By Zeke Zeff, Hampshire College
We’ve reached the end of the road. Actually, we just made it back from beyond the end of the road and are enjoying the comforts of civilization, relatively speaking.
On November 4 we left Cochrane for Villa O’Higgins, the last stop on the Carretera Austral. We drove all day, interrupted only by waiting for a ferry, swimming at a cold clear lake, and short breaks at lookouts staring into increasingly overpowering mountains. Once we arrived in town, we set up camp with the help of a local golden retriever and prepared to go out even further. Beyond Villa O’Higgins is Lago O’Higgins, a huge many-armed glacial lake; fringing the lake are steep forested mountains on some of which a very few pioneers make a living by burning land to graze livestock, and beyond them the great Southern Ice Field, which is exactly what it sounds like, but bigger. We had come to visit some of these mountains to collect data on all the flora and fauna, which had never been surveyed scientifically, and especially to look for traces of the Huemul, the endangered Patagonian deer.
At the dock.
We left Villa O’Higgins at dawn to drive to the final end of the road, a small dock on the lake where a boat awaited us. As the sun rose we and the crew dragged our gear into the upper deck and navigated through half a day’s worth of smooth water and jagged mountains under the blistering austral sun to the house of Lorenzo Sepulveda, one of the farmers of the area, who had agreed to guide us.
Lago O’Higgins from aboard.
At least, that’s where we thought we were going. In fact, we landed on a pebbly beach with few signs of life except for Lorenzo and his horses and dogs. After loading most of our food and gear onto the horses and sampling the nectar from the firebush (the flowers look like red honeysuckle and produce syrupy droplets) we started walking into the hills toward his real house, an hour’s walk away. Three hours later we stumbled into his homestead, tired and sunburnt. We set up camp and started cooking, but Lorenzo invited us to sleep indoors and roasted half a sheep for us. After two nights in a real bed, or at least a real floor, and a day surveying the area and feverishly repacking, we left the homestead to cross the peninsula we were on through the Valle Largo from south to north, with Lorenzo and, luckily for us, his packhorses. The crossing was a slightly tricky job because a respectable percentage of the valley was filled by a lake, but we would deal with that later.
Our convoy.
From the homestead north everything became wetter and wilder; bushy scrub became forests of tall lenga trees, open, mossy, and primeval; little streams became rushing creeks crossed on a log; the blistering sun gave way to wind-driven storms that lashed across the Lenga forests and the hilly bogs. Each night’s campfire was smokier. We found more and more Huemul tracks and got gradually soaked.
Huemul tracks
Lenga forest.
On our second day of hiking we went off our route to scramble up the side of the valley along a raging rocky stream where in all likelihood nobody at all had ever been. We climbed until alpine shrubs replaced Lenga trees and Andean Condors soared overhead. The Andean Condor is far larger than any bird I had ever seen, at least two meters’ wingspan, maybe three, and although I knew they were scavengers I felt rather edible and exposed on the empty moraine when two condors descended to check us out. They soared so low that I could see their faces and then circled round without flapping their wings, flying against the backdrop of the still-snowy Patagonian peaks. Then we scrambled back down and within a few hours arrived at the lake, which stopped us for a day and a half.
Glacial stream.
Andean Condor.
This wasn’t because of the lake itself. The lake was on closer inspection so large and the wind so fiercely against us that there was no talk of attempting to cross it. We had a packraft, an inflatable toy boat more durable than it looked, but as it had all the aerodynamics and steerability of a bathtub we would have made negative mileage had we attempted to row it against the wind. And there was a way around the lake. It just required crossing a river which was at the moment swollen with the rain which dripped through the Lengas gently but wet everything outside (e.g. us) in seconds, and so we waited for the rain to stop and the river to drop, which surprisingly it did. Two days after arriving at the lake we crossed the river easily, although as of a week later my boots have not yet dried off. But that was the last easy part.
Toward the end of the easy part.
Up to the river we had followed a rough trail or walked through blanket bog, which is bog composed of mosses and low-growing plants which makes easy walking, but past the river there was no trail except for what Lorenzo and his axe, his horses, and us could hack out. Lorenzo had gone down this way years ago and there were traces of that, but they did not do much. So we pushed through the thick temperate rainforest, stepped carefully and slid muddily down hillsides, climbed over logs – and kept taking notes, naturally, because the whole point of this trip was to get data.
In the afternoon we followed a smaller valley up from the main one in order to circumvent the lake by going over a high pass and coming down a different valley to the north side of the peninsula. All of this meant more bushwhacking, following narrow ridges through thick forest. As the day wore on and we climbed higher the cliffs on either side became snowy at their tops and then further down, until we saw snowfields at eye level, and the forest opened into primeval lenga forest, carpeted in moss and studded with boulders, and there we camped.
Patagonian mountains.
The next morning we climbed up to the pass, through lenga and then alpine shrubs and then just snow until we reached a cold black lake ringed by snowy hills and snowier mountains above. The shoreline was covered in contorted alpine scrub, so we walked along the shoreline in the water; our boots were already so wet that it made no difference, though I tried to find shallower areas on the theory that you can always get wetter. As we crossed the last-but-one ridge the sun began to come out, shining so bright on the snow that I couldn’t look up at the crags. We crossed a bog, climbed one more snow-covered ridge – and a new valley lay below us, and another river running with cold pure Patagonian snowmelt.
