Nine hours, one steep bit, and a sunrise at Fitz Roy
We start at four in the dark, complain about the alarm for an hour, and then the towers turn orange and nobody says anything for a while.
The alarm nobody likes
Four a.m. in El Chaltén is cold in a way that gets into the conversation before anyone's properly awake. Headlamps, cold hands around a thermos, and the same joke every year about whoever set the alarm. It takes about twenty minutes of walking before anyone stops complaining.
The trail climbs gently for a while, then less gently. The last hour — the boulder field everyone warns you about — is the one people remember. Not because it's technical, but because it's the kind of steep that makes conversation stop and breathing start doing all the work.
Then the light shows up
You come over the last rise still half-annoyed at your own knees, and the towers are just there — grey stone, then not grey stone. The orange comes on fast, maybe ten minutes of it, and it's the kind of thing a photo doesn't really hold onto.
Nobody talks much during it. Afterwards, going back down, everyone talks about almost nothing else.