Cambios

Heading NOBO the small pass after laguna verde is fine. Little snow but not bad. Next pass is a bit tough, lots of snow walking and lots of risky parts where there are hidden rivers/water ways under the snow and where cliffs of snow had broken off but we managed by being careful and taking time to judge. RR-CC-A {12} [68.1/68.5+2.9] is not passable we went on the route to the left of it. Scary but fine, you have to make your own route since it’s completely snowed over. Downhill is fine, snow is only on the south face of the mountain. Next day we skipped the pass and did a plateau crossing based on advice from a local, it was lovely, the trail is east to follow most of the way then getting across the plateau you can take any possible direction, no wrong way and it connects to the 12-03c. Coming down on though there are two tracks at 12-03c marker. OH-TL-I {12-03A} [0.9+3.4] is not a route. At least not now. It’s basically a river gorge and it’s not possible unless you can surf down waterfalls, so we scaled up almost completely vertical to meet the CC route that runs parallel. Might be possible when there is less snow melt though. The CC route we took was almost a completely verticals decent for 800 meters and I must say a bit terrifying. Clambering down on your butt/downhill rock climbing is not the hard part but if you are not careful and you don’t judge your path every few meters you can find yourself looking down a minimum 30-200 meter drop, so it’s mentally scary not knowing if you will get to the bottom. But we did. I would not advise it, instead I’d advise continuing on 12-03 past the lakes back to the normal route. Took us almost 3 hours of being very careful though. We then got to the first river. Many puenches locals we met before told us the only way to ranquil is the balsa, but we didn’t fully understand what they meant till we got to the river. They meant Bulsa Rahue which is on the way to lonquimay. The first main crossing at Ford {12} [45.4/1039] is very deep and very fast. For us as beginners a big no go, but I honestly think for advanced that would be tough as well if not only very dangerous. We then moved back to lonquimay where for the first part of the trail the river had flowed over so much that there was no trail but then eventually the trail gains significant elevation over the river and it’s fine. We asked others we ran into on the way and they confirmed that it’s too early to pass the rivers, but again depends on the hiker I’m sure.