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JR's Journal El Calafate to Puerto Natales, Chile
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| I let people sleep until 8:00. After breakfast, we were on the
road by 9:30. We headed south to Río Turbio, making two stops.
We had intended to cross into Chile at Torres del Paine but our bus was
apparently too big for some of the curves in the pass. The crossing at
Cerro Castillo was closed because the Chileans were paving their side.
Río Turbio was the next option to the south. Our lunch stop was
on the pampa with a fascinating glacial roadcut loaded with sedimentary
structures. Our second stop was at a Cretaceous coal roadcut just
north of Dorotea. I believe it used to be mapped as Carboniferous
but we found deciduous leaf fossils. Don Triplehorn collected a tuff
for dating. On the new geologic map it is shown as Cretaceous.
The border crossing took an hour and a half. It went fairly smoothly until Raúl, Angel’s son, came up. He did not have written permission from his mother to leave Argentina. The kid is 18, who would have thought he needed his mother's permission? Angel called his wife on Triplehorn’s Iridium phone and arranged to have permission faxed to our hotel. We left Raúl at the border and drove on in to the Hotel Glaciares in Puerto Natales. People dispersed around town to change money with varying degrees of success. All of the Internet places were full so I went back to the hotel for a cat-nap. We had dinner at a restaurant on the sound. The meal was grilled salmon. Everyone loved it. We walked back to the hotel. Everyone was too pooped to party so we all went to bed early (12:30).
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Division of Environmental Studies, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences |