A Patagonian Christmas story
A Patagonian Christmas story
Giving to and getting back from the environment in one of Chile's little-touched splendors.
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(John Maxwell Hamilton is a former foreign correspondent and the Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor in Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and a Global Fellow in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His most recent book, “Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Government Propaganda,” won the Goldsmith Prize.)
REFUGIO PRIMITIVO, Chile — This is a Christmas story. It is about the gifts the planet gives us and what we can give back.
The setting is north Patagonia, which receives less attention than the southern region, but shouldn’t.
Northern Patagonia is an environmentalist’s dream. At the center is Todos los Santos, a sprawling turquoise-hued lake that measures about 20 miles at its widest part. The Rio Blanco pours water into the lake on its east side. The Petrohué Falls at the west end discharges the water at such a great rate that the lake empties five or six times a year. You can jump in the lake with your mouth open,” famed Chilean photographer Guy Wenborne told me. “It’s that clean.”
Very little of the lakeshore is developed. There is one road in. Vast forests dominate, topped off by volcanic mountains with year-round snow. Chile’s first national park, Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, is here. Not surprisingly, the area has been likened to Switzerland.
I have always enjoyed Chile’s panoramas. A couple of weeks ago I returned to see the Lake District, as it is called, through the eyes of Franz Schirmer, who is, in fact, of Swiss extraction. His forebears — beginning with great grandfather Ricardo Roth – brought tourism to the area more than a century ago. Schirmer owns one of the family hotels, at Petrohué, on the east side of the lake.
Petrohué, which is reached by the one uninterrupted road, calls itself a village. This is a wild exaggeration. The only locals I saw worked in Schirmer’s lodge. Many are temporary or live elsewhere.
I was particularly interested in seeing Vuriloche Pass, a precolonial thoroughfare that runs over the Andes to modern Argentina. The indigenous Poya people kept the existence of the path secret from the Spanish for quite a long time. Once the colonists learned of it, they lost interest. The pass did not lead to an El Dorado of glittering gold and silver as they hoped. The Mapuche people in Argentina killed the head of the first expedition, a Jesuit priest.
Franz arranged for us to go by horse and foot through the pass. In the early 20th century, some colonizers built farms on the few flat areas and burned down large patches of forest with the prospect of doing more development. But they did not stay. The population, which had been in double digits, is now down to two bachelors who live rent-free on farms they watch over for the Schirmer family.
The farms are quaint in their gray, weather-battered state. And a bit they are a bit forlorn. There is no hope they will become highly functioning. Farmers can grow potatoes and raise a few sheep and cattle. But the farms are too remote to transport meat or agricultural produce efficiently. The two men in the pass, Schirmer said, “live back in time.”
The real El Dorado of the Vuriloche Pass is its natural beauty. The parts of the forest that were burned have come back as towering evergreen coihue, which are native to Patagonia and poke high in the sky. And there are still great swaths of untouched primary forest filled with alerce trees, which also are native. These are among the largest species in the world and among the oldest. Some trees are thought to be 4,500 years of age.
Rivers run with clear, cold water. Wild flowers dot the landscape. The backdrop for this is the tallest volcano in the region at 3,491 meters. Tronador (Spanish for thunderer) reminded me of the mesmerizing wall-sized photograph behind the drug store soda fountain I frequented as a child in suburban Chicago. It kindled dreams of foreign travel.
I was equally mesmerized when we reached this spot, identified on a map as Refugio Primitivo. From our hut, I gazed across the valley at an ice-capped spur of Tronador. Over the millennia pieces of the glacier fell into the valley below and since then have become covered with rock and dirt. The brown spot misleadingly looks as though it had been strip mined, but the rest of the scene is lovely. It is almost like a miracle to see the melting glacier water pour willy-nilly out of the rocks. Here is the beginning of the Rio Blanco, which feeds into Todos los Santos. The minerals in this glacier milk give the lake its turquoise color.
While we had dinner, we could hear small avalanches rumble across the valley. Our humble hut, with its dirt floor and odd-swinging door, kept as cozy as the rain came down during the night.
So, that’s the “getting” part of this Christmas story, the part about the natural gifts the planet lavishes on us. Now comes the part about giving back.
Franz Schirmer grew up in this region. After university study he left for a good job in a bank in Berne, Switzerland. He stayed half a dozen years. The bank offered comfortable opportunities for advancement and a large bank account of his own. But Schirmer came back to Todos los Santos when his grandmother asked him to take over the lodge at Petrohué.
Family ties were strong, and so was his love of the wild outdoors. After all, here was a man who made a childhood pet out of a puma. A large, deep puma paw print we saw in the mud on a riverbank made plain that these cats can reach lengths of 10 to 12 feet.
Schirmer’s goal is to put Vuriloche Pass on the map while at the same time saving it. He wants to make the pass more accessible while avoiding the self-defeating pitfall of ecotourism: that is, making it so successful that the visitors trample what they are supposed to celebrate. He has no interest in concession stands, tennis courts, and pool side bars, let alone five-star hotels.
Schirmer does see value in a few more people living in the valley to support tourism and make a good living for themselves. They could reside on the old farms, but instead of relying on agriculture they could allow the forest to take over some of the pastures.
Schirmer is making two kinds of investments in Vuriloche Pass. He is putting in his money and his time. He recently completed a modern hut for hikers and another is underway further into the pass. He wants to improve trails. “Bridges,” he told me, “we can be actually one of the top 10 trekking sites in the world.”
Schirmer would be happy to have help from investors and philanthropists who shared his vision. But after planning this for many years, he is satisfied to do the work himself, so far as he can.
Schirmer realizes that no matter what he does, Vuriloche Pass cannot escape the consequences of global warming. Tronador’s glaciers once reached as far as Puerto Montt, which is nearly 100 kilometers away. Now it has shrunk to a small fraction of what it was, just as glaciers everywhere are melting away. We were unable to go beyond Refugio Primitivo. A freak early summer snowstorm blocked the way to the border with Argentina. On our last night in the pass, it snowed again in the mountains, which was beautiful but also a sign — as if we need another one — how global weather patterns are out of whack.
Notwithstanding the fast-blinking warning signs about our warming climate, Schirmer has a deep faith that saving environments like Vuriloche will benefit people not only by providing an opportunity to enjoy nature, but in showing how they can live in harmony with it. Perhaps it is too much to think, as he does, that citizens of the world will have to adapt to this as a lifestyle.
But even cynical old journalists like me recognize that his work is a worthy gift in return for what the world gives us.
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Read more from Jack Hamilton:
How H.G. Wells predicted climate change, income inequality and the death of knowledge
The New Wilderness tests whether man and nature can co-exist
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