Josh tells of rampaging Mont Fitz Roy

On the morning of Febuary 3rd we woke up at ready for our 4 or 5 day hike to and around Mt. Fitz Roy.  Although it was early, everyone was ready to go hiking.  We had divided all the food and supplies amongst each other, found the trailhead where we were starting, and had our bags packed, ready to go, the night before.  So we got up and ate a small breakfast and by about 10 o’clock we were out on the trail. The weather to start the hike didn’t seem to promising at first considering it was windy and rainy. I was praying that the weather would clear up as the day went on.  Thankfully, The Lord answered that prayer and  in about an hour the weather had cleared up and we were hiking through forests and up hillsides.  Then at around 12:30 we stopped to have a snack and we realized we had been hiking on the wrong trail, and in order to get to our campsite for night one we had to hike back to where we started and go on another trail.  I’m not sure why you would name one trail Lago Toro and another Lago Torres. So our day of three hours of hiking quickly turned into a total of seven hours of hiking.  We arrived at our campsite for the night at about 7 PM, very tired and hungry. We quickly set up tents and some took a small nap before we started on dinner, which was rice and lentals! After eating, which took awhile because we could only cook one thing at a time. We quickly and happily resigned to our tents to sleep.
We then woke up Monday morning ready to go, we were optimistic for our short day of hiking which would be about three and a half hours to our next campsite. We got some rice in our bellies and headed off down the trail by 11 AM.  We stopped off at some great viewpoints of the valleys and mountains along the way. We arrived at our second campsite by about three in the afternoon and set up camp and ate a snack. We then decided to go take a closer look at Mt. Fitz Roy before we cooked supper. At this point, because we weren’t used to hiking a lot, our feet were blistering up. Logan had especially bad feet because he accidentally stepped into a bush with bare feet and got thorns in his feet, then on top of that he had blisters. After some of us bandaged up our feet all of us but Logan decided to head up this mountain on a one hour hike to see a great view. After about 45 minutes of zig-zagging up the mountain we reached the top to see a beautiful view of Mt. Fitz Roy and the blue glacier water lake below it.  After being up there for a half hour we decided to head back down and get to cooking. That night we had some more lentals, rice and warm tuna, with crumbled crackers on it. After that we hung out for a bit and retired to our beds.
On Tuesday Febuary 5, Aaron and Hans got up before the sunrise to see the sun come up on Mt. Fitz Roy. Then they figured they would get a head start on breakfast by making rice.  Sadly, our stove had other plans and to make a long story short we ended up having about half done rice for breakfast. It was nasty. After eating we decided that we were going to stay and camp at this place another night. So we were going to hike to the end of the trail and back, which was about eight hours of hiking in total. We set out, and about an hour into the hike we saw a beautiful glacier that had a couple waterfalls emptying into a clear blue lake.  Later, around hour two into our hike it started to rain a little, it continued to rain, and rain, and rain. It ended up raining the rest of our hike, which made things fun. But thankfully we all brought our rain jackets with us, so the top half of our bodies stayed relatively dry.  When we got to the end of the trail there was a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. We all ended up splitting a pizza between the five of us and it was really good. So after our break to eat we headed back out into the rain. We walked back in a little different way to see some different sights and arrived back at camp. We then had to deal with our stubborn stove to make dinner. It worked just about the same as it did that morning and we ended up having somewhat of a “lentil soup”, which consisted of lentils, water, and onions.  One thing about camping and always being hungry is that most all food tastes good!  Well, except for that horrible rice we had that morning. After eating we immediately went to bed, everyone was cold and tired.  Thanks to the Lord it had stopped raining when we were eating dinner and all the stuff in our tents stayed dry.
On the 4th and last morning of your trek Andrew and Hans woke up before the sunrise and watched the sun come up on Mt. Fitz Roy again.  That morning Hans worked his magic with the stove and got it to give us a good flame for breakfast and we had a crazy amount of rice, which was amazing! Then, as we were packing up to leave, we met the Israelis that we keep running into. This was about the 4th or 5th time in about three weeks that we met up with them.  After everyone had taped up there feet we headed down the mountain to Chalten. It was a good walk because it was downhill and took us right around two hours. When we got down and packed everything back up in the car we hit up the grocery store and had some good ole tomato on bread sandwich things. Ahh, it was just fabulous! We drove about four hours down to the city of El Calafate. Where we stayed the night in a hostel. It was great to have some warm showers and soft beds to sleep in again.