Overland Travel With KMcGee

After 10 days exploring Glaciers National Park in Argentina, we headed south to our final destination of Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, and once again I have too many photos to include in this post, so once I again I made a slide show with the full monty:

Although I didn’t blog our Patagonia trip last year, some of you may recall that Nancy and I spent 3 days in Torres del Paine National Park last year and did some epic hikes. We were thrilled to return this year with Caitlin and do a repeat plus a new hike (or two), weather permitting.

Torres del Paine (“Towers of Paine”) National Park borders Glaciers National Park to the south, but across the border in Chile. The Torres del Paine is a group of three distinctive granite peaks that rise 8,200 feet above sea level, although it’s worth noting that the Park hosts even higher peaks, including Paine Grande that rises to 9,462 feet. The Park, established in 1959, encompasses ~700 square miles and is located roughly 190 miles north of Punta Arenas (the beginning and ending point of our trip). It is Chile’s most popular national park, with a quarter of a million visitors a year and is designated by UNESCO as a World Biosphere Preserve. The Park is noted for its dramatic granite peaks (much like Fitz Roy and neighboring peaks), but a large portion of the Park is covered by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, also similar to Glaciers National Park to the north, and there are several glaciers that empty directly into lakes.

We camped at Lake Pehoe looking west across the lake to the peaks of Torres del Paine. You can’t find a more stunning view from a campsite, truly!

Note, if you were feeling a bit tired from traveling or just feeling lazy, you could just sit in your Lago Pehoe campsite and stare at the spectacular peaks for days on end and probably not get too bored, but alas we were here to hike.

Day one included an early morning catamaran boat ride across the lake for a long all-day hike up a valley into the heart of the Torres del Paine where condors soar and alpine glaciers thunder and calve off chunks of ice and snow that crash down mountainsides. Here’s a few pics from this epic hike:

Day two was a bit of a respite after the long preceding day’s hike, and involved hiking up to a viewpoint – perhaps the best in the entire Park – behind our campsite and then doing a bit of a primitive and circuitous trail to get back to camp. Here’s a few pics:

Day three involved a steep ascent to a viewpoint of one of the largest glaciers in the Park, Gray’s Glacier, and a view of the Peaks from the south. The trail was crazy steep – no such thing as switchbacks in this country – and started out cloudy and wet, but eventually turned into yet another beautiful day. Here’s a few pics:

On our last day leaving the Park, we stopped at a National Monument called the Cave of the Milodon. The Milodon was one of Patagonia’s Pleistocene megafauna that died out during the Pleistocene extinction a little more than 10,000 years ago – the same mass extinction of megafauna that occurred throughout the Americas around the same time. The Milodon was a huge sloth-like herbivore that was a major prey item for the early human hunter gatherers of the area. Here’s a couple of pics just for fun:

Here’s the promised slideshow of our visit to Torres del Paine, mostly of our hikes of course:

Torres del Paine slideshow (5.5 minutes)

Here’s a composite video of several panoramic videos that Caitlin took on our hikes, which does a good job of bring to life some of what we saw and were experiencing:

Torres del Pain composite video (3.5 minutes)

OK, we are wrapping up this trip with a one-night stop in Puerto Natales and then on to Punta Arenas for a couple of nights to drop off our camper and say goodbye to Patagonia once again. Who knows, we might be back again since third times a charm!

Adios amigos. Thanks for joining along on this trip to Patagonia. See you on the next trail!

WARNING: As happened at El Chalten, here too, I have too many cool photos to include all the worthy ones in this post. SO, as before, I am including several appetizers here and putting the full monty into a slideshow.

We departed El Chalten after a few days of trekking in the northern part of Glaciers National Park and headed to the southern part of the Park near El Calafate for several more days of trekking.

Actually, we simply passed through El Calafate, the largest town in the area, en route to our campsite at Lago Roca located 1 hour farther west and within the Park. This campsite was a gem! Beautifully situated on a hill overlooking Lago Roca, with a short grassy lawn-like substrate and lots of shade trees, picnic tables, trash cans, fireplaces, immaculate bathrooms and hot showers, great WiFi, and best of all, we were almost the only campers and pretty much had the entire 5 star campground to ourselves. Oh, and did I mention the views? Here’s a couple of pics:

For you birders, this campsite also blessed us with Lesser Horned Owl and Austral Pygmy Owl hootings at night – fun – and very bold Crested Caracara, who also entertained us with mating displays and the immodest culmination of those displays, if you get my meaning!

And for the rest of you, we had really cute Patagonian Foxes visit our campsite regularly AND some very, very friendly Skunks – yes, that’s right skunks (formally, Humbolt’s hog-nose skunks)! These little guys paid us almost no attention as they went about their business scrounging for food scraps. Of course, we didn’t know how friendly they were at first. It’s like the bull elephant in our Savuti camp in Botswana a couple years back (some of you may recall), at some point you simply have to hold your ground and not move, because trying to escape risks startling the creature and suffering their wrath. The same was true with our little skunk friends. As they approach, you reach a point where it’s best to hold still and hope for the best. That’s what I was doing/hoping for in this picture when I was approached while playing my flute and not paying attention to the ground around me (see video below for the live action version):

Whereas the northern section of the Park near El Chalten is all about mountaineering and trekking, this section of the Park is all about glaciers. We spent 3 full days in the Park and we were never out of sight of one or more glaciers.

Day one in the Park was 100% sunshine, warm temps and no wind, and thus was the perfect day for an all-day boat ride on Lago Argentina to see some of the Park’s most famous glaciers up close. Lake Argentina, by the way, is purported to be the largest freshwater lake in Patagonian Argentina (or in the entire county according so some sources). It is 62 miles long, east to west, and averages 500 feet deep and over 2,200 feet at its deepest. That’s a pretty big lake! We cruised on a tour boat 125 miles total in and out of several arms of the lake, each of which had hanging glaciers dumping water into the lake from above and a large valley glacier calving directly into the lake (including the most famous, Perito Moreno Glacier), not to mention cool icebergs of varous sizes and shapes in the fjords. Here’s a few pics to wet your appetite:

Day two involved, you guessed it, a strenuous all-day hike to high elevation, this time to see the Perito Moreno Glacier from high above. Fortunately, we were blessed with superb weather! It was great to see the glaciers up close from the boat (day 1) and then from above for a completely different perspecitve. From above, we could really get a sense of the glacier as a slowly flowing river of ice – even when its receding (as it is now). Here’s a few pics from this hike:

Day three was intended to be another steep mountain climb for panoramic views, but we were finally thwarted by the clouds and threat of precipitation. So, instead, we stayed close to camp and simply hiked along the shore of Lago Roca – and the weather held out for us. While not quite as awe-inspiring as the previous hikes, it produced 3 new bird species for me: Least Seedsnipe, Magellanic Snipe, and a yet to be identified with confidence species of Ground Tyrant (I think). I will be sending photos to Phil to sleuth it and return an ID for me. Here’s a few of pics from this hike:

Here’s a short composite video for fun (and especially for Yaron, who only watches my blog videos), including footage of a glacier from the boat and from high above, a fun episode with a horse running through the field along side our vehicle with the moutains in the background (Sherry, we thought you might especially like the horse video), and my encounter with a skunk while playing my flute:

Patagonia – El Calafate video (6 minutes)

Here’s a slideshow with the full monty of pictures, including too many glacier shots:

Patagonia – El Calafate slideshow (5 minutes)

OK, that does it for Glaciers National Park. We are off to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile for our final serious destination. See you there!

WARNING: I took so many stunning (in my opinion) photos that I struggled to winnow them down to few enough to embed in this blog post. SO, I included a few here and put most into a slide show (see link below if you want to see more visually stunning scenes of our hikes in Glaciers National Park outside of El Chalten).

We left our campsite near the Penguin colony on the Strait of Magellan and headed northwest to Glaciers National Park and our campsite outside of the mountain adventure town of El Chalten, Argentina.

We spent 4 nights and 3 full days exploring Glaciers National Park in the vicinity of El Chalten (i.e., the northern section of the Park). The small mountain village of El Chalten, with less than 2,000 year-round residents, is located on the banks of the Rio de las Vueltas within the Park and is a gateway to trails surrounding the peaks of Cerro Torre and Mount Fitz Roy to the west. The village is considered the national capital of trekking in Argentina and has a storied history of mountaineering in the southern Alps. Due to the growing popularity of trekking and climbing in the Park, the village has been growing rapidly over the past decade. Currently, it is like Telluride, Colorado back in the 1950s. Hopefully, the unchecked growth won’t continue to the point of ruin for enjoyable trekking. Here’s a couple of pics of this quaint mountain town:

We stayed in a campsite about 10 km north of El Chalten, right on the river. It was a somewhat quirky campground, but it had working toilets and hot showers, and a place to park our camper riverside, so our needs were met. Here’s a couple of pics:

Glaciers (or Los Glaciares) National Park, established in 1937, is the largest Park in Argentina at ~2,80 square miles and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Park owes its name to the numerous glaciers covering roughly half the property. Many of these glaciers are fed by the massive South Patagonian Ice Field, which is the largest ice field outside of Antarctica, Greenland and Iceland. Several glaciers, including the Upsala, Onelli and Perito Moreno Glaciers calve directly into the huge Lake Argentino, which is partly included in the Park (more on this in the next post).

The most striking sight in the northern part of the Park near El Chalten is Mount Fitz Roy at over 11,000 feet, named after the captain of the HMS Beagle, as I noted previously. The mountain also goes by the name of Cerro Chaltén in the native language, which means “smoking mountain” – probably because even on clear days it is almost always covered by a wisp of cloud that appears like smoke hovering around the peak. Here’s a pic, what do you think?:

Indeed, the weather is so typically stormy around Fitz Roy and the high peaks that many a hiker makes the strenuous 3,500 foot climb to the viewpoint at its base only to find it completely obscured in cloud. We were exceptionally fortunate in the timing of our visit, as we saw the peaks of Fitz Roy and neighbors in their full glory, as the pictures will show. Indeed, we spent 3 full days hiking in the Park and almost always Mount Fitz Roy and its neighbors were visibly looming either close overhead or in the background. Fitz Roy and the neighboring grannite peaks are as stunning a sight as one can imagine. The granite spires with alpine glaciers in between them cascading into turquoise-colored cirque lakes below are a sight to behold – almost surreal. The pictures, of course, don’t do justice to the sublimity of the sight, but it’s all I can offer. I should also point out that the granite spires that dominate the high peaks of Fitz Roy and its neighbors are what remains of the granite core of the mountains after glaciers and incessant winds have eroded away the softer materials, leaving the sharp and jagged granite spires to tower above their surroundings like gods.

We did three major hikes during our stay. The first was a serious all-day 3,500-foot climb to the cirque lakes below Fits Roy and its glaciers (Laguna de los Tres). This was a wonderous hike that followed a glacially-carved valley up to the base of Fitz Roy. We hiked much of the way through that classic evergreen beech forest of Patagonia before climbing above tree line. The only downside of this hike was the hundreds of other hikers on the trail. This hike is considered the one “must do” hike in El Chalten, that is if you are physically able to meet the challenge. There were times we were trapped in a long string of hikers with no way to advance or retreat – argh! During the steepest ascent near the top it felt like what it must be like these days on the Hillary Step portion of the Mount Everest climb. Here’s what that looked like:

There must have been 300 or more people at the top during our one hour stay, and I estimate there must have been easily 1,000 people making it to the top over the course of the one day – yikes, that’s a lot of people. While I really, really didn’t like being in this situation (and that’s putting it mildly), surrounded by masses of tourists (us being one), the views from the top made it all worthwhile. Here’s just a couple of pics from this hike to make you jealous:

Day two started out with a hike up to a stunning waterfall (Chorrillo del Salto), and then we took a primitive trail up canyon above the falls – based on Caitlin’s recommendation – that at times hugged the cliff with a precipitous drop off into the gorge below – the kind that would have given Gussy heart palpatations! It was glorious, as there were no other hikers daring this route. Here’s a few pics of this hike:

Day three was another spectacular hike climbing 4,000 ft up to a peak (Loma del Pliegue Tumbado) overlooking the Fitz Roy massive and neighboring peaks. The hike was all about panaramic views of the high peaks, and it didn’t disappoint. The weather, once again, cooperated beautifully. A bit windy at times, but we had enough breaks in the wind and plenty of sunshine, that with proper outer gear we were quite comfortable. Here’s a couple of pics of that epic hike:

Here’s the slideshow that includes many more photos from our visit. If you have seen enough already, skip it; otherwise, enjoy the short show.

Slideshow of our visit to Glaciers National Park and El Chalten (3.5 minutes)

OK, we are off to the southern sections of the Glaciers National Park outside of the town of El Calafate. See you there!

We departed Cabo San Pablo for a leisurely 3-day journey to the high peaks of the Andes at Glaciers National Park, with two one-night stopovers along the way.

Our first night was spent wild camping overlooking the Strait of Magellan near Punta Delgada ferry crossing (see B on map above). Not a terribly inviting spot given the total exposure to the weather, but the view over the Strait was quite nice. The most interesting aspect of this site was driving through a gap in the mine field lining the Chilean side of the Strait. Yes, I said “mine field”. These mine fields are a legacy of the Pinochet era during the 1970s when he was rather paranoid about invasions from neighboring countries. Sadly, many of these mine fields have still not been cleared of mines, so one has to be careful about straying too far off the road. Here’s a couple of pics:

Our second day involved crossing the Strait on the ferry and meeting up with the Wicked Campers mechanic to replace the house battery and cooler, neither of which have been working since leaving Punta Arenas (argh!), before heading out to Faro Cabo Virgenes at the northern tip of the entrance to the Strait (see map above) to visit a Magellanic penguin colony. The colony is supposedly the third largest breeding colony in Patagonia. We enjoyed some close up and personal encounters – but not so close as to disturb them – before the rain forced us off the beach and to the coziness of a cafe on the lighthouse bluff overlooking the penguin beech and our beachside campsite. Here’s a few pics:

Here’s a short video of the penguin colony, which I mainly included here for Skylar and Talia who both love penguins, but also for anyone else that really loves to watch pengins waddle around and mostly just stand in place pondering each other and, presumably, the meaning of their life (not terribly exciting to watch). There’s also a minute of footage out the window as we drove across the Patagonian steppe to the Andes:

Penguin video (5 minutes)

We left Cape Virgenes and the penguin colony and made the long 8 hour drive across the Patagonian steppe, which is quite monotonous, to the Andes. To keep us entertained and alert along the way, we watched out for two of our favorite creatures (below) and, of course, for the ever present guanacos on the side of the road:

Next stop, Glaciers National Park outside of El Chalten. See you there! Here’s a taste of what’s to come, albeit from a distance:

We departed Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego National Park for the high peaks of the Andes, but had a few one-night stops along the way. But before leaving Tierra del Fuego, here’s one last shot of the Martial Mountains outside of Tierra del Fuego to burn into our (and your) memory how beautiful the area is:

Our first stop was our first and only visit to the Atlantic Ocean at Cabo San Pablo (see E on map below):

Cabo San Pablo is a small coastal community – if you can call it that, since there are only ~6 beach shacks strung out along about 1 km of coastline – on the southeast coast of Tierra del Fuego (see map above). This is a very remote part of Tierra del Fuego. We didn’t see a single car for the entire hour drive out to Cabo San Pablo from the main highway. Cape San Pablo is a small isolated mountain that stands out from the coast forming small bays on either side. Atop the Cape is a lighthouse dating back to 1945 that is no longer functional since it nearly collapsed during an earthquake and is just a skeleton today. Here’s what it looks like hiking to the “lighthouse” and the leaning lighthouse itself:

The shallow bay to the south of the Cape hosts a huge shipwreck, the “Desdemona“. This was a German cargo ship, carrying bags of cement of all things, up the coast when it ran into mechanical problems, caught on fire, and was abandoned just offshore in 1985. Its metal hulk stands just offshore from our campsite as a stark reminder of how dangerous the waters around the bottom of South American can be, even to modern ships. Here she is:

Our campsite was a funky/quirky campsite on a bluff overlooking the wreck of the Desdemona. We had great seaside viewing from our campsite, but the highlight of our stay was the homemade seafood empanadas made by the host – delicious!

OK, we are off up the coast to truly wild campsite on the southern side of the Strait of Magellan on our way north to the Andes. See you along the way.

We left our campsite on Lago Fagnano and headed southwest to our southern-most destination, the city of Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego National Park.

Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego with a population of ~80,000 and claims the title of the world’s southernmost city (I would think this debatable depending on how “city” is defined). Nevertheless, it is in a stunning location, bounded on the north by the Martial mountains and on the south by the Beagle Channel. In addition to being an administrative center, Ushuaia is a light industrial port and major tourist destination – massive tour boats visit here on a regular basis; indeed, during our visit a ship the size of a small city probably carrying 5 thousand or more passengers was in port.

The Beagle Channel was named after the famous British ship HMS Beagle, under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, that first reached the channel on January 29, 1833, during its maiden voyage surveying Tierra del Fuego. The crew of the Beagle included none other than Charles Darwin who served as naturalist on the expedition and who would chronicle the trip in his book “Journey of the Beagle”, which served to inspire his development of the theory of evolution by natural selection that transformed science and our understanding of the natural world – indeed, arguably the most significant contribution to the biological sciences since the enlightenment.

We stopped in Ushuaia for a resupply but mostly just passed through en route to our destination, Tierra del Fuego National Park, located just beyond the city. The Park encompassing 243 square miles was established in 1960 and is the official southern terminus of the Pan-American Highway and the so-called “end of the world” as they like to claim.

We spent 3 nights in the Park and managed 2 long day hikes. Our first hike was through the Patagonian Evergreen Beech forest along the shore of an inlet and out to the Beagle Channel. Big and gnarly beech trees (due to the incessent winds) and some great birds, including the beautiful Magellanic woodpecker (think Pileated woodpecker), were some of the highlights. Here’s a few pics:

Our second hike was to the top of the 3,500 foot Cerro Guanaco, which afforded spectacular views of the Beagle Channel and all the surrounding peaks. This hike was quite strenuous, rising 3,500 feet over a distance of 4.5 miles (think Oscar pass outside of Ophir for you Dolores folks). Beech forest with some giant trees gave way to some gnarly forest and eventually to some spectacular apline grasslands and colorful bogs before the incredibly steep ascent to the peak. Here’s a few pics:

OK, that’s all she wrote for Tierra del Fuego National Park.. Next stop, a quiet spot along the Atlantic coast at Cabo San Pablo. See you there!

We began our overland journey from Punta Arenas by crossing the Strait of Magellan to the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. Our first stop was the King Penguin colony at Parque Pinguino Rey, a protected area located in Bahia not far from the town of Cameron (see A on the map below).

King penguins are the second largest penguin species in the world (28-39 inches tall and 21-40 pounds), second only to Emperor penguins, and are distributed circumpolar in the Antarctic, with colonies reaching north to Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands, among other locations. Most colonies are located on remote and isolated islands, making them difficult to visit, but the colony at Parque Pinguino Rey is readily accessible, so we deemed it a must see destination. Unfortunately, we arrived late (due to frustrating camper delays which I won’t rant about yet) and weren’t able to hike into the sanctuary and get close to the penguins, so we had to be satisfied with seeing them from afar with binoculars. But just so you see what we wanted to see up close, here’s a picture of King Penguins from the internet:

Here are just a few interesting factoids about King penguins. They mainly eat small fish, squid, and krill. Their main predators as adults are leopard seals and orcas. On foraging trips, they repeatedly dive to over 300 ft, and have been recorded at depths greater than 1,000 feet. They have a long reproductive cycle of 14 months and produce only a single egg with each breeding cycle, which means they can only raise 2 chicks every 3 years. Not surprisingly, this species was exploited commercially in the past for its blubber, oil, meat and feathers, but thankfully today it is fully protected under the IUCN, with a total population size estimated at over 2 million.

Although we were somewhat unsuccessful at the King Penguin colony, we were here to explore the landscape of Tierra del Fuego. Tierra del Fuego (“Land of Fire”, the name given to the area by Magellan because of the numerous fires from the indigenous people he saw along the coastline ), as I have previously noted, is actually an archipelago consisting of many islands. Our journey covers only the main island of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, with an area of ~28,000 square miles. The western two-thirds is part of Chile, and the eastern part is part of Argentina. The southernmost extent of the archipelago, Cape Horn, lies just north of 56 degrees south, which is roughly the same distance south of the equator as the Alaskan peninsular and Scotland are north of the equator.

The indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego the were mostly wiped out by the colonialists during the late 1800s which was spurred on by the discovery of placer gold in the streams. Today, oil extraction, sheep farming, and tourism are what drives the local economy.

Our first night was spent camping in a quaint little campground in the small sheep-farming town of Cameron (see A on the map above). Not much to report here other than to say it was pleasant.

Our drive from Cameron to our next destination wild campsite on Lago Blanco (see B on the map above) gave us a great introduction to the mainstay livelihood of the rural residents of this part of Tierra del Fuego, namely, sheep farming. You haven’t witnessed sheep herds until you visit this place. There are probably 5 to 10 thousand sheep for every human in this landscape. The grasslands are vast and the sheep appear as, what John Muir called them, “range maggots”. Sheppards on horseback and sheep in the tens of thousands. Truly a site to see if you don’t mind livestock ranching on a grand scale. However, I must say the rangeland didn’t look too overgrazed or damaged by the vast sheep herds. Here’s a couple of photos to inspire your imagination on the life of sheep farmer in Tierra del Fuego (i.e., a lonely existence, unless you like sheep as company):

Our semi-wild campsite on Lago Blanco, a beautiful freshwater lake in the interior of Tierra del Fuego, was sweet. The setting was beautiful as the lake was surrounded by mountains. We also had a nice visit to our campsite by a Patagonian fox, a threatened subspecies of the South American Grey Fox. Importantly, we had the opportunity to stretch our legs on a few-hour hike along the lakeshore. Here’s some photos:

I should also note the abundance of Guanacos – close relative of the Alpaca – along the route. Last year Nancy and believed ourselves lucky when we spotted a few of these beautiful creatures en route to Torres del Paine, but here we are inundated with Guanacos at every turn. They are in the fields by the dozens and along the roadside edges everywhere, making driving somewhat hazardous. Fortunately, they mostly seem wise to the hazards of challenging vehicles or darting across in front of the oncoming vehicles. Neverthess, we saw more than a few roadside carcasses. I should note that while we find Guanacos beautiful creatures and love seeing them, the sheep ranchers view them as pests and call them “a plague on the land” – not too surprising coming from livestock ranchers, when anything competing with resources on the land is viewed as something to do away with – argh!

Our last night destination before Ushuaia was another semi-wild campsite on Lago Fagnano located halfway between the towns of Tolhuin and Ushuaia (see C on map above). But before getting to the lake, Caitlin had us detour to a commerical natural hotspring, which turned out to be quite nice and relaxing. We ended the day at a nice campsite on Lago Fagnano that is quite popular with the local fishermen. There were dozens of fishers when we arrived and lots of cars, and it appeared that we might be in for a roudy night, but alas, they all departed at or around sunset and we had the site to ourself – nice! Here’s some pics:

OK, on to Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego National Park for some hiking at “the end of the world”. See you there!

We arrived in Punta Arenas on the 17th and headed straight to our AirBnB for needed some R&R. Here’s first night celebration for arriving without issue:

The following day, we picked up our Wicked camper, purchased supplies, and Nancy and Caitlin stolled along the waterfront and went to a very old museum on the history of the region while I dealt with picking up the camper and getting it squared away (i.e. got new tires put on to save headaches later):

And in anticipation of seeing penguins in the coming days, Caitlin got into the mood:

On the 19th, we splurged for an all-day boat cruise through the Francisco Coloane Marine Park in the southern area of the Strait of Magellan, passing Cape Froward, the southernmost point of the mainland Continent, and tidewater glaciers along the way (see map below for route).

Here are some selected photos from our boat journey:

Now for a tiny bit of history! The Strait of Magellan, of course, is named after the famed Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who was the first to attempt to circumnavigate the world in the name of Spain between 1519-1522. You may recall that he fell short of his goal, dying in a battle in the Philippines in 1591 just short of his goal, but his crew did complete the voyage. Magellan pioneered the 350-mile long navigable route through the fjords and channels between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, thereby circumventing the treacherous ocean-going route – which can have 80-foot waves at times – around the southern-most islands of Tierra del Fuego – Cape Horn. The Strait is used today by cargo and passenger ships traversing from the southern Atlantic to the southern Pacific Oceans and either avoiding the costly passage through the Panama Canal or too large to use the Canal. And did you know that Magellan also gave us the name for the Pacific Ocean.

OK, enough of humpback whales, glaciers and Magellan, let’s move on to the Grand Island on Tierra del Fuego. See you there!

PS: for the birders: one new species, Striated Caracara

Welcome back to my overland blog, only this time it ain’t about my journey through Africa. Instead, this series of posts is about a short, one-month long overland trip to Patagonia with Nancy and Caitlin beginning February 17, 2026. Yes, that’s right, Caitlin is joining Nancy and I for this overland journey. Indeed, this year’s journey back to Patagonia for Nancy and I came at the special request of Caitlin, who saw pictures from our Patagonia trip last year and decided it was a must see destination for her.

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What, you say? Patagonia two years in a row? Last year (2025), Nancy and I (minus Phil and Mary who had to cancel at the very last minute – literally the night before – due to some unexpected GOS (Getting Old Sucks) issues), overlanded along the Carretera Austral route down the Chilean coast from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas (see map below). It was an epic journey that I won’t recap here, other than to say that we were awestruck by the amazing rugged landscapes, the remoteness, the wonderful and abundant self-drive camping options, and the friendliness of the people, all of which inspired us to return to explore the Argentina side of Patagonia. And when Caitlin asked if we would take her to Patagonia, we didn’t hesitate to say YES. Not only that, but several of my blog-followers asked me to include this Patagonia trip on my blog, so, here it goes:

First, let’s clear up a little of the mystique of Patagonia. Patagonia is a familiar name for the vast geography at the southern tip of South America, but to my surprise when we first entertained the trip, I discovered that Patagonia isn’t a formal geographic entity by any political means. It is NOT a formal state or province and has no formal political boundary. Instead, it is somewhat vaguely defined as the southern portion of the continent incorporating parts of both Chile on the western side of the Andes Mountains and Argentina on the eastern side of the Andes extending from roughly the Colorado and Barrancas Rivers on the north in Argentina southward to the tip of the continent. Surprisingly, on the Chilean side there does not appear to be consensus on where exactly the northern boundary lies.

Patagonia is an extraordinarily diverse landscape, including cold, wet, dense forests on the western side of the Andes and dry prairie grasslands and deserts in the rain-shadow of the Andes on the eastern flanks of the mountains and plains extending eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. The Patagonian Andes rise upwards to 5,000-10,000 feet in most places, with the highest peaks reaching over 13,000 feet, with vast ice fields and mountain glaciers capping the highest elevations and in places extending all the way down glacially-carved valleys to the ocean. The west coast is dominated by numerous fjords and channels creating a labyrinth of isolated islands. Due to the harsh environment and complex geography, the region is relatively unpopulated (<2 million), which makes for great overlanding for us!

The name “Patagonia” is believed to have originated from Ferdinand Magellan’s 1520 passage through the region, where he encountered the native Tehuelche people, whom he called “Patagones,” possibly referring to their large feet or large shoes. The region was often subsequently referred to as the “land of giants” owing to the relatively large natives, who were much larger than the Europeans at the time.

Patagonia has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for more than 10,000 years, and possibly as much as 18,500 years. The region was colonized by Spain beginning in the 1500’s after Magellan’s exploration, but only sporadically and intermittently until the early 1800s when the region began to separate from Spain, but it wasn’t until the late 1800’s through a series of Spanish-American wars, and ultimately the treaty of 1881, that Chile and Argentina separately achieved full independence from Spain.

The contemporary economy of Argentine Patagonia is largely based on sheep farming, the extraction of oil and natural gas, and tourism, while in Chilean Patagonia the economy is dominated by fishing, salmon and muscle aquaculture, forestry, and tourism.

OK, that’s my brief overview of Patagonia, which doesn’t do it justice, but it will have to suffice lest this post get even longer. Hopefully, the pictures and descriptions to follow in subsequent posts will put a bit more flesh on the bones.

Our trip this year begins February 17 in Punta Arenas, Chile, situated on the Strait of Magellan and close to the southern tip of the mainland of South America. From there, we will take a ferry across the Strait to the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego for a week of exploration, beginning with a visit to a King Penguin colony and ending with a couple of days of hiking in Tierra del Fuego National Park outside of the bustling tourist town of Ushuaia, Argentina. Then we will make our way slowly north back to the mainland and on to Glacier National Park and several days of hiking – weather permitting – outside of the small mountain adventure towns of El Chalten and El Calafate. Lastly, we will make our way back south to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile before returning to Punta Arenas. Here’s a look at our intended route, starting in Punta Arenas (the red waypoint on the map) and heading south on a counter-clockwise loop with a few side excursions, and eventually landing back in Punta Arenas:

That’s it for my introduction to Patagonia and overview of our overland trip. See you on the trail!