Laguna Blanca
  • Laguna Blanca
  • 6012 m
  • Primary factor 1777 m
  • Location: South 26.52994, West 67.05940 (GPS on the ssummit)
  • Difficulty: YDS class 2.
  • Climbed February 26 2022.

Copyright Petter Bjørstad, 2009-2022.

Information:

How to get there:
The nearest town that offers accommodation and services is El Penon. This is about 220 kilometer slightly north of west from the city of Tucuman.
From El Penon, drive Hwy. 43 south for about 4 kilometer to location S26.50994, W67.24920. Carefully find a dirt road / track that forks left here. Drive this track, a high clearance 4WD is recommended, to location S26.54485, W67.13941, elevation about 4375 meter. This is a good trailhead.
Route description:
From the recommended trailhead, go south or slightly east of south to locate a very distinct valley with a small creek at its bottom. This valley, called Qbrada in Spanish, is the key to a pretty good route. Follow the qbrada upstream, it makes maany turns and gets appreciably more narrow. In fact, at one point it narrows to a small waterfall only. Pass this point on the right, a short (YDS class 3) scramble is required.
Shortly after this narrow section, the valley again narrows. Depending a bit on the amount of water in the creek, it may be better to exit the valley left at this location S26.56533, W67.11470, ascend (loose, but not very hard) and locate a goat trail that traverses the hillside, keeping pretty level. This bypass lets you reenter the valley in a more convenient spot. The valley continues and stays quite narrow before it gets much wider. Keep along the left side, we put a high camp at location S26.56882, W67.09182, elevation about 5080 meter. This was a pretty ideal place with running water nearby.
Continue up the valley, keep left as it turns almost 90 degrees. As you continue to ascend there are a few different options. The first good place to fork right and leave the qbrada is near location S26.55094, W67.07608, elevation about 5500 meter. A clear side-valley may be ascended in order to reach the main crest. This is south of the south summit.
An alternative is to continue up the main qbrada, then go right at a higher point in order to ascend the main crest on the north side of the south summit.
Either way, as soon as you reach the main crest, continue north. The central summit and the north summit are competing for being the highest, they are quite close, but it seems pretty certain that the north summit at location S26.52994, W67.05940, is the highest point at 6012 meter of elevation.
Comments:
Here is a summary of the peaks climbed in Argentina, February 2022..

We arrived in El Penon in the afternoon. The two "best" hotels in town were fully booked, but we stayed OK in "number three". It was sort of surprising that this "tourist town" (People come to see flamingos), did not have mobile phone service, no such signal. However, they did have WIFI - unfortunately, they had made a "clever" choice of password, it included Spanish characters that one normally cannot find on computers from outside Spanish speaking countries.
We started out after breakfast and drove the truck up to the trailhead described above. We did not know where to fork off from the main highway, this caused some small delays as we needed to drive quite some distance off-road.
We started hiking around 1015, initially carrying quite a volume of extra water since we did not know how much (if any) water we could find in the qbrada. As soon as we could see that the creek was indeed pretty good sized, we cached the water and continued up the valley with much more agreeable loads.
It is always interesting to follow this type of valley, never knowing what one may see around the next bend. The qbrada narrowed and suddenly there was only space for a waterfall. An easy scramble got us higher, but then the continuation looked difficult. We traversed out to the left and found quite a nice bypass leading to easier terrain higher up. After about 4 hours of walking we decided to put our camp just below 5100 meter at the left side of the valley. The valley was here at its maximum width, more like a large flat expanse. We could now see the main crest up ahead as well as the general area where the qbrada would turn about 90 degrees left then continue uphill parallel with the mountain crest.
The next morning, we started with head lamps at 0545. After turning left we ran into a sequence of vertical ice barriers running across the now somewhat narrow valley. Big surprise. Fortunaately, it was fairly easy to pass on our right hand side. This rather unexpected obstacle ended after a few hundred meter. Still a bit mysterious how such large blocks of ice could form locally. We continued up the qbrada, then decided to ascend at the first reasonable opportunity. A nice and gentle ascent brought us to the main crest, quite a bit south of the south summit. This route implied that we would spend quite a long time at pretty high elevation, visiting all three summits.
We arrived at the central summit at 1020, then proceeded to visit the north summit. By using our hand level as well as our Garmin GPS, it seemed pretty clear that the north summit would be about one meter higher than the central. We left the central summit (after our second visit) around 1120, then traversed south, retraacing our route back down to camp, arriving there by 1400. A long break was well deserved, clearing camp before starting our last leg at 1510. The valley seemed quite long at the end of a successful, but long day. We arrived back at the truck where Franco was waiting at 1745, thus more or less exactly a 12 hour day.
This was our last summit on what had been a pretty interesting 3 week trip in Northern Argentina.

Resources: