Tucked deep into the Andes’ spine lies a hidden valley, its walls gilded with ice. Glittering out from the volcanic stone like a diamond vein, this glaciated peak inspires a goldrush-level fever among the nature-loving set. Even its name is intoxicating: Hielo Azul. Blue Ice. Geologists say the blue of a glacier comes from ground-up mountain bones that have been gobbled up by the ice, but as I glance between glacier and sky, I have to wonder. Much like the unsullied blues of deep water far from shore, the colors of a Patagonian sky are hard to conceptualize until you have already seen them, then unforgettable once you have. Even at midday the sky borders on navy; the air is so clear that the black of deep space is starting to leak through. I tip my gaze straight to the heavens and squint, looking for the spigot where the sky’s unfiltered color pours down into the ice. Nothing. Maybe it’s hidden behind the single cloud hung from the sky, the one hopelessly snagged upon the jagged peaks.
With considerable effort I pull my thoughts back to Earth, but as I look around I’m not sure if this is really the same planet I stood on this morning, or if indeed I strayed from the path and have stumbled into Middle Earth.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I first heard about Hielo Azul back in February of 2020, and within a week I had dropped everything to answer its call. I boarded a southbound bus down Ruta 40, part of the fabled Pan-American Highway that stretches from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and alighted in the town of El Bolsón. Widely known as Bariloche’s weird hippie cousin, El Bolsón is home to a motley crew of artisans and musicians, burnouts and travelers who have all paused in their journeys to take a collective breath. Pinched in a fold between mountain and steppe, the town is improbably famous for its berry farms and breweries, ice cream and no-nuclear-power mentality. (And should you need further proof that something curious is afoot here, Bilbo’s last name is “Bolsón” in the Spanish translation of The Hobbit.)
As with any true quest, my path there and back again was lined with trials and tribulations. Finding this blue-ice grail was never really the point (although it was admittedly very shiny). Instead I was presented with a series of rhetorical questions and ideas to ponder, lined up one after the other like chapters in a story. Why was I really out here? What was I looking for? What’s the meaning of life? Once I began to hike and the questions started pouring out, I couldn’t get them to stop.
I won’t take you too deep into the inner workings of my mind, but I will lead you on a journey through seven of the more interesting thought-chapters from my quest to Hielo Azul.
Chapter I: Why do I think this is fun?
I cling to the sides of something that could hypothetically be called a bridge but really seems more like a freshman’s first draft of an engineering project, hastily built from scrap wire and 2-by-4s. Every one of my careful steps generates a shockwave that threatens my already-tenuous balance, grappling as it is with the extra 25 pounds on my back. I think of that scene in American Gods where Odin asserts that an airplane only stays aloft because the passengers collectively believe that it will. Come on, bridge, I believe.
My boots hit land with a puff of kicked-up dust and I almost laugh with triumphant joy until I look up and see a wall of mountain before me. I vaguely remember the friendly mountain guide in town telling me this hike would last a solid 7 hours, but he hadn’t mentioned that they would all be unidirectional: up. Or had he? More likely he had and I just hadn’t heard it over the excited hieloazul-hieloazul-HIELOAZUL!! chant that had been happening in my head for the past week. At any rate, less than 15 minutes into my climb, the sweat is already pouring from my brow. It mixes with the fine ochre dust coating my cheeks and creates a delicate mud facemask. Hand me some cucumbers and I could almost believe I was in for a day at the spa. A fleck of mud drips into my mouth and it tastes an awful lot like self-doubt.
It’s not long before I resort to counting my steps, celebrating every even hundred with a break perched on whichever rock or log is closest. Eventually I stop unstrapping my pack and just flop over each time like an enormous disgraced turtle. Getting up again, as you can imagine, is largely accomplished by flailing. I’m surrounded by a beautiful old coihue forest but all I can see are my feet, sunk in the cartoonish Pigpen-cloud of dust stirred up by my boots, which will probably never return to their original color.
This was a terrible idea.
II: Surely it’s around the next bend?
(Similar formula to chapter I, now with 20% more nausea and cursing!)
I know there’s a famous mirador somewhere up ahead. I know because the map said so. The only trouble is, my free hiking map is a half-baked art project that was drawn by the same underachieving freshman who built the bridge. Hand-drawn and hilariously not to scale, about the best it ever provides is a vague squiggle suggesting the general cardinal direction. Fortunately, the path itself is marked by a series of red-and-gold eyes that lead me through the forest. Each one is hand-painted on an old tin can lid and resolves into a tiny flash of art as I near: smiley faces and “Hola!” and arrows greet me, though none of them will cough up the secret of how far I still have to go. Every time the light shifts and forest temporarily opens, my heart leaps with hope. Every time the trees swallow me up again, I sigh and zero my gaze on the next visible bend in the trail. The dusty path behind me is littered with my broken dreams.
Finally, finally, the granite bald yawns before me, a black stage lain out before an amphitheater of mountains waiting for a show. I am too shattered with exertion and gratitude to give them much. My performance consists of me crawling across the sharp volcanic rock, ditching my infernal pack, and sprawling on my belly. The sun directly warms my back and the dark substrate beneath radiates its secondhand warmth up. I bonelessly sink into this warm sandwich like it’s a dreamy hot tub instead of an uneven slab of rock, and start cramming my face with cookies. A lizard waddles by. Overall, my mountain audience seems whelmed.
III: I want this river to swallow me whole, turn me inside out, and only spit me out once I’m scrubbed pure.
Almost an hour after I expected to arrive at the river’s edge, the blue ribbon finally brushes against the trail. Delighted, I fling my pack to the ground (are you sensing a trend here?) and half-submerge myself in the freezing water. I don’t even bother with my camelbak or hands, instead just plunging my face directly into its depths and drinking. It is a teeth-numbing cordial borne of sunlight and ice: stirred, not shaken. I am grateful for its cleansing embrace after spending five hours engulfed in dust.
A belly full of fresh glacial water is a form of medicine that can’t be bought. My pack weighs nothing despite the extra water weight. My steps are bouncy. I read a sign saying it’s 3 more kilometers to the refugio, and then promptly forget I ever saw it.
III ½: I could punch a puma in the teeth right now.
Ah, the hiker’s high. My beautiful legs and strong back have, once again, carried me a full kilometer into the sky. My spirit leads my body. My thoughts, when they come at all, are disjointed and strange. I am invincible. Time and distance are meaningless. Here, kitty kitty!
IV: GREAT SUCCESS
They say the journey is just as important as the destination, but it’s hard to deny that the moment of arrival always delivers such bliss. As soon as I catch sight of the refugio I tumble from my puma-punching high into a puddle of exhaustion, and I succumb to gravity on the quiet shore of a nascent creek. I won’t move again until the early mountain sunset forces me inside. For now I sprawl on my back, resting in the Andes’ cupped palm. Above the great bluebird eye that’s been watching me all day still evenly meets my gaze. A dark rim of mountains now colors its periphery, and capricious squalls dance just behind their jagged edges. The clouds bubble like a witch’s potion, held within cauldrons carved from the exposed bones of the earth.
I cannot move 90% of my body, but it doesn’t matter. The tiniest of head tilts is all it takes to open a different door into a new visual world. I look right and see a thundering waterfall of fresh meltwater pouring straight from the source, and I plunge my feet into the product of its flow. It is instant relief mixed with excruciating pain. In seconds I can feel neither my fresh blisters nor really anything below the knees. Movement catches my attention and I tilt left to watch tiny passerine birds buzz over the water’s surface as they hunt for invertebrates. Laughter catches my ear and I crane my head back towards the hand-carved goalpost that marks an unlikely soccer pitch built up here on the top of the world. Tilt down and I stare into a translucent world of river-polished lava rocks, ochre and emerald and ebony tumbling ever downstream at their glacial pace. I pocket a few of the most unique ones, because I am me.
Night falls abruptly at altitude. In a heartbeat the sky flips from bluebird to frigid inkpot riddled with diamonds. I pull on every winter layer I brought and stand mesmerized by the abyss. In the sun’s absence, deep space has finally breached the atmosphere and filled this valley to the brim with its Otherness. My arm shivers with cold and wonder, conveniently electrifying my conventional toothbrush. I watch the galaxy pivot until my legs threaten to give out, and only then do I scurry into the refugio’s warm attic to dive gratefully into my mattress on the floor.
V: Do it now.
The next morning I realize I may have some issues with my ego. I see a trail labeled “very difficult, allow 3 hours for the climb” and think to myself ‘Ha! That’ll be like an hour, tops,’ conveniently forgetting everything I had just learned the previous day. Now look at me. Not even halfway up the mountain after two hours of scrambling, and I’m 4-wheeling it again. The rocks in this capricious boulderfield keep shifting underneath my torn hands, like they never learned about physics. All I can do is keep contact with as many rocks as possible and hope at least a few of them stay put. Rock cairn trail markers would be absolutely useless in a boulderfield, so instead I follow a precarious trail of enormous painted bullseyes that will ~ allegedly ~ lead me the safest way up the mountain.
A blast of frigid winter air punches me in the chest the second I crest the upper lip of the glacial moraine. A treeless moonscape sprawls at my feet, a monochrome bowl filled with a milky turquoise lagoon. I eye the hikers standing on its shore and wonder if it’s worth joining them since it means I will have to climb back up and over this moraine. I am so very done with climbing. Then instinct bubbles up and whispers: this is the one chance I will ever have to dip my fingers into this lagoon, because I will never visit this place again. It’s possible I’ll be proven wrong, but this is one cultivated habit that has served me well in my years boomeranging from one continent to another. Whenever I really want to do something, I should do it now. Do it while the realm of its possibility is the closest it will ever be to overlapping the realm of my reality.
So, like the ungainly ape that I am, I plough down a rocky scree that isn’t anywhere close to the actual trail and end up sliding down amid an ankle-deep avalanche of rocks. My feet and opposable thumbs are useless here, my brain doubly so, but at least my balance kicks in during my descent. Finally I grind to a halt on a chunk of bedrock which bears telltale white clawmarks made by the glacier not so long ago. This glacier, and most others around the globe, is disappearing. Even after climbing up to the edge of the world and making contact with its impossible color, the glacier’s foot is still too high up the mountain for me to reach. I last only fifteen minutes contemplating both of our fates before the fierce wind drives me back. I crest the moraine lip again and slide back down the other side of the mountain, riding a wave of tumbling rocks back down into summer.
VI. ARE YOU *&#%ING KIDDING ME?
After swinging by the refugio to pick up my pack, I am on my way back down to El Bolsón. Just to reiterate: I am on my way back down. I’d decided to return by a different route so I wouldn’t have to retrace my steps from yesterday, and obviously because yesterday had been a unidirectional slog uphill, today would be unidirectionally down, right? HAHA, NOPE. Less than 10 minutes from the refugio, I stand in disbelief at the bottom of the steepest uphill grade of the entire loop. If the glacier was the valley’s face, this trail climbed right up and over the valley’s left shoulder.
I stare up and fight back tears. I’d been so ready to finally walk an easy path. I whip out my ersatz map and beg its squiggles to tell me how long the pain games will last if I continue on this route to Wharton. The written Spanish instructions promise this path is slightly shorter (I think), but I would be heading, yet again, into grueling uncharted territory. The squiggles aren’t talking. I know I could turn around and go back down my original path, but it is already after noon and there’s a very high chance I’d get stranded at the bottom by the lack of buses and hitchhiking options back to town.
Well, nothing for it. I had already come this far, and I wasn’t willing to back down now. What better time to dig deep than when I have reached the end of my emotional and physical tether only to face the greatest unexpected hurdle yet? I cinch my hip strap, pull down my hat, and throttle any remaining self-doubt. I climb up tree roots like they’re ladders. I counsel my gaze to stray no more than ten steps ahead on the trail. When I pause, I only ever face back downhill, resting my calves and focusing on the progress I have already made.
And eventually, bit by bit, I finally reach the high point.
VII: Calm
I glide through an old-growth forest, patting the gnarled trunks of great-great-grandmother lenga trees who cling yet to life. Besides two other pairs of hikers, I have the entire mountainside to myself. The high tide of true calm surges in. Less manic than I was while in the grip of the puma-punching high, I am finally able to relax into the forest’s serenity. Exhaustion has drained all strife from my mind, and every barrier to thought’s natural flow has disintegrated. Typically my mind is an undisciplined dog yanking at the leash in whichever direction presents the most colorful distractions, but now it has been brought to respectful heel.
I have just successfully hiked a kilometer into the sky and seen where the boundary between worlds thins. I have chased clouds up mountains and surfed back down the other side on waves of meltwater and rocky scree. I have bathed in freshly freed water that spent the past few centuries locked away as ice in a glittering Andean crown. The space created by such wonder could only ever be filled with calm and joy and gratitude. Not even the further obstacles – three steep hours in blistering sun, a long wait to cross a footbridge, or a final hour uphill to reach the bus stop – had the power to puncture my reverie.
And just like that, it ends. I arrive back where I had started, and the city looks the same. I look the same, albeit much dirtier. I had drunk from the blue-ice grail and realized I could not bring it with me, except abstractly in the form of answer and memory.
I am the same, but I am not.
logistic Appendix
If you’re interested in doing this hike, I included some practical information that I struggled to find online before I went. I visited in February 2020 (you know, in the before-times), so things might have changed. Click Page 2:
Window Seat Odyssey 
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