Ivan exploring an island near Pio XI glacier during a rainstorm. Photo by Shalynn Pack.
By Ivan Langesfeld, Pomona College
I’m sitting in the quiet, empty quarters of the Transbordadora Austral en route to Tortel. The rest of the group is in the main quarters upstairs, but I write better in silence so here I am. Less than six feet below me lie the rocking, frigid waves of the Messier Channel, the fjord that cuts through the heart of Bernardo O’Higgins National Park. As the sun slinks away, the heavy rain we woke up to continues unabated, though the dense morning fog has mostly cleared out by now. We just wrapped up two weeks in Puerto Eden, a little gem of a town hidden deep in the fjords of the Magellanes Region of Chile and neighbor to Patagonia’s Southern Ice Field (the largest in this hemisphere!). Tonight’s dinner of pot roast and amorphous gelatin on the ferry serves as stark contrast to yerterday’s, when we sat around Maca and Isabel’s warm living room and gorged on fresh cholgas and choritos (mussels and clams) that some of us helped pull out of the ocean just a few hours earlier.
The last week has been pretty jam packed. On Monday we got back from a four day trip to the Pío XI Glacier with the notoriously hilarious Captain Juan Vila and Rocky, the Captain’s majestic wonder dog who bounds up near-vertical cliffs and otherwise puts us to shame by easily leaping over streams and obstacles as we struggle through them.
On the trip to the glacier we were finally able to see some of the ranchos cholgueros (the traditional mussel-smoking outposts dispersed all around the fjords that the Puerto Eden community used to rely on as their main source of income) we have been studying and bush-whacked a section of overland trail once proposed as a route to a Pío XI mirador (lookout point).
The sub-Antarctic moorlands (cold, wet bogs, but lovely things really) that we’ve been hiking through are made up of tons of otherworldly lichen and moss assemblages. Where in other landscapes the flora and fauna are easily picked out as beautiful even if far away, here you really have to stick your nose in the dirt to appreciate the intricate beauties of the rich beds of mosses and peculiarly adapted plants that call this place home.
Other highlights from the trip: pods and pods of dolphins, rainbows and double rainbows (to make up for unceasing rains), navigating through a gnarly ice flow after having seen it calve off the glacier, and getting out the pack raft when stopped for lunch at a small unnamed island (Juan at one time lived on it for a year while harvesting king crab).
Back at Puerto Eden, we spent two days with the local kids in their school, doing a fun beach cleanup and teaching them about the marine life in their backyards. The ranchos cholgueros team (Maisie, Zeke and I) wrapped up our last interviews with the locals, trying to understand and contextualize the complex nature and history of this cultural practice, once robust and responsible for the vitality of their community but collapsed since the 1994 outbreak of red tide. With just a few relic ranchos operating out of Eden, the future of this way of life remains uncertain.
With the rapid pace of things here it feels insane that our time in Chile has just barely begun. Tomorrow we’ll wake up back in Tortel and shortly thereafter be starting our sphagnum research.
Hasta luego!