather and contribute to the local economy. I think a guide is required to attempt the summit, but I’m not sure.
There is a lot of interesting story about finding this canyon, our guide, getting to San Carlos and about the area. However, if you are here just to know about the canyoneering descent, I’ll get right to that and talk about the rest later. We descended the La Chorrera – Inferior (lower) section of this canyon with many 100+ ft less-than-vertical rappels often involving (but not through) flowing water during what seemed like low-flow conditions (it hadn’t rained in a couple weeks). It was a great, non-touristy canyoneering experience guided by Manuel of Eco Guías Colombia who provided gear and wetsuits (one fit me at 6’6”!) and was exactly the authentic canyoneering experience I was looking for.
While there are over a dozen coffee tours in Salento (and dozens more elsewhere in the county) to choose from that give you the general information on how coffee is grown, harvested and produced… I wanted to specifically try “Coffee Cupping” (i.e. coffee tasting) because I’ve never liked the taste of coffee but wanted to see what ‘good coffee’ tasted like and how it varied. For this reason (and because Ocaso was close to where we were staying) we chose the “Premium Coffee Tour” from Ocaso. This was 100.000 COP ($29) per person in Jan-2024.
When you think of Colombia there are two consumable products that start with “C” that come to mind and one of them is Coffee! Anywhere there is coffee and tourists in Colombia, there are coffee farm tours. We had a great time on some cocoa tours in Costa Rica and love learning about local things while traveling so went on a couple of them. Here is what we learned:
