Daily Archives: March 6, 2008

Greetings from El Chalten, Argentina, home of that incomparable peak Fitz Roy and all that is sparkling and beautiful in the world of glaciated peaks.

For those of you with a good memory, I left you wondering whether we would be able to catch a monster chinook in Torres del Paine. The answer, sadly, is No.  Bernard did catch a 7-lb brown trout, which we shared with friends at the hotel for dinner. It was fresh and delicious, perhaps because it had been nibbling on a dead cow floating along the banks of the Lago Toro before Bernard hooked it?  While at the Rio Serrano, standing in our waders in utterly frigid waters, being pelted by rain, we observed some of the mammoth chinook lumbering out of the icy depths and flumping back in.  These were no ordinary chinook, but rather ones that, so we´re told, escaped from a farm operation some 25 years ago, somehow found the Rio Serrano and now use it as their spawning ground.  Clearly they are genetic anomalies and who knows whether the above is even possible.  We were hopeful of getting into a tussle with one of these behemoths, but they kept to the deep channel in the middle of the river, and we couldn´t get close, even if I had been able to cast more than 10 feet…..

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