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.

Choritos (clams) and cholgas (mussels) freshly pulled out of the water. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

Maca teaching us how to harvest cholga mussels. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

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.

Dramatiscanus obscuras – Rocky the Magnificent, Rocky the Stoic. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

Captain Juan Vila at the helm. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

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).

Team Puma at their first rancho cholgero. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

A rancho cholgero, where local people stay weeks on end to harvest and smoke their mussel harvest. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

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.

Red, jello-like fungi growing on a branch above some of the diverse moorland mosses, lichens and plants. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

Dwarf cypress (Lepidothamnus fonckii) grows on a thick bed of red spahgnum (Sphanum magellanicum). Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

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).

Maisie explores the bay on packraft. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

An austral dolphin with an injured dorsal fin. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

Icebergs line our route out of Pio XI glacier. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

Rainbows appear suddenly on the waterscape. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

Team Puma victorious at Pio XI glacier! Photo by Shalynn Pack.

El Glaciar Pío XI, one of the only remaining advancing glaciers in the world, shortly after an impressive calving display. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

Icebergs near Pio XI glacier. Photo by Ivan Langesfeld.

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.

Round River instructors interview a former mussel harvester. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

Isabel and Maca hosted us for a curanto, a celebratory stew from Chiloe Island, made of freshly caught mussels and clams, with chicken, sausage, and chapallele bread, cooked with ferns and a dash of white wine over a hot wood fire. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

Posing with the local school kids after our beach cleanup. Photo by Shalynn Pack.

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!