“In the wintertime it can get pretty lonely,” said Martín, a young caretaker at Piltriquitrón shelter. “Sometimes a week will go by with no climbers, nobody, and you have to start climbing up and down just to do something.”

The two of us stood on the deck of the shelter, each with binoculars, glassing the cordilleran peaks across the valley. It was fall, and the Lenga forests were turning red below the permanent snowfields and glaciers on Cerro Lindo and Cerro Hielo Azul.

“You ever climbed them?” I asked.

His scraggly beard stretched into a smile. “Yes,” he said, adding that he and his crew had snowboarded down. I whistled and said, “You have it made.”

He laughed. But it was true: below a spring were two cabins, each with solar panels, woodstoves, stocked kitchens, and even a microbrewery. They had climbing gear, snowboards/skis, a horse, two dogs, and a cat with a litter of kittens.

For the other caretaker, Bárbara, this didn’t seem to be enough, however. Like Martín, she was in her mid 20s, with a lean, muscular body that reflected year-round living in the mountains. Unlike him however, she sulked around the shelter, staying clear of the visitors (a couple from Buenos Aires, a stout Swiss woman, and a young man and woman from the US), and seemed irritated when I ordered a coffee. I asked her the same question I’d asked Martín, “how is it living up here?”

“Fine,” she said, putting the kettle on the stove, “But it’s been getting too crowded.”

I went back outside and joined my wife Laura on a split-log bench overlooking El Bolsón. Without knowing it, Bárbara had hit on the main theme of our trip here in Northern Patagonia. For the last four weeks, we’d been traveling with Laura’s father, Adalberto, who had lived here as a child, once exploring the cordillera on horseback with his father. While we were seeing these places for the first time, he was seeing them through the lenses of his memory—before the River Limay had been dammed, for example, or private property signs had been posted along its banks—and describing them as such. In response, I’d mention the suburban sprawl that had completely consumed the farmland and forests of my hometown in Marietta, Georgia. It was the same story everywhere: the land was disappearing, and most people didn’t see it, or saw it and didn’t care.

I handed Laura the binoculars, pointing out Mount Tronador some 120 km to the north. We’d passed it—almost like a gateway to Patagonia—at the beginning of our trip. After a hot two-day drive over the pampa from Buenos Aires, we crossed a bridge above the Limay river, 50 meters below its mouth at Lago Nahuel Huapi. There was a lone fly-fisherman, waist-deep in the current, casting long, graceful loops over the water. Behind him (or her?) were miles of whitecapped lake, then the city of Bariloche, its streets and buildings thrown like a net onto the mountainsides, and finally, Tronador, with snowy flanks and peak disappearing in the evening clouds. As traffic raced across the bridge, a string of taillights blazing towards Bariloche, this lone figure seemed like part of the landscape itself. It reminded me of surfing Ocean Beach, San Francisco, or kayaking through downtown Boulder: a search for wilderness in the midst of the city.  Read More...