Yerba Loca in the spring

Spring is in the air and what better to do than going for a little hike in the Andes! We had arranged with a few friends and colleagues to spend Sunday in Yerba Loca, a nature reserve east of Santiago which we've previously visited on a couple of occasions.

Having been in charge of organising the trip, we "forced" everyone to a semi-alpine start (8:00am on the Sunday after the clocks went forward for this summer's daylight saving time in Chile). It turned out that we were pushing the limits a little too much because half of the gang didn't show up for reasons as varied as foot pain to sleepless night due to partying neighbours... q-:

Before we could start our walk we had to deal with the "ski crowds": Yerba Loca is located half-way to Santiago's ski resorts and - with the skiing season not quite finished - this meant lot's of people driving too fast and too dangerously (i.e. overtaking on the 40 switch-backs up to Farellones) in cars which were mostly rediculously over-sized in order to get to the ski lifts before all the others who were doing exactly the same (i.e. too fast, too dangerous, too big a car).

It was around 9am when we finally got going. Over the course of 4 hours we gently climbed the 800m in elevation difference up to the spot where a year and a half ago we camped on our way to Glaciar La Paloma. This time, though, the atmosphere was very different: lots of snow still up on the mountains and melting snow or snow fields even covering parts of the valley in the last part of the hike. We didn't make it to the water falls as originally planned, sinking into wet snow up to above our knees in some places didn't exactly help. Nonetheless, fun was had by us all, Mario and Margarita included. (o:

A couple of photos below or here in higher resolution: