Seven Sunrises in Patagonia

Hannah Keller had traveled nearly seven thousand miles for a single photograph. It was the shot every landscape photographer dreams of: Mount Fitz Roy, in Argentine Patagonia, at the exact moment of sunrise, when for three or four minutes its granite towers glow a deep, almost impossible red. She had seen hundreds of pictures of it. What she wanted was one of her own.

From the village of El Chaltén, the hike to Laguna de los Tres, the icy blue lake at the foot of the mountain, took most of a day there and back, so Hannah pitched her tent at a campsite in the forest about an hour below it. Every morning, she would get up at four, climb the steep final trail by headlamp, set up her tripod by the lake and wait.

And every morning, the clouds won.

On the first day, the mountain was completely hidden. On the second, it appeared briefly, gray and unimpressed, before vanishing again. The third morning brought snow, and the fourth a wind so violent that she had to lie flat on the rocks to keep her camera from blowing away.

On the fifth morning, among the usual handful of hikers, Hannah noticed someone new. An elderly woman in a bright purple jacket was sitting on a rock nearby, calmly pouring hot water from a thermos into a gourd of mate. Her name was Elsa, she was seventy-three, and she had been climbing up to this lake every summer for over thirty years.

"So how many times have you actually seen it?" Hannah asked. "The red, I mean."

Elsa thought about it. "Six," she said. "Maybe seven."

Hannah stared at her. "In thirty years? Doesn't that drive you crazy?"

"Not at all," said Elsa, handing her the mate. "If it happened every day, nobody would climb up here at four in the morning. It's the waiting that makes it worth something."

Hannah, who had an editor in Chicago and only two mornings left, was not convinced.

The sixth morning was gray. On the seventh, her last, the sky was so heavy that she almost stayed in her sleeping bag, and it was only the thought of Elsa, already on her way up with her thermos, that got her moving.

They were sitting side by side in silence when, without warning, a gap opened in the clouds to the east. Light poured through it, and the towers caught fire. Hannah grabbed her camera — and then, for reasons she could never quite explain, she turned around.

Elsa was watching the mountain like someone seeing it for the very first time, the red towers reflected in her eyes. Hannah took eleven photographs of her before the color faded. Not a single one of Fitz Roy.

Little did she know, as she stumbled back down to her tent, that the portrait would win the biggest prize of her career the following year.

She mailed a framed print to Elsa's apartment in Buenos Aires. The reply arrived weeks later: "Eight times now. And this time, I've got a souvenir."