Our Great Adventure: Cerro Catedral Day 203 09/04/2015

The forecast for today was a clear, bright day and we'd decided to get the local bus to Villa Catedral in the Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, 20km west of Bariloche and work up to Refugio Frey. We had breakfast at the guesthouse and then headed down the hill, with our leftover pizza from last night, to get the bus. We seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last few days searching for bus companies and timetables in an attempt to plan our journey from Puerto Natales to Ushuaia. What we hadn't done was find out the bus times to get to Villa Catedral. Given they only go every 90 minutes and we must have just miss one it was a bit remise of us! Anyway after about 80 minutes the bus came and we drove c30 minutes to what is apparently one of South America's largest ski resorts. As with all ski resorts they look a bit soulless out of season. After checking the time of the last bus back to Bariloche we set off to walk up to Refugio Frey which is in the bowl just below the mountain that the resort is named after. The route sets off heading south contouring along the hill side above Lago Gutierrez. It was a beautiful walk high up parallel with the shoreline. After a few hours the route heads north west and climbs up Van Titter through beautiful beech forest. We both commented that the landscape was very similar to around El Calafate, further south in Argentina where we'd been when we were here last. The views were wonderful with sharp mountain ridges appearing through autumnal forests, a mass of orange and red. We passed Refugio Vivac Piedritas, a shelter built into the side of a boulder and a memorial before a final push up hill before coming out of the low trees into the bowl. The refugio was built in 1957 and sits at the head of the valley next to Laguna Toncek with Cerro Catedral to the south. The bowl is very impressive although most of the rock looked decidedly unstable. As we reached the refugio the guardians were working to lay a new floor and asked if we'd take a photo for them as they hadn't got a camera. We had a chat about summer and winter climbing routes and were impressed to hear that they create an artificial ice route by diverting water from a higher laguna. We had lunch, leftover pizza, by the lake side before strolling around it and finally heading back down. As we walked down through the forest we heard the sound of woodpeckers and saw two tapping away in a tree. Coincidentally something we'd seen when we were in El Calafate over 13 years ago. We arrived back at Villa Catedral just as the bus arrived at 1715, to take us back to Bariloche. In the evening we went to a local gastro bar for dinner. It was a very busy place with a buzzing atmosphere. Tomorrow we're getting the bus back to Chile. It's scheduled to leave at 7.30am so it was an early night for both of us.