Post by Grubb
Mosquitoes won’t bother us here. In the windy low-40s, it’s knit cap time. Driving in from the small airport with stark brown hills to the east and barren flatlands to the west, I felt like I might be back in New Mexico somewhere around Carlsbad. Only there weren’t any trees. Nada. Zip. The landscape had been scoured by the wind. And the ground cover made our chamisa and gramma grass look grand. Spearheaded bunches of short yellow grass stippled what otherwise was a wasteland; there were no signs of the calafate barberry shrub the town is named after.
The town itself, small (6,000), and not overly developed, reminded me of Truth or Consequences only instead of Elephant Butte beating back the mesas there’s this magnificent emerald lake that curves out of sight into the hills where the Perito Moreno Glacier rises up out of the water like a frozen Niagara Falls. Imagine T or C as a resort town hugging the banks of Lake Argentino. There’s a main drag with shops and restaurants catering to tourists, scattered low-rent chalets, hostels, and Best Western looking hotels set back off dirt roads, and, due to the lake and the windbreak of the hills, trees.
So here it is, a taste of Tor C in the Patagonian outback. El Calafate, a quiet town just around the bend from mountain mists shrouding the icy sublime.