Puyehue, Nahuel Haupi, and then some

Puyehue National Park, near Osorno Chile. Instead of paying a national park entrance fee, I had to pay a private company called El Caulle because the trail passed through their land. It was that company, and not the park service, that maintained the trail and the refugio. I walked in the restaurant to pay with an Australian couple, and the girl behind the counter gave us a single receipt, thinking we were together. When they asked about a receipt, the guy behind the counter said, don't worry, it's just one big farm, no one is going to check your proof of purchase up there. I thought it was a bit strange to think of my national park visit as more of a farm visit. The first 30 minutes was indeed like a farm, with gates to be opened and closed with barbed wire to keep cows on one side or the other. I closed a last gate then the trail ascended steeply for almost 2 straight hours. It was a poor trail, easy to follow but dusty with loose rock and sand, the grooves in the mountain sometimes following 4 different paths at once. It seemed very run down for a trail, even though there were a lot of people walking it that day. I made it to the top, to the refugio. The El Caulle Refugio was a run-down old shed, with slabs of wood across bunk beds as the place to sleep, and a slow burning wood stove in the center of the single room. The Refugio was free, or at least, included with the entrace fee. I slept in my tent that night, as did every other hiker there (almost 20 tents). The Refugio was not the standard sleeping area, it seemed, just a back-up for bad weather. And our weather was great. Clear blue skies during our long long days. I headed up the trail 25 minutes to get water from a glacial stream. The whole round trip took 50min, which was pretty long just for water, but it was good to stay occupied since I was having a tough time being by myself after Carolyn left. I managed to light the stove without any help and even have some thick chocolate pudding for desert. It seemed like hiking alone just wasn't fun anymore--even though the park was beautiful, I didn't have anyone to share it with me.

The next day I had banana oatmeal for breakfast and hiked up and across scree to cross the lower slopes of the volcano. The mountain turned into rocky dunes, with psychadelic patterns of brown in the sand. The trail was marked by tall bamboo sticks, faded by the sand and time, with red tubing nailed into the top to make them more visible. I left my bag at the tent sight, called Banos 2 because it was by a hot springs, and walked with two Israelis another 2 hours to see geysers. We waded across rivers in our sandals then got rocks in our shoes in the sand. The geysers were yellow and green and bubbling mud, but they didn't smell quite as bad as I remembered from Lassen National Park. On the way back I cut in on their Hebrew conversation (YES!) and talked about the importance of being Jewish according to the religious definition (they hadn't met an American Jew quite like me before). Back at camp, I shared by zapallo soup with them in exchange for pasta with tuna. I enjoyed their company and started to remember a bit more the benefits of being on my own.

I woke up early to go into the hot springs before leaving--I had to because they were there but also because I wanted to since my dusty pants. The bubbling springs mixed with river water right where I was sitting, so I could regulate the amount of heat I got with a wave of my hand. I walked 3 hours back across the sandy dunes, relishing in my ability to drink from the mountain streams. I added flavor packets like peach or lemon to the water and so had icy cold drinks to keep me going to whole day. With the refugio in view below, I left my pack behind a rock and climbed an hour and a half up the snow-filled crater on the top of Volcan Puyehue. Up there I had 360 degree mountain views, even over into Argentina. I almost napped except for the biting flies that kept landed on my face and hands (now finally, the white spots from the fly bites have gone down). I slid down half running in the scree and wrote 20 postcards to send home,since I had been slacking on that front for a while. It was a quiet night at camp, with only 2 tents and 4 people in the refugio compared with about 20 tents two nights earlier. It was my first day since Carolyn left that I was calm the whole day, with no major internal turmoil. I didn´t feel quite so lonely up on the crater when I felt like I could see the whole world.

Without bothering to add 50 minutes up the hill to get more glacier water for the final day, I started down the hill. The few people that were in camp and the refugio had already left so I bid goodbye to the volcano alone and headed down the hill. The descent was shaded in the forest, so it wasn´t hot, but it certainly was tedious. I couldn´t believe that I had managed to walk up that whole way. I shook my head again at the poor state of the trail, the erosion I assumed the influx of hikers had caused. An hour in to my mindless descent, I heard shouts in the distance, then a man on a horse told me in no uncertain terms to get off the trail so that I wouldn´t scare the cows. I moved off a ways but he kept shooing me further and further away. Stay hidden and shut up was the message he gave me. Oh, and there are four more groups of cows coming after his, so wait there for all of them. And so it was that I remembered that this was private farmland, not national park, and that I was invading the space of the cows, and not the other way around. So I ducked down behind bamboo and waited for the cows to pass. After the first group, I skipped a ways down the trail and found a better hiding place. The cowboys on horseback passed with shouts of UY-YUY to keep the cows moving while dogs barked behind them. I wasn´t waiting more than 10 minutes in the bushes, but I could feel the blood rushing to my foot, threatening pins and needles, because I didn´t dare make a sound for fear of another cowboy´s reprimand. When the cows had past, I rejoined the trail, understanding why the trail conditions were so poor. It wasn´t the 70kilo hikers who had pounded the mud down the mountain, but rather the herds of animals who are decidedly less interested in maintaining a single pristine path. And the way down certainly wasn´t pristine after that. I watched carefully where I stepped until I made it all the way back to the end of the trail at the El Caulle restaurant.

I picked up my bag and walked to the road, hoping to catch a ride to the next park instead of backtracking to a city and possibly waiting a few days for the next available bus. It took a while waiting in the sun, but made it most of the way to the next park, stopping at an urban campsite for the night when it was clear I wouldn´t make it all the way. I enjoyed luxuries like a shower and a pomelo soda before going off to sleep. I woke up to pounding rain and pulled all the clothes I had rinsed inside so they wouldn´t get more wet. But it was too late for that. It rained the whole next day, as I broke camp and bussed to the next city, dropped my bag, restocked on mountain food, and bussed to the starting point of the trek at Villa Catedral. This was my one day off from the trail, and my one day of rain, so I didn´t complain too much.

I awoke to clear blue skies and found the trail at the base of some ski lifts. I took the roundabout route through a forest recovering from a major fire, the remaining tree trunks still bright white, but slowly being overtaken by a green understory (good term, right Carolyn?). I dipped my toes in a river before the big uphill started, but it was so cold in the shade that I put my socks on and kept going almost right away. Halfway to Refugio Frey, my destination for the night, I passed a small Refugio called la Pedrita because it was built underneath an overhang in a big boulder. The refugio was made of wood, and was complete with windows, a stove, and a platform with space for maybe 8 sleeping bags. Basic, certainly, but a welcome sight in bad weather, I bet. The way it was built in the rock was so different from anything I have seen-- it was more dramatic even than Aescher Berghaus in Appenzell way back in early August. One problem: a handwritten note by the entrance warned of that there were rats inside that were known to carry the HANTA virus. Now this was something I had heard about, but never had I encountered a refugio or hut that screamed so strongly ¨stay out.¨ So I just poked my head inside for a second, but stayed out as recommended. The hut was unusable, but curiously they CAB, the mountain organization that owns it, chose not to dismantle it. Passing by what would have been my favorite refugio but for the possibility of diseased rats nibbling through my sleeping bag, I headed up the valley, climbing up rocks painted with smiley faces and kilometer numbers to encourage me to the top. A roof then a whole building then 3 buildings came into view. There was a crowd of grungy people and a pile of backpacks all strewn about the rocky ground outside the hut. Frey stood proudly at the foot of a short valley, just past a small lake. Jagged cliffs soared up on both sides of the hut, with the rock climbers´ carabiners glinting hundreds of meters above me in the sun. A woman came outside carrying a freshly baked pizza. I felt like I was back in Switzerland. I sat outside the door in Frey (outside the main hut-- there was also a smaller toilet building--squat but with flush-- and a storage building) and just watched the people below by the water and above on the sheer rock faces, trying to get a feel for the rhythm of life here.

This hut seemed so similar to the European ones I knew. It was a simple two room design on the bottom floor, with a kitchen for guests and a kitchen for the staff, along with some wooden benches and tables. Stairs led up to one big room filled with bunks and mats, maybe 40 or 45 spots in all. The sleeping area wasn´t quite as clean as the ones I remember from Switzerland, and there were certainly no fluffy down comforters arranged just so waiting for tired guests. And the food you could order or buy was different too, of course. Alfajors instead of kuchen, pomelo instead of appenzellerbier. Outside, I felt a difference because there was free camping around the hut and along an entire length of the lake. Some tents I could see from my viewpoint, others were hidden in the leña scrub along the water. The campsites were free, and it seemed like some visitors, especially the climbers, entrenched themselves there for weeks at a time, bathing in the lake whenever the sun shone and descending only to stock up on food (I confirmed this a week later when I saw the same dirty looking campers an entire week later when I returned to Refugio Frey). Every camper who had been there the night before was air-drying all possessions, sleeping bags, underwear, everything. I sat by the lake, the shore dotted with these colorful possessions, and watched the lake surface calm from ripples to mosaics, to glass reflections. I glanced away to assess my dinner food and when I looked back the reflection was gone, the wind picking up as the sun set. I made too much soup, cooking for 2 instead of just 1, and I tried to each as much as I could. I saved the extra broth for breakfast. Mmm.

The next evening I wrote in my journal: ¨nothing like seeing the smoke rising out of the hut´s chimney from far off away a long day hiking.¨ I woke up late, at 10, after a cold and uncomfortable night on what I realized too late was a slanted surface. I walked around the lake up the valley, until loose rock and boulders rose and all sides and I couldn´t imagine there would be a path out. But I trained my eyes to spot the red splashes of paint on the rocks and I picked and dragged my way out of the valley, heaving myself up with 2 hands at points. I bid goodbye to the craggy Catedral Peak and looked out at infinity yet again. A few quiet moments on the top like that is enough to remind me why I am doing this. Downhill was much harder, with more skiing through scree than I felt comfortable with. I fell 3 or 4 times, nothing serious, since the path was so steep I was never too far from the ground, but my confidence was shaken enough to opt for less dangerous route the next day. The most trying part of the two mountain passes I descended was not the loose scree, which just demanded attention, but rather the larger rocks through the trees when I was almost at the bottom. That demanded patience, which was in shorter supply. But like I said in my journal, there is nothing like the smoke rising out of a chimney in a lone building by a lake in a long valley, knowing that I am home for the night. Offcially named Refugio San Martin, my home for the night was more commonly referred to as Refugio Jakob after the lake over which it stood guard. I stopped to talk to an American outside who mentioned how friendly the huts he had visited had been, and walking inside I found the same to be true at Jakob. For the first time ever, including Switzerland, India, and the rest of my time in Chile, I went into a hut and someone greeted me without demanding what I wanted. When I said I didn´t want anything, the guy in charge said that everyone was welcome to hang out in the hut, even campers who weren´t staying there or buying food there. The atmosphere inside felt comfortable too, with strangers sharing tables and couples playing cards, without the pressure I have seen at other huts to buy at least a beer before being able to sit at the tables. The sleeping area was a room with bunks on the ground floor along with a loft up above the dining area. There was a hefty log ladder right by the door to get up to the loft. My last view of the hut before my early night was of a candle-lit room buzzing with conversation.

In the morning I hiked up away from the trail to Laguna de los Tempanos, bounded by a snow patch and high rock walls. I left the refugio at 12, the same times as the rest of the locals--most of the international hikers left hours before. As I mentioned before, I chose not to do the demanding route because I didn´t want to fall any more. The route required extra navigating because rock falls meant the route was unmarked or non-existent in places, so I gave myself and my knees a break and walked slowly down out of the valley instead of up and over the passes. This meant extending my 5 day trek to 6, with a shower in a little town halfway through-- sounds just about right to me. The little demanding part of the route was crossing a stream holding a wire cable above my head. Also a bridge that seemed sketchier than any I crossed in India. I stopped for two hours in the shade of trees by the same river and read Isabel Allende´s Eva Luna while dipping my toes in the glacier water and eating an entire Sahne-Nuss chocolate bar (Amazingly, I carried that chocolate bar in my bag for a week without once feeling inclined to eat in. I knew I was back to my old self when I couldn´t but help myself to another little square or two). I walked down in the dusty late afternoon, yanking off my boots in pain at one point... because ... well... ok, so the night before I dropped a tent stake on my big toe--ouch, but not a big deal-- but I ignored the way the band-aid rubbed against my other toe the next day until it was too late and I had a little circle of raw skin in just the wrong spot. It is healed now, finally, 10 days later, but that was a stupid and terribly painful little spot. The path ended at a T to a jeep trail, with no signs to point me in the right direction and no indication on my poorly labelled map either. I waved down some grandpa-bike riders and asked the way to Colonia Suiza. They told me and said it was 7km, but with great views. I started walking and calculated that I would just make it at dark unless I hitched a ride. I waved down a car and their reaction when I said I was going to Colonia Suiza was that it was still really far-- 7km. Such is the attitude of the mountain bikers from the city vs. the Colonia Suiza locals. I had a shower at the lakeside campground and walked down the only street in town. It was basically just a long block, a curious conglomeration of Swiss flags and food in a random town in the Lakes District of northern Patagonia.

After this I stopped writing in my journal for the rest of my hiking time, because I acquired hiking companions which kept me busy and talking the entire day, right up until I went to sleep.

Ha. I had to take a break and read the Style section of the nytimes just now (what Rachel... style... you. ok. simma). This is just like being back at school (ok, not just): I have postponed this as long as possible, I have thought and talked about writing, I have had my preparatory snack (just like a stop a Diversions back in the day) and I have read all the news I should on nytimes.com. There is nothing left to do but to finish writing. And its not like this is unpleasant to write. No, I enjoy this. Just like I know I will enjoy writing soon about the mountains huts as a system (or not) and what my latest thoughts are on the meaning of wilderness. And I have the time right now to do it. And I am in front of the computer. But now, of all times, I´d like to just lay in bed and read another book, or merely go to sleep. No escaping it this time, though. I will finish this tonight.

So from Colonia Suiza I ascended a gentle path by a river for 4 hours, taking off my boots often to air them out (increasingly smelly after non-stop hiking) and more importantly to give my tent stake/band-aid induced injury a chance to get some air too. After barely being able to tear myself away from the last 20 pages of my book, I started up the last section of the trail. Steep steep steep up and out of a valley. The t-shirts they sold in the hut had a picture of a squirggly line, ok, a squiggle, and said maldito caracol, which means basically damned switchbacks (at least that´s what I understood from my Argentine friend Carolina´s explanation of it... yes I do know that caracol also means snail, but the switchbacks are called that because they go in a kind of spiral like the shell of a snail). And I basically was thinking maldito caracol in other words going up for that hour, but I made it. Refugio de Laguna Negra was the coolest shaped refugio I have seen so far. Well, it was equally as cool as la Pedrita but it had no HANTA rats so that gives it a boost up, I think. The hut was one small building, with the entrance wall at about 9 ft tall and the opposite wall about 15 ft, with a slanting flat roof to cover it and a layer of sheet metal on the lakeside wall. The funny shape--none of this ¨classic¨chalet business--was to help it survive minor avalanches during the winter. The lake after which the refugio is named is not actually black, but the rocks above it are. I sat trying to read by the lake but the wind kept turning the pages too soon, so I gave up and joined the nearest conversation which happened to be in English. I met Carolina, a Porteña, and Naomi and Seth from Brooklyn. Carolina gave us our first taste of mate, which, since I had been preparing myself for drinking grass (according to Callie´s explanation) was a pretty pleasant green tea. We talked the rest of the afternoon, moving a couple times to stay in the sun and finally giving up and going instead to stake out our table for dinner. That night I ordered the hut food instead of making my own dinner. At that hut however, we were the odd ones out because all the locals cooked their own food. I stayed up late, having a class of wine and failing to understand when Carolina tried to explain truco, an Argentine card game like (and I´m going to butcher this spelling) schaffkopf with special cards. We went outside to look at the stars. The wind was warm that night and we watched for shooting stars and satellites together as I pondered why Orion would wear his belt so tilted. After my friends went to bed, I stayed up even longer because I had to finish my book. Some teenagers shared my table around that time. They started hiking at 6.30 and so didn´t arrive until 11.30pm--hiking in the dark doesn´t sound too fun to me but I guess if you know the way... There were still hushed (and not so hushed) conversation going on downstairs when I climbed up to the loft and found my sleeping bag where I had left it spread over a mat in a corner. I went to sleep to the noise of campers going in and out of the hut as they prepared for bed and multiple snorers up in the loft.

From the refugio, I made my way around Laguna Negra up and over rocks (including a brief rapelling section) along with Carolina, Naomi, and Seth. We climbed for an hour up to a dip along the ridge for views of Mt. Tronador right up close. I had seen the same mountain from the other side not too long ago when I was on top of the volcano in Puyehue. From there the red dots disappeared and we (poorly) chose to walk across the loose rock to get to the next part of the ridge. Tired and frustrated, especially since after 2 hours the refugio was still in plain view, we finished that section and talked to some hikers coming the other way. They guessed there were another 6 hours left until Refugio Lopez, which would mean we would arrive... at 8pm. We followed the path along more scarily shaky rocks then down into a sludgy valley. The red splashes disappeared again and so our patience wore thin searching for the trail. The trail descriptions and map I had were of no help; the second group of hikers didn´t help much either. We could see the path in the grassy meadow down in the valley and knew we had to get there, but weren´t sure how. I walked off across more slanting rocks (Mckenna, it was kind of in the style of me searching for our hostel in Florence 2 years ago--I walked like I knew where I was going but really...), but eventually it was Carolina who found the path and I backtracked and humbly followed. We ate lunch around 4.30 in the shade of some trees. Everyone was subdued thinking of the huge climb that awaited us. For lunch I cooked up some veg. soup with rehydrated mushrooms. Not awful, but I couldn´t really call it a success. The climb was one of those loose rock--stab your toe into the shifting dirt--pray that the whole mountain doesn´t come sliding down climbs. I once again felt glad I hadn´t down the more difficult route the day before--this was enough of a challenge. I wasn´t out of breath going up because I went so slowly that that wasn´t possible. But I had to take breaks because my legs were shaky and my heart would start racinh whenever the rocks threatened to slide out from underneath me. The four of us walked far apart, so that any possible falling rocks wouldn´t hit the rest of us. I had to do some Mark Massey style self talk, particularly on the lower half, when I could see I wasn´t even close to done. But there was no choice but to continue. It took 2.5 unnerving hours to get to the top. Carolina thought that called for some mate. We hid from the wind and slurped it up before heading right back down again. The last 1.5 hours to Refugio Lopez, which we could see below us, passed in kind of a daze, because for all of us, our energy and our emotions had gone into the climb, so we had nothing left. 10 hours and 15 minutes after setting out from Laguna Negra, we stumbled into the busy Refugio Lopez. It was just past 9pm, but since this wasn´t Switzerland, that wasn´t too late to order dinner. The bife de chorizo and pomelo felt just right after such a long day. We all talked for a bit but everyone was dead. We didn´t bother busting out a deck for more truco lessons though the rest of the visitors, it seemed, played late into the night. Our bunks were on a separate floor, not a loft, so it was pretty quiet as we put out our sleeping bags and went to sleep.

I shared my oatmeal and dulce de leche for the last morning in the mountains, then we walked down down down away from the refugio. Somehow we ended up on the jeep road, not the path, which took us to the right place but took 4 hours. Those 4 hours did seem pretty easy compared with the day before, but it was still more mindless than other days I´ve had on the trail. We caught a bus just before Colonia Suiza and headed back to town. I got to shower and enjoy fresh fruit, my favorite things after 6 days of hiking.

But I couldn´t leave it at that. I had 1 day left before my very long bus ride to Buenos Aires where I had my flight out of South America. So I went back to Villa Catedral with Erez, an Israeli guy I met at the hostel, for one day of hiking. It was a weekend so the buses were infrequent, and with our poor timing we didn´t actually start the walk until 1.45. The sign warned that the hike to the refugio was 4hours, which I hadn´t cared at all about one week earlier when I was here, but I didn´t want to miss the last bus (a la Puerto Natales). We hiked fast, with only a few short breaks, as I kept calculating how long it would take to get there and back. The last bus was at 9pm. 4 hours and 4 hours and we wouldn´t make it. But we were fast hikers. Up to the top in an impressive 2 hours and 45 min. I gave my feet a rest and ate an artesenal alfajor, accepting an offer of leftover pizza the couple who shared our table (Erez said that reminded him of a kibbutz). We started down at 5.40, half jogging the steep sections and otherwise keeping the same brisk pace. I remembered that a week earlier when I had been listening to conversations, someone had said there was a 7.45 bus. Erez and I decided to try for that one. At 7.45 we were still 20 min away. We saw the bus pulling into the village from the main road and started to jog. The bus had to drop off passengers and drive around the whole parking lot then wait for every new passenger to pay before leaving, so I figured we had a chance. We took a wrong turn when the trail hit a jeep trail almost at the bottom. Hurry hurry as I backtracked then found our way. I saw the bus at the bus stop, with the last passenger pulling herself up. Full out sprint move move move until I was 10m away and knew that the bus driver saw us. We climbed on hot and sweaty and happy to be there. Erez said I was in pretty good shape and I knew it was true. All those hiking days in a row will do it. Back in town I stocked up on fruit for the bus ride and showered before joining Erez and some other Israeli travellers for dinner. I couldn´t speak in Hebrew, but I started to remember enough to respond in English to comments in Hebrew. Yes! After that we walked and bought some gourmet chocolate as an after dinner treat. There was a band playing in the street, and there were crowds out enjoying the summer evening everywhere. A fine last night to cap off my hiking for South America.

In the morning I got on a bus and got off 22 hours later. Callie and I found each other and I unloaded myself and my smelly clothes for a couple days of city adventures. Now I am on my way to Tanzania for another chapter of new food, new people, and new mountain hut systems.