Monte Fitz Roy

Monte Fitz Roy (also known as Cerro Chaltén, Cerro Fitz Roy, or simply Mount Fitz Roy) is a mountain in the border between Argentina and Chile that is located near the village of El Chaltén that is in Argentina. . It is in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field in Patagonia. The mountain is 3375 metre high. It was first climbed in 1952 by French mountain climbers Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone. It is one of the most difficult mountains to climb on Earth. The clothing label, Patagonia, used Monte Fitz Roy as the idea for their logo, after Yvon Chouinard climbed the mountain in 1968 and made a movie about it.

Francisco Moreno first saw the mountain on 2 March 1877. He named it Fitz Roy, in honour of Robert Fitz Roy. Fitz Roy was captain of HMS Beagle and had travelled up the Santa Cruz River in 1834 and made maps of large parts of the Patagonian coast .

Cerro is a Spanish word meaning hill, while "Chaltén" is a Tehuelche word meaning smoking mountain, as they believe it was a volcano for its peak is most of the time covered by clouds.

Geology
Fitz Roy is a huge pyramid shaped granite monolith, carved by the winds, snow and ice. Fitz Roy is made of igneous rocks from deep in the Earth. When large tectonic plates collided about 100 million years, magma escaped between these plates and solidified between other rocks. The erosion of these rocks led to the formation of the mountain.

Plants and animals
There are no plants on the bare walls of the summit. In the steep foothills, below the summit there are forests of beech and vast plains of short vegetation adapted to extreme climatic conditions

Animals are very rare in the region of Fitz Roy. There are a few eagles and rabbits.Alessandro Gogna 2006. Les plus beaux sommets du monde. Arthaud.

Gallery

References

Further reading
 Giuseppe Miotti, 1991: El Fitz Roy : Cuadernos Patagonicos N.4, Milano, Scode, 1re éd. 32 p. [Giuseppe Miotti, El Fitz Roy : Cuadernos Patagonicos N.4, Milano, Scode, 1991, 1re éd., 32 p. In Line Tecpetrol.
 Kearney A, 1993: Mountaineering in Patagonia. Seattle, Washington: Cloudcap.
 Marc Antonin Azema, 1954: La Conquête du Fitz Roy, Paris, Flammarion, 235 p.
 Terray L, 1963: Conquistadors of the Useless, p. 307-8, Victor Gollancz Ltd.  

Other websites

 Fitz Roy at Peakware 
 Monte Fitz Roy in History  
 News El Chaltén  

Video



Category:Mountains of Argentina
Category:Mountains of Chile
Category:Santa Cruz Province, Argentina