This is a shot from one of our campsites.  I set up the camera with the intervelometer to automatically take a shot every 30 seconds as we set up camp and did our best to stay warm.

Here is the cast of characters from left to right.  Sitting on a bump on a log on the left is Yuri.  He is in the process of getting a jackboot to the face.  I tease Yuri, but he is actually a very nice guy and I like him.  That doesn’t mean you want to room with him or share a tent, mind you.

Second from the left is me.  Don’t you like my hat?  I got it on Etsy.

Third is Irina. I hope I spelled that right. She was our chef and handled most of the cooking, keeping me well fed and warm. She also came out on a few photography adventures too and was always there to lighten the mood by making Russian animal sounds. For example, did you know that Russian frogs don’t say “ribbit ribbit” and Russian dogs don’t say “ruff ruff”? This is only a small sampling of the campfire discussions. You can try to guess down in the comments what they say…

Fourth/Fifth is Yana and Dima. They had no trouble keeping warm. Their sleeping bags could be zipped together. Dima tried to be helpful and suggested that perhaps I could do the same thing with Yuri. After saying that, he reared back, laughing like Brezhnev, and then drinking like Yeltsin.

On the far right is Vulva. Again, I can’t quite say his name properly, but it’s very close, within the delicate region of “Vulva”. He was a very cool dude, richly festooned with silver Buddhist paraphernalia from his various expeditions to Tibet and Nepal.

They are all great people and I enjoy my time with them tremendously.

Filed under the categories: Argentina, El Chalten, Nikon D3X, Patagonia, Travel

This was shot in the final hours of daylight, near the southern tip of Argentina and the edge of Chile, just a glacier’s throw from Antarctica.

In the morning, we woke up at 4:30 AM in -7 degree cold. I hardly slept 30 minutes the whole night. I was in a tiny 2-man tent with Yuri. The noxious fumes of our tiny prison reminded me, if you will, of the inside of a tauntaun that had spent its life consuming cognac and cigarettes. Furthermore, his snore had the sonorous bass and carrying power of a humpback whale with none of the beauty.

I started on one edge of these rugged peaks and moved around to this side, to get the view from the glacial lake. The spiked mountains there are Cerro Torre, and I was very lucky to see them without cloud cover. I understand they are covered up 90% of the time, so to have crystal clear air was fortunate. The glacier there, which presents on the right but really goes back behind many more mountains, is called “glacier grande”.

I did a lot of other things this day too, including a 45-minute 1500-foot ascent up an icy trail that was not really a trail at all. Dima and Vulva (Vulva is one of the other Russian gentleman who joined us on the trip — it’s hard to pronounce with a strange V-W sound, but he seemed to respond when I called him “Vulva”) went up the mountain with me in the pitch black, using only headlamps. I’ll have more on that story later because it was pretty sketchy. But, alas, we were able to see Fitz Roy as the sun turned the tips pink. After that, we began the long additional 10km hike that brought us to this location. I stayed here watching icebergs float by until the last morsels of dusk remained.

Last, I hope you like the new theme – it should come online sometime today. There are still minor little probs — the comments will get better, etc… but we will ease into it. The new design was done by one of the top graphic designers in the world – a Frenchman named Fabian Barral. He used images from my passport to create the look and feel. I think it’s great — let’s hope you do too!

Filed under the categories: Argentina, El Chalten, LucisArt, Nikon D3X, Patagonia, Travel

Our hike is starting to get closer to our quarry. The destination inside the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares are the isolated peaks of FItz Roy.

Every few kilometers the terrain can change drastically. Because all the land around here is recently glaciated, the soil is very fresh and full of life. The strange mountain formations make for unpredictable weather patterns and cloud/fog formations across the landscapes. Even better, we are here in the middle of autumn, so many of the leaves are turning.

It’s always a welcome relief to take off my pack, set it down, and then wander about for some photos. I grabbed this one along the way to share with you all.

I noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Monte Fitz Roy said, “the weather in the area is exceptionally inclement and treacherous”. No shit. Wait until you see the shot I upload tomorrow. It was taken after 16km of walking in a single day after waking up to -7 degrees at 4:30 AM from a tent that contained the heavily scented noxious scents of the one and only Yuri.

Filed under the categories: Argentina, El Chalten, Nikon D3X, Patagonia, Travel

I am still here in Argentina, although the photo below is from last week in Buenos Aires. If any of you watch Lost, then you will be familiar with my “flashback” and “flashforward” style of description. I know some of you were waiting to hear more about the backpacking adventure, but I’ll sprinkle that stuff in over the next six months or so, interlaced with other various plots (again, like Lost). Also, like Lost, many of my stories have no endings.

As for this one, the five Russians and I went to one of the oldest Tango dinner expositions in the city. Argentina is famous for the tango and swarthy Argentinian men who perform it. This is the famous dance hall of Homero Manzi, who is apparently some kind of a legend, according the little video they put up before the dance. The video was of very low quality, which made me think it was either very old or made by a college student.

The dinner consisted of a variety of meats and wines and tango dances and music. It was quite a show. The whole thing was scripted like an old 1960′s style dinner theater with all sorts of staged scenes and dramatic dances.

These sorts of things are always extremely difficult to photograph. It’s very dark. There’s a lot of movement, and it’s tough to figure out the ideal setup. I clambered up to where the supplies are stored and set up for this shot. You can actually see Yuri somewhere in this photo… I won’t say where. Although I can assure you he is not one of the swarthy Argentinian dancers. Furthermore, this was shot with a wide-angle lens, so objects such as Yuri may be larger than they appear.

Filed under the categories: Argentina, Buenos Aires

This is the start of what would be a 40km backpacking trek through the Andes. And I mean THROUGH the Andes.

I have come with my friend Dima, who is ex-Soviet miltiary. He’s tough. At 23, he led a 3-week expedition through Siberia to find the rare Siberian Tiger. Now he is 43 and he hasn’t slowed down any.

If you look closely at this photo, over on the middle right you can see some very sharp vertical peaks. In there is Fitz Roy, one of the hardest places to reach in the world and even harder to photograph. That is our destination.

Filed under the categories: Argentina, El Chalten, Nikon D3X, Patagonia, Travel

This is one of the abandoned rooms in the ruins of Akbar’s palace in northern India. The interiors of the rooms maintained their deeper red and orange colors and seemed to glow as light flowed into the room. In fact, it seemed the whole room changed every few minutes as the sun changed position. I suppose that’s all they had to think about, architecturally, back then, other than a creative way to move water around.

Filed under the categories: Travel