I am having a lot of problems with an unstable internet, so I may change these notes to a list of names of places and brief mention of interesting events, which I will develop at a later time for the actual blog. It is a pity indeed, because I am now at the core of one of the great mountain ranges of the world, and everywhere you look there are enormous craggy ridges, deep glacier valleys occupied by impossibly blue lakes, elegant volcanoes, and a broad diversity of geologic units.
Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi. Bariloche stands at the right edge of the vast Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, which extends all the way to the crest of the Andes and the border with Chile. It is a "European-style" national park, probably closer to the American version of a national forest (a land of many uses).
The gigantic Lago Nahuel Huapi occupies the bottom of two (or three) alpine glacier valleys that join together at the very center of the national park. Its shores are dotted by many formal camping resorts and I am sure hundreds of informal campgrounds where the 10 million bonaerenses who fled the capital have come to lounge by the shore, fish, and basically soak lots and lots of nature. A special variety of tourist has come with their bikes, and loaded with tent, sleeping bag, fishing rod, and all the other accoutrements are heading for their favorite fishing holes. These are tough hombres y mujeres, who defy death carving a lane for themselves at the sides of the narrow highway, plus a topography that only mountain bikers would dare to tackle. No, I didn't see any e-bikes among them.
Fold-and-thrust belt and abundant moraine deposits. The rich conifer forest gets in the way of the fast-moving geologist, but some of the jaggedness of the mountains appears to be related to resistant sandstones exposed in the tight folds of the fold-and-thrust belt of the Andes, although I also see plenty of intrusions and black rocks that could be metamorphic in origin. Covering the whole thing are thick moraine deposits loaded with granitoid boulders. I am having many flashbacks to the Canadian Rockies, New Zealand, and the high Sierra Nevada. I am trying to soak it all in, and have even stopped here and there to take a picture or walk along a stream, but there is nothing like being here to capture the grandiosity and overwhelming beauty of the mountains.
Villa La Angostura is another of those alpine cities that has been transformed by tourism into a colorful set of shops and restaurants that cater to the needs of the transient tourist population (including anglers during the summer and ski and snow enthusiasts during the winter). The area north of La Angostura is called Los Siete Lagos, and even though the lakes are smaller than those at the south, they are very scenic and apparently attract a lot of the more humble tourism that finds the shores more conducive to family camping.
On my way through I saw I could turn left and come to a border crossing. Chile is here so close and yet so far because I cannot take the car across the border (like I blatantly did 20 years ago). From here it would be a short trip to Puerto Montt (at the northern end of the Chilean archipelago) and to the island of Chiloe, which I remember well for the fabulous seafood and an incredible variety of potatoes (the island is one of the places where potatoes might have been domesticated in deep pre-historic times, although Bolivia claims that it was in their altiplano that domestication first took place).
At some point past Los Siete Lagos I entered the Parque Nacional Lanin, which is more arid and less populated than Nahuel Huapi. The geology also changes, and you see many more volcanic rocks. The main town is San Martín de los Andes, at the downstream end of the glacial lake Lago Lácar. The town is nice and not as "loud" as Bariloche or La Angostura, perhaps because the tourist crowd is a lot thinner here. The landscape is dominated by the looming form of Volcán Lanin, which is a beautiful symmetrical andesitic stratovolcano.
Leaving San Martín I caught the end of the working shift, and was happy to give a ride to two ladies, who were going home. They work at a resort hotel and were going home to Junín de los Andes 20 kilometers away. I love picking up people to keep me company, and always learn something new about the folks or the land. After I dropped them off I picked up a guy, who was working construction in the area, but had formerly worked as a hunting guide in one of the estancias. Apparently this place is popular with wealthy hunters seeking a red deer, and they pay extremely generous tips to their guides (US$ 2,500) when they bag their prey.
By the time I dropped him off I was a good 160 km from Bariloche, coming into 6 pm, and I had to put in a burst of speed. Along the way I saw some thick unwelded Ignimbrites, abundant air-fall tuffs, and beautiful cross-bedded deposits of pumice sand dunes (they were too thick to be pyroclastic surges). This would be a fabulous place to do some volcanic stratigraphy.
I was 15 km short of Bariloche when I picked my last set of hitchhikers. They were a young couple of Uruguayan doctors who had taken an Uber to some caves developed in volcanic rocks (some story about the caves being formed by steam blasts), but on the way back they had not been able to call an Uber back, didn't have the card needed to ride the buses, and were facing a three-hour walk back to town! I have been in that position and have given many thanks to the kind people who rescue a stranded hiker.
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