Patagonia: The End of the World on Foot

You fly directly from Buenos Aires to El Calafate, a small Patagonian town whose entire existence is justified by being the nearest settlement to the Perito Moreno Glacier. The glacier is a wall of ice four kilometres wide and sixty metres high — a river of blue-white frozen water descending from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which is the largest non-polar ice cap on earth. Walking the catwalks in front of the glacier puts you close enough to feel the cold radiating from the ice face. The Nautical Safari boards a vessel that approaches within 300 metres of the southern wall — at water level, the scale is incomprehensible. On day four, the South Glacier Adventure pushes further: a multi-hour trek through ancient lenga beech forests to Superior Frías Lake, covered in icebergs drifting in silence.

The border crossing into Chilean Patagonia brings you to Torres del Paine National Park — arguably the most spectacular national park in the Americas. The W Trek — named for the shape of its route — takes four days through landscapes that shift with extraordinary frequency: the Valley of the French, where hanging glaciers calve into the valley below; the Grey Glacier, a floating mass of blue ice on a vast lake; and the final morning approach to the Torres themselves — three granite towers of 2,800 metres rising sheer from the valley floor. You camp and stay in refugios each night, waking to views that make the morning's blisters irrelevant.

El Chaltén is a small village in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park that exists almost entirely as a base for hikers. The centrepiece is the Fitz Roy massif — a cluster of peaks led by a single jagged spire, 3,359 metres high, that is one of the most dramatic mountain silhouettes on earth. The trek to Laguna de los Tres — the viewpoint lake directly beneath Fitz Roy — takes five to six hours and ascends 1,200 metres. In good weather, the reflection of the peaks in the lake is extraordinary. In bad weather, the peaks disappear into cloud and the journey itself becomes the point: lenga beech forests, river crossings, wind so strong it requires concentration to walk in a straight line.