Peat walking

Today I hiked up to a glaciar that overlooks Ushuaia, called Glaciar Martial. It took about 2.5 hours to hike from my tent up to the snowy base of the glaciar. From the top, the views down to the town and the Beagle Channel were great. The large ships in the harbor looked like tiny specs from so far up. Being that it was a Sunday, lots of other tourists were out walking as well. The temps were in the upper 50s and there were patchy clouds. I was able to put my fancy new gore-tex trail runners to good use as some ¨peat-walking¨ was required along the route. Peat, at least of the Patagonian variety, is a strange sponge-like ground cover. You expect to sink down to your ankles when you ask it to support your full weight but amazingly you only sink a couple inches at most. Any water that did seep onto the top of the shoe was expertly deterred by my trusty new salomons. That´s it for now, the blog will be dormant for the next 4 days or so as I attempt my first overnight backpacking trip of my journey. I will be hiking with Paul, a 24 year old guy from Maryland who I met tonight at the campground.