Abrupt profile of the landscape, a rocky monument, whose morphologically hostile condition enhances and embellishes it in a sculptural way. Its great height is meticulously expressed when it touches the clouds and that many times penetrate between the rocky layers of Patience.
Its visibility was for a long time exclusive to the ranch, a private and hidden landscape, since it was only possible to get there by sea, air or on horseback. However, since 2017 with the new extension of the Y-85 route that crosses Patience, today it has become a partitioned road landscape and opens up a new possibility for us to admire this landscape in the south of the island.
A dynamic landscape will be seen, in which the northern slope that can be seen from Lago Deseado is wooded and green, only its top displays rocky textures. On the south side, these slopes become mostly vertical, rocky and snowy, a much colder look, which warns us of the proximity to the southern hemisphere, from Seno Almirantazgo.
Georeading
In this region, all valleys and fjords were covered by large glacial flows. For this to happen, the temperature was colder than it currently is, and the zero-degree isotherm, or freezing level, was only a few meters above sea level. This allowed snow to be accumulated all year long gathering massive volumes of flowing ice, filling valleys and fjords with ice sheets up to a thousand metres thick.
Currently, glaciers remain at mountain peaks like small witnesses of what used to be. Global temperatures have risen, the zero-degree isotherm as well. At Sierra la Paciencia the freezing line lies 1100 m.a.s.l., and still, a small ice sheet timidly flows downwards through the mountain. Leaving the eternal icefields behind, it merges with the water streams that feed the life at the foothills and valleys ahead.
Some of the peaks display the silhouette of ancient glaciers that are no longer there, small U-shaped cirques, scalped by the abrasion of the rocks at the base of the ice.
The force of the glaciers is the force of water. Water can penetrate the finest cracks in the rocks, patiently waiting till the nightfall when it freezes and expands, widening the cracks. Day after day water and ice fight their way through the rocks, cracking, fracturing, and excavating the valleys and shapes than we can admire today.