south on the carretera

Just got back from an eleven day road trip from Coyhaique to Villa O’Higgins.  O’Higgins is the last town on the Carretera Austral,  Chile’s Southern Highway. The actual end of the road.  Here’s the report.

The client who went with us is named Bob.  He is a good man from Kentucky.  We met Bob at the airport on the afternoon of April 26th and began our journey.

We we were not on the road more than an hour or so when we ran into this guy.  He is a huemul.  One of only two types of native deer in Chile.  They are beautiful, elusive, and notoriously rare to see.  Things were off to a good start.

A little further down the road we stopped by the town of Cerro Castillo to eat lunch.  There is a sweet bus there where they cook up delicious greasy sandwiches.

It kind of felt like being at home.

We camped close to Cerro Castillo that night, woke up in the pouring rain, and started driving.  Stopped by the Rio Baker to take a look.  It is the largest river that flows into the southern Pacific.  It is huge and beautiful and the blue green glacial colored water is like nothing I have ever seen.  We would be back.

News Flash.  The man is currently trying to build some giant concrete walls that would turn this canyon, amongst others, into a lake.  Then they are going to build giant metal towers and string them together with really big electrical wires and line them up through the most beautiful parts of the country all the way to Santiago and the copper mines of the north.  Existe Alternitivas.

This guy basically just ruled and had a long trip in front of him, and we had a mate going,  so we shared.

The next day it started raining again.  Only a little harder.  We were headed from Cochrane to Puerto Yungay, where you catch a ferry across a little chunk of ocean in order to meet up with the last stretch of the carretera down to Villa O´Higgins.  Cochrane is the closest town to Yungay and is about a three hour drive away.   We went to the tourism office the night before to get the ferry schedule.  As it turned out, we got some kind of bad info about the ferry schedule.  I mean, it had only been changed for a week or so, so you can’t really expect news to travel that fast.

Only three people live in Yungay.  They work for the military.  We got to hang out with them for a few hours.

It wasn’t all bad.

We caught the ferry and made it to the last stretch of the road.

It didn’t take long to run into another one of these guys.  Did I mention that they’re rare?

The road to Villa O’Higgins was literally one of the coolest stretches of road I have ever been on in my life.  Had to stop at a small landslide not far from town.

It gave us a chance to check out the condor above our head.

Villa O’Higgins is a small little town at the end of the road, so to speak.   Often times there is no gas and you don’t really want to plan on having to make any phone calls.

But it is extremely beautiful.

And the people that live in town and in the surrounding area are very cool and very nice.

Not to mention, nearby waters have dense populations of big slabby brown trout.  We chose to spend our time there sticking hooks in them.

This place will forever be deemed laguna el slabo.  Not to be confused with the original lago el slabo.

Even I caught one. (photo: Rex Bryngelson)

And here’s a few more just for good measure.

Well, I kind of alluded to the fact that often times Villa O’Higgins has no gas.  And by often times, I meant pretty much every week.  The problem is, you kind of use all your gas getting there.  So, long story short, we got our boy Alfonso on the scene and he scored us 20 litres of some black market bensina which, combined with the rest of the two cycle mix we had for the boat, was enough to get us out of town and up to Cochrane.

But first, we were forced to make an impromptu diversion to fish and camp at a little lago we had heard about.

The boys both caught super piggy rainbows.

I was just happy to boat this little brown trout. (photo: Rex Bryngelson)

Our camping diversion made it possible to skip spending a night in Cochrane, and instead we just grabbed gas and headed up to the Baker.

The float on the Baker was quite cool.  It was cold and the fishing wasn’t phenomenal by any stretch.  But, as I mentioned earlier, it is the largest river to flow into the south Pacific, it is beautiful, and floating it was one of the highlights of my river career thus far.  And even though my time on rivers has not been long, I guarantee I will always be grateful for having pushed some oars around on this river.

There is a place where the Rio Baker meets the Rio Nef, it is called La Confluencia.  There is a big beautiful rapid there.  After our float we went to check it out up close.

La Confluencia is not very close to anything.  Seriously, it is in the middle of nowhere.  There is a ranch there that is very peaceful and beautiful.  The woman who caretakes it is a friend of Rex’s.  She is from Carbondale.  The other employee who was there is a chileno.  He worked the top shack on High Alpine two seasons ago.  He wants to be a ski patroller.  I told him everyone that works at Snowmass is a jerk.

The day after the Baker float.  We packed up the truck and started north once more.  Camped one more night on the way, took in some scenery, rolled into Coyhaique, and called it good.

Fue un buen viaje.

Chao.

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