Having exhausted the main day hikes out of Ushuaia (well, except for the Martial Glacier, which didn’t seem too interesting) and not being terribly keen to pay to enter the Tierra del Fuego National Park again (I’d already done the best hike in the park – Cerro Guanaco – in 2016), I needed one more day-hike to fill in my time in the far south of Argentina.
Fortunately, I overheard another girl in the dorm room talking about a hike she’d done with some local friends-of-a-friend to the Valle de Olum and Laguna Bélgica, and decided I’d see if I could find the trail on Wikiloc. I love Wikiloc, and it didn’t let me down – there were actually two GPS trails available! I downloaded both to Maps.Me and put the word out around the hostel about my plan.
I must have done a reasonable job as a guide and hiking companion to the Laguna de los Témpanos and Vinciguerra Glacier because Matthias decided to join me again. The irony was – he was from Belgium – but I didn’t tell him beforehand that our destination was Laguna Bélgica (Belgian Lake) 🙂
Fortunately, the trail began directly opposite the carpark for Laguna Esmeralda, so we caught the transfer out there (for a change, there were actually 3 of us waiting at 9am!) and started hiking through the Lenga forest.
The trail was obvious (well, once we’d walked through someone’s property) and we followed the yellow dots and worn path along the river, marveling at just how much damage beavers are doing in this part of the world!
The hike through the forest was not terribly steep, and without too much effort we reached the top of the tree-line and the “beaver dam”.
At this point, the yellow markers we’d been following disappeared and so we switched to following the Wikiloc GPS trail on Maps.Me for a while.
The climb got steeper at this point and we eventually came across a new set of markers … stone cairns. These were very easy to spot while we were still hiking through vegetation, but became increasingly challenging to find as we ascended the stony trail to the Olum pass.
The views back into the valley and across to Laguna Esmeralda were incredible
but it seemed as if Laguna Bélgica was never going to appear! We were almost to the pass itself, before we finally came upon it – and I told Matthias its name 🙂
We stopped here to explore and have some lunch, and contemplated going all the way to the pass. But we could only see one cairn, and the way looked even sketchier than what we had already scrambled up, so we decided to head back to ensure we didn’t miss our return transfer to Ushuaia.
It’s amazing how you don’t really get a sense of how steep a trail is until you start to descend it. We spied a couple of people coming over the pass from Laguna Turquesa (it is in the next valley across) and thought they were absolutely crazy heading down such a steep mountain. But upon reflection… we had actually just done the same thing.
Recommendation
If you have hiking and navigation experience and want to get away from the “crowds”, the Valle de Olum to Laguna Bélgica is a good trail to do and easy to get to. You get a bit of everything (Lenga forest, Patagonian vegetation, rocky scree) and some amazing views back down the valley and across to Laguna Esmeralda. It would have been great to hike the whole way over the pass and back to the road, but unless you can arrange transportation back, that is a little more logistically challenging.
Time: 9:30am – 2pm
Cost: 350ARS for the transfer to the Laguna Esmeralda carpark
