One of the big land marks of Patagonia is this big glacier, which is apparently one of the only in the world that is not shrinking over the past couple of decades. It covers ~250 sq km
I took the "Big Ice" tour offered in El Calafate by Huelo y Aventura. The concept is that you cross the lake, climb up to the glacier (about 90 mins) and then put crampons on your boots in order to go walking on the glacier itself (see below).
From a distance the glacier looks like a big thing of ice, but one doesn't really appreciate the scale without some kind of point of reference (see the people in the lower right below)
Once on the glacier itself, the group (twenty tourists and four or five guides) climbs up a few km, getting some nice views in the process.
It's not super easy going, given that the glacier isn't so flat, and walking with crampons isn't so easy. One has to keep one's legs well apart (else the crampon can catch on the other leg) and each step is quite a bit more of an effort.
At the top, there's a picnic on the ice. It was only then that one feels the cold. Before, while walking up and down the little slopes constantly, it's enough of an effort to keep rather warm (even a little too warm). Once one stops, it feels much colder.
Further on, there's a lagoon. The water on the glacier is supposedly very clean (just a bit of minerals (and it tastes a bit metallic), but no bacteria can survive and obviously there's no livestock upstream)
It's quite deep, and no doubt very cold water. These types of lagoons apparently form every spring and freeze up over the winter, they're depedent on the flow of water undernearth the ice to stay liquid.
On the way back, one has a bit of a break at a cabin owned by the tour company in order to wait for the boat. The glacier is constantly moving (at least during the day in this season) and so pieces of ice are always coming off into the lake. It's really very noisy, sounds like a sailboat or an old timber house in the wind. From a distance those pieces of ice appear to be rather small, but no doubt the one below was the size of a Volkswagen
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