The chance to hike over a hundred-square-mile sheet of ice has a way of rearranging your travel plans. And in the case of the glacier Perito Moreno, it may mean your trip to Buenos Aires suddenly requires an unplanned detour into Patagonia. Luckily, we know just where to go.
 
First, find your way to a town called Calafante on the shore of Lake Argentino. From there, hop a bus to the glacier and in less than two hours you’ll be tramping over a mountain of permafrost. You can stick to 90 minutes of brisk walking if you’re not sure about your ice-readiness, but we recommend renting a set of crampons and charging into the icy floe for a full five hours. (You may have to get up early.)  To navigate the ice with confidence, we recommend Hielo y Aventura, a local outfit that’s been making this run for 15 years.

If you’re particularly lucky—make that spectacularly, unbelievably lucky—you might even see something called “the rupture” that only comes once every couple of years. It happens when the glacier advances over the lake far enough to form a natural dam. Then the upstream half of the lake gets fuller and fuller until, after days of building pressure, it finally busts through the ice. It’s one of the better natural spectacles the Southern Hemisphere has to offer…but like we said, you’ll have to get lucky. It’s only happened 19 times in the past 100 years, and there’s no telling whether 2010 will be a good year for it. For the best odds, we’d make the trek in March or April, when the first touches of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter set in.
 
Hopefully, you will have recovered from Carnival by then. 

Hielo y Aventura

Santa Cruz – Patagonia – Argentina