At World´s End

In the six days I´ve been off Antilco I covered some serious mileage. A bus took me along a narrow, serpentine pass through the Andes from Pucon to Bariloche, Argentina where I enjoyed two days of fine chocolate and even finer views of the stunning lake district. A day hike took me from the ski center at Cerro Catedral to a mountain top lake surrounded by austere granite towers where I warmed up in an electricity-less lodge full of mainly Argentine youth, who, but for their language, could have been any thruhiker on the Appalachian Trail. I sat reading, eating bran muffins the lodge worker had made, thinking what a beautiful example of convergent evolution it was. On opposite sides of the world trekkers and mountain lovers have built small, cozy lodges, filled them with photographs of their beloved peaks, and play chill acoustic music while hosting hikers. 

The Argentines chuckle when I speak. They are surprised a gringa speaks Spanish well, and they are shocked to hear such a strong Chilean accent. I didn´t think my speech was so colored, but the looks on dozens of Argentines faces has taught me otherwise. I returned to my linguistic comfort zone on Monday, making a dramatic, all-day crossing crossing of the border called The Cruce Andina, or The Andean Cross. In a seven stage journey, with four bus rides and three boat rides, I traveled from Bariloche, Argentina to Puerto Varas, Chile. Catamarans zipped us across emerald green lakes, so colored by the mineral sediment which runs down from neighboring glaciers, and we wound across the water in the shadow of green mountains which rise dramatically out of the water without beach or shoreline. The clear skies, forested mountains, and crystal water makes each horizon a stunning triptych of color that is not unlike the views in the Pacific Northwest. I spent the day with three young Colombian guys and together we marveled the lakes and volcanoes, and ended our night together lost and dripping, wandering the sodden streets of Puerto Varas trying to find our hostels. 

I spent the morning in Puerto Varas, a lakeside town with views of the formidable volcano Orsorno. It’s peaceful, natural beauty moved me, but more so made me appreciate Pucon, which is also a lakeside town with a view of a breathtaking volcano. Unfortunately, the towns I visit must all be compared to Pucon, and I haven´t yet found a place more "wow" provoking than my Chilean hometown. Uniformed school children crowded the central square armed with sidewalk chalk and youthful optimism to celebrate The International Day of Water. They drew pictures of responsible water use and wrote messages of varying usefulness, like "We will waste no more!," and the less practical, "I will never shower again!" 

In the afternoon, a 20 minute shuttle bus took me to the neighboring port city of Puerto Montt which sprawls northward from the Pacific Ocean. A stepped off the bus and immediately resolved to loathe the city, with its throngs and noise and pollution and traffic. Within minutes I found a quirky alley of two-story buildings which leaned in on each other. Small, repeating triangular windows lined the upper stories, while the lower levels opened into stalls where local artists sell their crafts. Unlike the ubiquitous wood, leather and wool products which are sold throughout southern Chile, theses stalls featured merchants with unique crafts and I wound through the twisting, weaving, narrow alleys looking at the crafts and talking with some of the vendors. One woman, a slipper maker, invited me in to show me her client book filled with sixteen years of individual slipper sales. “My slippers walk in many countries,” she told me proudly, showing me an ever-growing list of countries, to whose citizens she has sold her footwear. When I told her I was from the states, her eyes grew wide and she smiled, saying that the largest pair she ever made were for an American man. “He was a giant!”

          Another craftsman, a round faced, jolly man with dark hair to his shoulders and glasses that perch on the bridge of his nose, beckoned me in and within moments convinced me to sit down and watch him work. He took out a scrap piece of leather, turned on the heated metal tool he uses to draw on the leather and began to sketch. “For you: a special present!” he said. I am now the thrilled owner of a unique souvenir from Nestor in Puerto Montt who drew a sailboat on the sea under the words “Willa, Pte Montt, 2011.”
          To the west of the city center is the fish market Anglemo, which is filled with heaps of sea flesh... mussels, clams, crabs, salmon, urchins, and abalone. I ate fried hake in a small restaurant on stilts which extended over the water, and watched the simple, brightly colored wooden boats motor around the port. Although Puerto Montt is a busy, modern city, touches of its past remain in Angelmo where the boats are still small and every boat and building is slapped with a thick layer of bright paint. Primary colors are king, but orange, green and purple

In the evening I bussed to the airport and flew into Punta Arenas, where the frigid midnight wind let me know just how far south I´d come. This morning I wandered the city cemetery which is filled with anglo names and provides fascinating evidence of the city’s first pioneering inhabitants. A three hour bus ride north across wind swept pampas brought me here to Puerto Natales. The pampas were flat... flatter than anything I´ve yet seen in Chile and the change was startling. Rheas dotted the roadside, along with sheep and horses which grazed the coarse, shrubby plains.

Puerto Natales feels like a forgotten town at the end of the earth. Travellers come only to get to better places, like Torres del Paine National park, where I´m headed tomorrow for a few nights of camping. Trekkers wander the streets of tired, once brightly colored buildings with checklists in hand, and file through grocery stores, stocking up before they enter the park for extended hikes. Today the clouds hang close to the earth and all is gray and wind bitten. The mountains around Pucon give the area a great sense of ascension, but here I feel trapped between a flat sky and flatter earth. I´ll be glad to get into the park tomorrow and return to an undulating landscape and soaring towers of stone.

And so, there is a taste of my travels so far. I have glaciers and the quaint island towns on Chiloe to see before I return to Antilco, but I´ll be glad to go back when the time comes. Traveling here is thrilling, and the backpack culture of young, excited adventurous is contagious and exhilarating. But I am lonely traveling alone and look forward to being back on the ranch and eating dinner with Mathias, Karin, Remo and Mara every night.

True Grit

Three weeks ago I helped seven riders repel off a horse down a fifty-foot cliff into the crater of Sollipulli volcano. They gripped a lasso of crude leather and scuffled their feet, searching for firm footing among the loose shale and igneous rock. The inched their way down the nearly vertical drop and tried not to think about the very real possibility of the earth beneath them sliding away in an avalanche. Next to me, on the lip of the crater, Luis’ horse turned his back to the chilling wind, closed his eyes to the dust, and leaned away from the crater, anchoring himself against the weight of the multiple women who descended on the lasso attached to his saddle. One woman sat resolutely while the others silently prepared for the descent and said we were dumb, dumb and stupid for attempting such a dangerous stunt. Another rider dug out her cell phone, turned it on and thrust her arm vainly in the air, searching for nonexistent signal to call her kids and say goodbye.

We arrived to the rim at 4:00 in the afternoon after six hours of riding over the vast volcanic landscape of Sollipulli. It was at times arid, at times snow-capped, but always unforgivingly steep. Sollipulli is an amalgamation of several small, long-dead volcanoes and its geography is accordingly varied. Harsh conical formations rise to a flat top or a hollow crater; great undulating ripples of earth bend and flow, as if complex, monstrous waves of lava hardened to form this severe landscape. The high altitude keeps most parts of Sollipulli covered in snow through most of the year, but in some places the sun strips the cliffs, outcrops, plateaus, and hills of their white blanket and exposes feathery veins of hardened lava in the rock as well as red iron deposits. Through the morning and afternoon we cut tight “Z”s up mountainsides and even tighter ones down snowy slopes. We held our hats as the horses tiptoed across the five foot wide, razor’s edge summit line. I hauled a horse, an older gelding called Rebelde, off its knees when it fell in an ice patch and slipped dangerously to the edge of the earth. Then I watched in numbed shock as my own horse, Tornado, bolted wildly, galloping across the snow and skidding to a stop only inches from the edge of bottomless crevasse.

Such was our morning. But in my memories of that day I often overlook the first six hours. The climax of beauty, terror, danger and emotion was our descent into, and the time we spent within, the great crater. Once the women reached the end of the rope, they stepped off the sand and shale and onto the firm, snow-capped glacier which fills the crater. Luis calmly herded them behind an outcrop where they wouldn’t be able to see our next stunt, then struggled back up the cliff to me. He removed the lasso from his own horse and fixed it to the bridle of another, then turned to me with an inappropriately flippant grin and asked, “Ready?” I must have hesitated, glimpsing the cliff again and imagining what we were about to do, because he stared at me harder and said “Nervous?... Don’t be. This is easy.”

Luis is a wizard with horses, but his blind confidence comes not from faith in the certainty of a positive outcome. It comes instead from his inability to entertain the possibility of a disastrous outcome. It is his strength and weakness. When you are on the lip of a crater, in deafening wind, with ten horses you have to somehow get to the bottom of the crater, it is not an “easy” situation.

With seven riders and ten horses to care for, my worries flared ferociously at that moment. What if the snow in the crater was soft or hiding huge crevices? The landscape had been unpredictable all day, what if we couldn’t get back out of the crater? What if, in the struggle, I slipped off the cliff under the hooves of the horses, as had happened once earlier in the day? But my thoughts had to wait because suddenly Luis was standing halfway down the cliff, buried to his calves in the loose rock, hauling on the lasso and shouting for me to start. I moved behind the first horse, Palomo, and slapped him with all my force. Two minutes of slapping and tugging finally overpowered him and he slipped over the edge. I took advantage of horses’ herd mentality and pushed the next horse, Chocolate, over the cliff before he could figure out where he was headed. The rest followed, stepping off the lip before their self-preservation instincts set it, and stood watching ten horses plunge, slip, fall and slide their way down the rock river to the bottom. I lost sight of Luis in the eruption of sand and dust, and had to wait until the roar sliding rocks quieted before I could call out to him.

I was the only one left on top. I gathered the remaining ropes and jumped, surfing the shale to the bottom. Once on the snow I noticed the pervasive tranquility of the glacier. The women sat quietly, half-traumatized, half-exhausted; the horses stood calmly, only gently shuddering from shock; the wind was gone, the air was still and it was silent. It was as though we were in a vacuum. The glacier was vast, blindingly white and stretched out for hundreds and hundreds of meters before us. The sky too breathed tranquility, with an easy wash of baby blue and a few stretched cotton strands of cloud. And, but for a few bright drops of blood dribbled across the snow, fallen from the horses nicked legs, it seemed that everyone was safe.

In all, we rode for twelve and a half hours that day. Two weeks earlier Aldo and Luis successfully crossed Sollipulli on horseback- the first riders ever to do so. In an ambitious, and ultimately ill planned decision, we decided to cross it again with seven riders as part of their twelve day trek. The seven riders and I laugh now, and brag that we survived Sollipulli. But, it was the most extreme day of my life and I don’t want to forget that. Up there, on the volcano, it seems things are only given in vast dosages. It was too beautiful, too dangerous, too exciting, too steep, too magnificent, too stressful. I felt my insides compress and cried from the beauty. As a rider, I might do it again. As a guide… It is a changing, unpredictable landscape which changes quickly and intensely. I’m not convinced that the unimaginable sights we saw, the entire volcanic landscape of southern Chile stretching out in purple peaks and snow-capped cones before us, were worth the risk.

I have more to write about the rest of that day… (how we couldn’t get out of the crater, how we rode through the dark on exhausted horses…) and more to write about the past few weeks as well, including an eventful four day ride I led. But for now I’m leaving, taking a short vacation from Antilco to recharge and give my nerves a rest. I head today to Bariloche, Argentina and from there will continue south, deeper into Patagonia. There are links below to my pictures from Sollipulli which capture nothing, but are pretty. Check them out!

Hasta Luego!