Patagonia, finally!! I traveled 14,000 miles from my hometown of Dilley in south Texas to Patagonia.
After leaving Coyhaique I traveled south toward Lago General Carrera. The road was paved for a short distance then changed to gravel and rock. The knobby tires would come in handy now. I could see the snow-capped mountains in the distance and the famous Patagonia winds started to present themselves.
Cerro El Castillo or Castle Mountain is the first mountain to catch your eye. I saw my first glacier there. From information that I had gathered I knew that if the snow has a blue tint it is a glacier. I could easily see the bluish tint on the Cerro El Castillo when the sun shone on the mountain.
Cerro El Castillo
As I continued traveling along a road that followed a river that fed the lake, the gravel road turned into a road of large rocks. At times it was very difficult to handle my heavy GS. As I approached the crest of a hill, and while standing on my foot pegs, the front tire sank into a pile of rocks. This caused my handlebars to turn hard left and the back end of the GS wiped around so fast. This caused me to fall backwards off the GS. This occurred in a matter of a few feet. The GS came to a sudden stop when it hit even larger rocks on the side of the road. Luckily my body suffered no damage. However, the GS was not so lucky. It did suffer some damage. The left pannier was torn off. A risk of traveling solo is that when you need help to upright a heavy GS there is no one around to help. With lots of effort I managed to upright the GS. My next challenge was to get it out of the ditch it had fallen into. First I had to point it in the right direction, next I had to secure the pannier that was torn off. I managed to point the GS in the right direction and I secured the pannier with tie downs. I was back on my way.
My ride on this day was rough which made for a very long day. I traveled 250 miles and 175 of those miles were traveled on very rough and harsh road. At the end of the day I was very tired and I still needed to repair and secure the damaged pannier. I managed to locate a hardware store that had the items I needed and the pannier was back as good as new.