Fitz Roy is a black granite tower rising 3,405 metres straight off the Patagonian steppe, with a ring of thinner spires around it. There is nothing gradual about the approach — flat brown grassland, and then the wall. The Tehuelche called it Chaltén, the smoking mountain, for the cloud that streams off the summit almost every day. That cloud is the mountain's defining habit: Fitz Roy spends more days hidden than visible, and a clear morning is a genuine event. The rock is the exposed core of a granite mass that cooled ten kilometres underground about 16.5 million years ago and was later stripped bare by glaciers. The walls it left are so sheer and so storm-battered that nobody climbed Fitz Roy until a French team reached the top in 1952. Its jagged skyline is the outline on every Patagonia jacket, chosen for the brand by Yvon Chouinard after he climbed here in 1968.
At its foot sits El Chaltén, a village put up from scratch in 1985 and now Argentina's official trekking capital. The trails start at the last row of houses, and the whole massif opens up on foot from there. The classic walk climbs about ten kilometres to Laguna de los Tres, the pool set right beneath the wall. Time it for dawn: for a few minutes, while the valleys are still dark, the granite catches the first sun and burns orange-crimson before fading to grey. A shorter, gentler valley walk goes to Laguna Torre, under the needle of Cerro Torre, where icebergs drift on the water. The weather turns on a dime — a clear indigo sky can be gone within the hour, and wind on the exposed sections knocks people over. In autumn the lenga forests below flush deep red and copper.