Loving Place and People in Patagonia A poem hanging in the lodge at Chile’s Patagonia National Park asks readers to ‘feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things’. This was, and remains, the task of eleven Rhodes Scholars who spent early April backpacking through the 640,000 acres of glacier, grassland, and forest that comprise Chile’s newest national park, in the country’s Aysén region. Hannah Carrese (Colorado & St Antony’s 2017) takes up the story.
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ur trip was conceived by Ben Wilcox (Illinois & Exeter 2013) and Tom Barron (Colorado & Balliol 1974). Ben planned the trip and, with Mauro Inastroza, served as our guide. Tom covered the cost of our ten days in Patagonia. The trip was in this sense a work of philanthropy and philtopy, love of people and love of land. It was a product of these loves in another sense too: the national park we hiked through was donated to Chile by Kris McDivitt and Doug Tompkins, known for their work with the outdoor companies Patagonia and North Face. They began conserving land in Patagonia in the belief that there isn’t enough beauty in the world, and that ‘re-wilding’ this land was good for this place, for its people, for all people. We came to Patagonia during a period of transition. It was the cusp of fall. We spent a day hiking, snow dropping onto our packs, past intermittent rainbows, and on to lengas (Chilean beeches), already turning a profound red. The next morning, we marvelled as six inches of snow melted underfoot and we looked up into a surprising bluebird sky. Patagonia Park was itself in transition. We began our hike the day after it officially became a national park, drawing together a private park owned by the
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Tompkinses, and two reserves owned by the Chilean government. The donation by the Tompkinses forms the cornerstone of a new conservation project that will establish a ‘Route of Parks’ stretching 1,000 miles from north to south in Chilean Patagonia. This means Aysén, too, is in transition: it is becoming a region of protected wildernesses rather than ranches, its economy sustained by visitors like us rather than sheep. In the town of Cochrane, on the southwestern edge of the park, we spoke with environmental educators, gauchos turned wilderness-guides, antidam activists, business owners, and a communist garlic vendor about different ways of attending to the land. How can the old gaucho, or cowboy, knowledge of the region be made relevant in the new park? The land comprising Patagonia Park is rife with transitions, present and past. We hiked west from glacierblue Lake Jeinimeini up braided streams running from the high peaks and then turned south to reach the swept grassland of the Chacabuco Valley and the lenga forests of the Tamango Reserve. Descending into the Chacabuco Valley, we walked through land long ago carved into a U by a glacier and then cut to a V by the Avilés River. It was also a period of transition for us, between