Fitz Roy is a tower of black granite rising 3,405 metres straight off the steppe of Argentine Patagonia, and on most days you cannot see it. The Tehuelche called it Chaltén, the smoking mountain, for the cloud that pours off the summit. The village at its foot took the same name, and everything in it is arranged around the chance of a clear morning. Nobody drives to a trailhead here. The paths start at the last row of houses. The longest, up to Laguna de los Tres, is a full day out and back. An hour from town the trees open and you see the tower clear for the first time. Half an hour on, Laguna Capri lies in lenga woods under the same wall. Then the trail follows the valley, climbs steeply for a last hour, and leaves you at a turquoise lake directly beneath the peak, glaciers hanging above it.
A gentler walk follows the Río Fitz Roy to Laguna Torre, where icebergs drift out from Glaciar Grande. The spire above it, Cerro Torre, hides even more stubbornly, and the argument over who first reached its top is mountaineering's most poisonous. A less trodden path climbs Loma del Pliegue Tumbado and pulls back far enough to show the whole massif: both towers, the glaciers and lakes, and in April a lenga forest gone copper-red. Wind is the constant, worst in January, when gusts scour the ridgelines at over seventy kilometres an hour. The peak carries the name of Robert FitzRoy, who captained the Beagle on Darwin's voyage and went home to run Britain's first weather office, printing the daily predictions he called forecasts. The village itself went up in 1985, thrown up to plant Argentines near land Chile also claimed, and it lives off the walkers now. You leave it in the dark, because the first hours after sunrise are when the wall is most often clear. The granite takes the sun and burns crimson while the valley is still grey, and by afternoon the cloud has usually closed over it again.