Cycling even when the road ends…

We departed Villa O’ Higgins, the end of the Carretera Austral, on December 21, 2011 and boarded a small boat for a ride across Lago O’ Higgins. Since there is only one company who offers rides across the lake only twice a week, they have a major monopoly and their tickets are quite expensive. We were happy for the shelter of the boat as it protected us from the cold rain we had endured for the past 2 days. Fortunately, the sky turned and the rain let up as soon as the boat left the dock letting us have some impressive views of the towering snow covered peaks that rose from the vibrant blue waters. I admired how there are no roads in these parts, just trails along the shoreline that I hope to one day walk when we return with backpacks.

We spent the 2 1/2 hour boat ride chatting with our new friends from British Columbia, Kelly and Dave, and playing with their precious son Tumelo also known as “Timmy,” “Little Bill” (due to his facial expressions like Bill Cosby), or, my favorite, “Mr. T.” We were excited to learn they have their own outdoor education school in Canada known as TreeHouse Outdoor Education! They are backpacking around Patagonia on the once main horse trails that are now disappearing as roads and cars make their way to these remote parts. We loved hearing their stories and enjoyed the beautiful energy this family exudes.

When we reached the other side of Lake O’Higgins, we wished our great friends happy trails and sunshine as they took off to hike trails near the massive southern ice fields where they would celebrate Christmas. This is where we would begin the infamous Lago Del Desierto route, 22km of trail ending at the border post on Lago Del Desierto in Argentina. The first section of the route was gravel road and more or less rideable until we reached the top of the pass and officially entered into Argentina. The final 7kms was trail similar to what you would find on a hike in the Santa Cruz Coastal mountains of California along a narrow trail.

We had been forewarned about what to expect and since there was a fair amount of rain the previous 3 days, we expected the worst. The trail had a lot of roots to navigate around and a few real mucky spots near water sources but overall we managed to lift our bikes and fit them through the narrow horse paths arriving at the Argentinian border post around 5:30 pm, in perfect timing to catch the final boat of the day across Lago Del Desierto at 6pm.

Most of our 22km trek was spent zigzagging back and forth with a couple we met a few hundred kilometers back in Cochrane where Justin fell ill with a fever. Walter is from the Netherlands and Magda is from Poland – they speak a mixture of Polish, English, and Dutch together and it is quite interesting to listen too. We ended up camping together and enjoying a campfire near the river leading to our next town and discussing our travels. They are spending their honeymoon cycle touring around Patagonia!

On December 22, we departed our beautiful campsite and set out for El Chalten. El Chalten is most famous for its location at the base of Cerro Torres and Mt Fitz Roy. The views of the backside of Fitz Roy greeted us as we travelled the 37 km on poor dirt road to arrive and stop at the first bakery we saw, eating some fresh baked bread and happy to be in a place to rest for a few days and celebrate Christmas.

~ Justin

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A Christmas Hike to Remember

El Chalten, which means “smoking mountain,” shares my birth year of 1985, as it was hastily built in order to stake claim to this area for Argentina during ongoing border disputes with Chile. To this day, there are still places on the map where no line is drawn as the border has still not been resolved. A narly Seattle alpine climber, Collin, who we met on our Lago del Desierto trek, told us he had been living in El Chalten during the winters since 2003, climbing as much as the weather allows, and the city has more than quadrupled in size in 8 years.

It is nestled right next to Los Glaciares National Park, home to the largest fresh water reserve in the world. Interestingly, there are more tourist than locals populating the city at any given time as it has mainly developed as a tourism hub to the park.

We decided to take an overnight trip into the national park to get a good view of Cerro Torres with a massive, active glacier beneath it as well as climbing to the base of Fitz Roy. The scenery is jaw-dropping here and we seem to have hundreds of pictures of the same massive spires as they overwhelm your senses at every viewing.
BELOW: Cerro Torres seen from Lago Torres

BELOW: Fitz Roy

We set up camp with a terrific view of Sir Fitz for the night, scarfed down 400grams of spaghetti with tomato sauce and salami, and then decided to climb the last couple 100 meters to the base of Fitz Roy for sunset around 7pm since the sun would not set for another 3 hours or so. Justin commented how this is one of his favorite places in the entire world, and it will definitely hold a special space in our hearts.

We celebrated Christmas Eve morning by waking up to the sun glistening on the massive granite peaks, a very uncommon occurrence – many come to see these peaks but the clouds rarely unveil the magic wonders.

Along our hike back to town, we bumped into Steve and Kevin, two gentlemen from Ohio who we had met the day before at the ranger station. They offered to meet for drinks later in the day, so we enjoyed Sprites and great conversation in the late afternoon sun. Steve asked if we’d join them for a Christmas dinner the next day which of course we were honored to! After our Sprites, we rolled over to the all you can eat pizza joint and stuffed ourselves to the gills for a Christmas Eve celebration. It wasn’t my grandma’s amazing prime rib meal, but we still rolled home stuffed.

Christmas day we checked into a Bed & Breakfast and gazed at sir Fitz all day as we relaxed with not a worry in the world except poor Internet due to our remote location. Our Christmas dinner turned out to be a real feast and we once again lay overstuffed, extremely grateful for all the kindness and compassion we have encountered in our travels. We can not believe how close we are to Ushuaia!

Merry Christmas everyone. Sending love and happiness your way.

~Melissa

PATAGONIA SIN REPRESA (Patagonia without Dams!!)

I have a huge lump in my throat as I try to put into words what I have learned about the potential pending doom of Patagonia. I feel, more than ever, the pains of John Muir, the famous naturalist who fought to his death to preserve the wilds of the Sierra Nevada as the plague of civilization oozed into these pristine wilds. San Francisco’s City Council came to the decision in 1913 to build the now infamous Hetch Hetchy dam to provide more water for the growing city. This declaration caused 100s of Natives Americans to relocate and flooded a valley Muir believed to be even more beautiful than the now famous Yosemite Valley. He passed away a year after the decision was finalized. Today, less than 100 years later, only one river in California, the Smith River found close to the Oregon border, runs wild and free without a dam. [List of California Dams] [Dams: Good verus the Bad]

Below is an excerpt from pg.19 of the Lonely Planet’s online guide to Patagonia (a popular traveler’s guidebook) which outlines the issue at hand today in Patagonia:

“Patagonia boasts one of the world’s great water reserves, with deep glacial lakes, two of the planet’s largest non-polar ice fields, and powerful, pristine rivers rushing from the Andes to the Pacific. It’s a dream if you’re a salmon, a nature lover or kayaker. Or a hydroelectric company.
Energy is a hot topic in Chile, where natural resources are few. Spurred by fears of a pending national energy crisis, Spanish-Italian multinational Endesa and Chili-based conglomerate HydroAysen are laying plans for large scale dams throughout Patagonia. By come estimates, 12 Patagonian rivers, including the Baker, Pascua, Futaleufu, Manso and Puelo, are threatened. A study by the University of Chile found that tourism, the region’s second-largest industry, would take a severe hit if the dams are built. While the damns would provide a short-term solution, in the long-term they would transform one of the greatest wildernesses on Earth into an industrial engine.
Popular views construe the project as necessary to protect the nation’s energy reserves, but in fact the public sector uses only a third of Chile’s energy – over half is consumed by the mining industry. Pristine ecosystems and rural farms are at stake, but an even greater issue is building the world’s longest transmission lines.
Thousands of high-voltage towers would run 2415km to bring power to Santiago and mining operations in the North.
‘As a planet we are in a fresh water crisis and global warming will make it worse,’ assures Aaron Sand]gers of International Rivers. ‘These rivers are immensely valuable. We should safeguard our remaining sources of freshwater.’
In the Puelo Valley, the flood zone would put the farm and family burial ground of third-generation subsistence farmer Segundo Cardenas underwater. A century ago, the government gave citizens incentives to populate this remote region. In a reversal, it’s now asking Patagonians to give up their waterways, and in some cases their livelihood. Some feel that the country is pillaging the resource-rich south to feed the energy-hungry north.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Cardenas wondered. ‘When you build a house, would you take a board from one wall to patch another? That’s what Chile is doing.’
For more information, contact Patagonia Sin Represa (Patagonia without Dams: www.Patagoniasinrepresa.cl) or the US Based NRDC (National Resource Defense Council; www.nrdc.org).”

ABOVE: A dam and man-made water canals have already been built in the Lake’s District of Chile’s Patagonia

History, time and again, shows that money and greed trump the protection of our wildernesses and ecosystems. The earth seems to be balancing on a steep apex, and it is only a matter of years before human life on this planet is drastically impacted, if not destroyed, by our own consumptive behaviors. The scariest part to me, is that the majority of the whopping 7 billion people worldwide (as of October 2011) are not even aware of the problem. **Interesting population growth fact: in 1900, the population of Earth was 1.6, and just 99 years later we flipped those numbers to 6.1 billion Learn More About Population Growth).

When I worked for the City of Vacaville last year teaching outdoor education to children, I had a rough encounter promoting my program at a city fair. A man came up to me, a bit of alcohol on his breath, and started yelling that I better not teach that global warming bull—-. I just stared at him in shock, and often on this bike ride I wonder to myself, what should I have said to help him see that there is a problem without spurring more anger?

Is it too late?

There are shimmering glimmers of hope shining through the scars of plastic inundated oceans and clear-cut hillsides caused by the overwhelming growth of man. The Tompkins, founders of the clothing brands NorthFace, Espirit, and Patagonia, live on their properties in Chile for a majority of the year. They have purchased thousands of acres which they are turning into remote protected land for public use. Miles upon miles of fencing have been removed and invasive plant species spread by cattle are tediously picked out of the landscape by hand. The Chilean and Argentinian governments are in a constant battle with the Thompkins, feeling their actions as a threat – Learn More About the Tompkins. Many people wonder is the only way to protect our wilderness land to privatize it? Something does not seem right about that. However, the Tompkins are just two of many more philanthropists and small organizations working to educate the masses with a focus on lowering our rising rate of consumption.

How do we separate politics, for example, the harsh Berlin wall between Republicans and Democrats stagnating the United States, from the protection of our planet and our future? Tompkins has pointed out, “Environmental problems arise from the mistaken notion that humans come first. They have to come second; this has not sunk in to the political and social leadership.”

I will continue to ponder these questions as we roll along and hike in the wilds of Patagonia.

~Melissa

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” ~ John Muir’s Protest of the Hetch Hetchy Dam