Cambios

Anyway, on HA, the trackfiles are a bit wrong for an important turn off -39.00634, -71.30802. At that point you will see two trails, leave the road and go up. We met some bikers here, only people we met for the next two days. Path up is not visible, but the forest is open and you go basically straight up. When you reach low lying beech shrubbery, the path reapers and takes you to the saddle. Down below, at the turn off, there is a creek if you follow the main road for a little bit, you will may want to fill up on water. From the saddle we opted to follow the ridge NE from HA. It is spectacular and while steep, no hands are needed to advance. With a packraft and 10 days of food it was slow. We slept near a seasonal lake around -39.03013, -71.28361, very beautiful.

In the morning, Tomáš went exploring and found the other side of the pass much preferable, so around ten, we set off to continue. After an easy 40-minute 300m traverse to the pass, the character of the valley changed a lot and walking because became easier, a nice Christmas present:). The almost open beech forest and a relatively regular creekbed (with water) enabled us to reach -39.45964, -71.41716 in a superb speed of almost 600m/hour. From there, we followed the river through a dense old and amazing canopy. At about 400 m/ hour, we eventually got to a 20 m cascading (not vertical) waterfall here: -39.47088, -71.41775. To its left, we managed to cut a path with our machete, passing each other our backpacks on the not-entirely vertical somewhat crumbly climb-down. Unfortunately we do not think our holds will last long as we scaled it down in mainly mud and fragile rock (rope or bamboo bashing walkaround should do). Afterwards, our speed again decreased to about 200 m an hour, overcoming many logjams and much smaller waterfalls. We camped around -39.47449, -71.41901. Natalie somehow left her insoles there. All the scrambling we have done both up and down were manageable (T4 to T5 on SAC scale), though a rope of 10 or 15 m or so would have been at certain moments quite useful. We used our leashes, straps and carabineers for lowering our backpacks.