Acres o´ Thistles

Hey all! Finally back to base camp when no one is using the computer (traffic is high when we first get back, so I usually wait). So the last week, we were at this absolutely spectacular location in the middle of Valle Guanaco, one of the smaller valleys off the side of the larger valley, Valle Chacabuco. Below is a small view of what we could see from camp.

Most of our work the past week was removing several acres of thistles, which are those really prickley tall weeds with small purple flowers. It takes double gloves to not get them in your hands when removing them from the ground. On our second day at the camp, it finally stopped raining (it had rained for about a week prior) and we made some solid progress on the field in the next few days. For the most part, we used large, heavy metal rods to dig the roots out of the ground and then pull them out at the bottom.

The first day we arrived, when it was still a bit rainy, Mack, Justin, and I went for a short hike up a very cool looking valley that had been eroded for quite a bit of time by the river running through it (Rio Furioso, obvious english cognate). In order to get there, we had to cross a relatively fast moving river, but got across dry and happy. This turned out to be a great move --it poured the following day and the river rose a good foot or two, so we would not have easily crossed again during our time there. The hike itself was more exploratory than destination based, so we unfortunately got kinda stuck in the valley and had to climb out through some pretty thick vegatation. We arrived on top of one of a variety of very flat plateaus that are a result of successive glaciations and resultant lakes that formed (crazy thing is that when the glaciers moved from the campo de hielo norte east into the valley, it changed the drainage pattern of the entire valley so that water drained east instead of west through Argentina into the Atlantic, creating a large and presently nonexistant lake in the valley we work in. We heard a talk from a few British scientists that are collecting core samples in the Chacabuco Valley last night).

After work, there were a few days when we went out to catch rainbow trout in one of the nearby streams. Mack and Justin were much more successful than I, but two nights we had fresh fish for dinner, which was an amazing addition to the meal. I also learned how to kill, gut, and cook fish, which will be a useful skill in any future hiking.

Here´s a picture of the three of us at sunset after a bit of fishing.

That was pretty much our week´s work. Yesterday, on our day off, we went on a longer six hour hike to a great peak with a 360 view of the area. I don´t have any pictures that aren´t of the RAW variety, so I can´t post them now, but I can assure you that it was truly spectacular.