{"id":849,"date":"2013-05-11T10:30:05","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T02:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.joel.net.au\/?p=849"},"modified":"2023-01-29T09:16:01","modified_gmt":"2023-01-29T01:16:01","slug":"meeting-san-francisco-the-glacier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/2013\/05\/11\/meeting-san-francisco-the-glacier\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting San Francisco, The Glacier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Made my first excursion out of Santiago to do a hike up in the mountains, just 20kms shy of the Argentine border. The hike was at El Morado Natural Monument and followed a valley up to the San Francisco Glacier. The hiking trail was in quite a spectacular area that began in a mining village that was surrounded by bright yellow autumnal aspen trees and led up a steep track to a treeless plateau of low colorful scrub, glacier-melt rivers and a scenic pond, the Morales Glacier Pond, at the foot of the mountains. <\/p>\n

\"Morales<\/a>
Morales Glacier Pond<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The elevation started at about 1900 meters and climbed up to 2500 meters above sea level. Overall, about a 15km hike. For me, I felt quite good throughout the hike thanks to my acclimatization hangover from Ecuador. For my fellow hikers, I think most of them were finding it a bit of a challenge. In all, we had three Brazilians, two Americans, and a New Zealander of Vietnamese descent living in Sydney – besides myself. The three guides had to juggle Spanish, Portuguese, and English to keep everyone satisfied. Two of the guides were from Chile and the third from Peru.<\/p>\n

\"El<\/a>
El Morado Natural Monument<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Along the way there were underground mineral waters bubbling up that you could taste – and yes, they tasted carbonated. There was a bit active volcano nearby and volcano eruption evacuation route signs the whole way back to the highway.<\/p>\n

The glacier itself wasn’t huge, but you could see it descending down the side of the mountain. Our guides were quite thrilled that there was so much snow around, which was somewhat unusual for this time of year. At the tongue of the glacier, there was an ice cave where a small stream was born than ran back down the valley to where we started.<\/p>\n

\"San<\/a>
San Francisco Glacier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The area was very beautiful and the return hike became even more scenic as the sun started to go down. The mountainsides were rich in a wide spectrum of colors due to their mineral wealth. I can’t say I’ve seen anything like it before.<\/p>\n

\"El<\/a>
El Morado Natural Monument<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Everyone of the tour got along great – even though a few of the Brazilians didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Portuguese. We ended up getting back to our homes about three hours late, which made me feel like we had a good long satisfying day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Made my first excursion out of Santiago to do a hike up in the mountains, just 20kms shy of the Argentine border. The hike was at El Morado Natural Monument and followed a valley up to the San Francisco Glacier. The hiking trail was in quite a spectacular area that began in a mining village… Continue reading Meeting San Francisco, The Glacier<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chile","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3sHuW-dH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}