Latitude 55º 88´S: Glaciers, Tierra del Fuego, Chile and ¨The End of the World¨

Day 8
January 24, 2010
The Beagle Channel

Mile 1000

The next morning I was still sick and could not bear the idea of leaving the room with Glenda at 6:45. The ship was scheduled to begin a transverse of seven glaciers around 7:00 a.m. "Text me," I foolishly told her as she left the cabin, and tell me all about it.¨

Stupid me. Here I´d come 5,000 miles to grab every last opportunity, and I was passing up this amazing chance. This was just another in the list of reasons I´d come on this trip.

I forced myself out of bed, showered quickly, grabbed my camera and dragged myself to the 12th floor. It didn´t take long for me to wake up!

We were retracing Charles Darwin´s 1846 journey through the Beagle Channel. He´d had a lot to say about these glaciers. and I would, too, after we´d slowly coursed out way southeast into the Collingwood Narrows. We were paralleling the southernmost spine of the Andes. The Norwegian Sun sailed its typical slow 14 knots an hour past massive, impressive ice blue glaciers. Growlers floated in the ice, intense blue water all around us.

Ice fields and glaciers, blue, jagged and enormous, stood out in front of us. Fissured blue ice extended upwards for hundreds of feet. Steams of icy water ran down the fronts. Pleated and striated crevices, on some of the glaciers, were an intense aqua marine hue. Despite being on such a huge ship, it was still possible to the hear the grumblng and grinding noises of these massive fields of ice.

A light, cold mist shrouded the high, snow-capped peaks of the Darwin Cordillera above us, some of which had been dusted with a new layer of snow the night before. This was a stunningly beautiful stretch of water and, despsite to uncooperativeness of the weather, a stunningly beautiful stretch of mountainous scenery.

In the end, in the course of little more than two hours, we passed five of these glaciers. Periodically, the mist would lift and we´d see dazzling flashes of snow in the distant mountains--a silvery brilliance in the ocassional brush of light.

And this was just the start of the day.

Glenda and I convened for breakfast and plotted the rest of the day. By noon we´d arrive in Ushuia, gateway to Anatrctica, at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego, the southern most city in the world.

Kirk, Glenda and I disembarked--their first steps in Argentina. We spent a quiet day shopping, roaming past pastel colored houses, whose gardens bloomed with muliti-colored lupine, shastas and Icelandic poppies.

We were truly at the end of the world--as far south as one could go and still be on an inhabitabe planet. That evening, as I waited for the boat to leave, I stood on the top deck and looked out at the magnificence around me. To the south lay Tierra del Fuego--the land of fire--and a scattering of small islands--one of which we´d pass tomorrow morning--Cape Horn. To the north lay a spendid jumble of shadowy high peaks, glaciers, jagged summits and swirling masses of clouds, all of which were softened by the the blue distance of a fading sun.

None of this was lost on me. I stood and gave great thanks for this mighty creation and for ability to see and experience it.

I was grateful beyond words.