Trekking through the clouds

The view from Cerro Catedral (we probably could have just gone back after this)
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It was supposed to be a nice, easy, leisurely hike through the woods and the mountains.  It's called the Nahuel Huapi Traverse, and the way the guidebooks and maps depict it, it looks like it's a mildly amusing trail that winds its way slowly through the ridges of the Andes.  Shai, Zvika, and I approached this as if it was little more than a shortcut to Blockbuster, and boy were we wrong.

To begin, the Nahuel Huapi Traverse begins after a half-hour gondola/chairlift combination to the top of Cerro Catedral.  The cloud cover skimmed the tops of the mountains, giving us the sensation that we really were doing a pretty spectacular and intense adventure.  I'd say within half an hour, the novelty of that adventure wore off and the difficulty of schlepping our crap up the tumbling glacially-deposited rocks really kicked in.

Laguna Schmoll
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For four hours we walked up, down, and around rocks perched more precariously than I would have liked (Shai and Zvika just laughed... these guys were Israeli Army, remember?).  We finally arrived at a place called Laguna Schmoll, which was little more than a dot on our map, but an hour and a half from Refugio Frey (our intended destination) and a nice enough place to put down for the night.  We cleared an area, set up the tent, and cooked a dinner of spaghetti, tomato sauce, and whatever spices we happened to have on hand.  Eating with Swiss Army knife pliers out of plastic bowls and drinking the runoff from the laguna wasn't exactly Grampi's, but it was fun nonetheless.  Plus we were surrounded by inspiring, jagged peaks and glacial ice, so it could definitely have been worse.

Night panorama by our campsite
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Woke up the next morning to find that while we had been sleeping, a cloud had literally engulfed us.  It was to the point where you couldn't walk more than ten yards from the tent without having to strain to see the bright orange piping.  At this point, we were faced with a choice: hunker down for the day and wait out the cloud, or pack up and try to make it back to Cerro Catedral.  We chose the latter, which may or may not have been a good idea.

For the next hour and a half, we climbed up one of those "inspiring, jagged peaks" (whose inspiration was a lot less touching and wonderful once we actually had to climb them), picking our way around rocks because we could barely see the hands in front of our faces, let alone a trail.  The Israeli Army mentality had come to the conclusion, "Well, if we climb up and take a left, we have to hit it eventually."  Riiiiight.  Upon actually finding said trail, we threw off our packs and danced in celebration, scraped, filthy, and exhausted.  Then a guy and a girl from Oregon moseyed down the path, looked at us with considerable confusion, agreed to take our picture, and went on their way.  Apparently, they had followed the trail from Refugio Frey without a problem, and couldn't for the life of them figure out why we had just gone up and around the cliffs when the red dots were right there to lead the way.

Me at camp the next morning... look carefully, I'm in there somewhere.
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Anyway, we backtracked all the way back to Cerro Catedral, since the prospect of going another five hours to Refugio Jakob in the cloud didn't strike us as particularly appealing.  Made it back to Bariloche in time for an immense dinner at Alberto's, and then parked ourselves in the lounge of the Marco Polo Inn and watched Black Hawk Down until we more or less passed out from exhaustion.  It was an adventure I'm really glad I did, and one that I'd laugh at if you asked me to do it again.