Patagonia in Four Seasons
A Seasoned Traveler Remembers
Her Adventures at the Bottom of the World
By Mary Heebner | Photos by Macduff Everton
January 2, 2025
[Click to enlarge] Rio Vizcacha Basin, Patagonia, Chile; cowboy riding across wet meadow with Sierra del Cazador in background, late afternoon. | Credit: Macduff Everton
Photographer Macduff Everton and I have visited Chilean Patagonia in all seasons, which, below the Equator, turn on their heads. Sun-drenched windswept Decembers, Fall colors in March, and snowy, frigid Julys. We embarked on more than a decade of adventures exploring the mountains and valleys of La Última Esperanza (Last Hope) Province, and fjords stretching toward the Strait of Magellan. These four vignettes are from those times.
[Click to enlarge] Torres del Paine National Park: Explora Hotel Salto Chico above Salto Chico (Little Falls) on Rio Paine with Cuernos del Paine across Lago Pehoe. | Credit: Macduff Everton
Spring: Cerro Benítez
Cerro Benítez, 10 minutes north of Puerto Natales, is a geologic formation in the transition zone from plain to steppe. We scramble through brush and tufted grasses to a plateau with goblinlike nodules of conglomerate rock, dappled with lichen. The wind bears down on us, making it hard to stand, let alone move. Above Last Hope Sound, clouds draw up like huge manes of thick hair. They tower over the mountains and then pound the land in dark streaks of rain. In moments, the sky shifts from muted gray as a cold, white sun burns a hole through the cloud bank. The downpour at last dwindles to a hiss. Clouds race across the sky, and we dart about like blown rubbish. The wind howls at us to fall to our bellies, and we obey, slinking like lizards, inching to the edge of a cliff.
We peer over to see, less than 20 yards beneath us, a juvenile condor perched on a rock ledge. This windy promontory offers a god’s-eye view of Laguna Sofía and the great beyond, where soaring condors with 12-foot wingspans seem proportional.
Our descent takes us through forests of lenga, southern beech, smattered with ruby-red chaura berries, each one a burst of sweet liquid, a little gift in a parched place. Scampering downhill, the wind at our backs, makes for a playful descent.
[Click to enlarge] Cerro Benítez: View with condor overlooking Laguna Sofía, near Puerto Natales. | Credit: Macduff Everton
The following day, we drive to Laguna Figueroa on a route taken countless times by tourists toward Torres del Paine. A two-hour walk leads us first along Chorrillo Picana, Picana Creek, then up the side of a hill, where we crouch down through dwarf forests of the twisted low growing ñire, Antarctic beech. This is surely a place where los duendes, spirits of the forest, reside.
Like a slow exhalation, the sandstone rock path opens out onto a forest of tall, bare southern beech trees, each outlined in snow and wreathed in barba de viejo, old man’s beard, a chamois-green moss that only grows in pure, highly oxygenated air. Clusters of pan de indio, Indian bread, an edible loquat-looking fungus, sprout from its branches. A sudden snow dusts the valley and hills.
A hare crosses our path of vision, since not even the slightest movement in such a still and silent place escapes notice.
[Click to enlarge] Rio Vizcacha Basin, Patagonia, Chile; reflection of clouds in pond, late afternoon. | Macduff Everton
We narrow our footsteps to a worn single-file path to the top of the mountain, awed by a panorama that stretches from the glacial mountains in the fjords in the southwest, to the Paine Massif and Southern Ice Field in the northwest. A silver ribbon of a stream bisects the pocket valley below, and several little ponds mirror the sky.
When we reach the top, we lean over a tawny ledge crusted in bright orange lichen to find we are nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with another juvenile male condor, sunning himself. Condors fly so close to us that we can not only hear but also feel the thwop of their wings breaking the silence until they rise far up in the heavens, becoming black slashes against the sky, creatures of space, transcendent in the light.
[Click to enlarge] Rio Vizcacha Basin, Patagonia, Chile; horse next to seasonal lake beneath Sierra del Cazador. | Credit: Macduff Everton
Summer: Sierra de Los Baguales
Sierra de Los Baguales, Range of the Wild Horses, is an east-west chain of mountains near where Chile meets Argentina, containing amphitheater-shaped valleys with sedimentary rocks rich in fossils. Often referred to as mysterious and even sinister, it was a sacred and forbidden site for Patagonia’s Indigenous population.
We ride horses for six hours through whirlpools of dust and wind to a summit. Our horses love being worked. In the distance, shadows swim up the sides of bare mountains, washing their charcoal and russet flanks in deep purple. Spots of golden light rest on shelves of the steppe. They pick their way carefully up the knobby mountain. From moment to moment, the sky is a pearl, a smooth stone, a downpour.
I suddenly realize: I’m on the top of the mountain, at the bottom of the world, and what is beneath my feet? The past — traces of human artifact, fossils, layers of soil, mineral, and bone. Paintings start to form in my mind. We stop at an ancient riverbed crammed with fossilized seashell and bone. The riverbank once marked the edge of a grassy meadow encircled by a leafy forest. Now, only shreds of petrified wood remain, splayed around the base of phantom trees. Pick-up-sticks in a fan-pattern, all grays and ochres.
Like a buried manuscript of a forgotten past, a fossil is nothing short of a miracle. Most organisms live and die without leaving a trace of their existence — but sometimes, life rests between strata at just the right moment, with just the right conditions, and its delicate features are preserved as stone. Drawings also are fleeting. A thought caught on paper at a moment in time, sometimes buried beneath layers of pigment — yet the original marks persist. Even an erasure leaves traces of the old marks — a pentimento that remains an integral part of the clues, layers, the map of where we are, of who we are, in this place, now.
[Click to enlarge] Sierra Baguales, Patagonia, Chile; riders exploring Patagonia. | Credit: Macduff Everton
Autumn: Torres Del Paine
Paine means “blue” in the language of the indigenous Aónik’enk group of the Tehuelche, and gives its name to mountains, a river, and one of the world’s most famous national parks. In 1879, the Scottish explorer, hunter, and adventurer Lady Florence Dixie, absurdly and misogynistically referred to as a “tourist,” was the first European hunter, tracker, and adventurer to explore the mountains. She called them Cleopatra’s Needles.
The Park is a jewel within a province that encompasses a diversity of ecosystems, from dense forest to grassy steppes, glaciers, rivers, and lakes. Berries grow everywhere, including the thorny califate. Locals say if you eat its sweet fruit, you will doubtless return to Patagonia.
In spring, the mata negra blossoms as fragrantly as honey, while at the end of its cycle in autumn, the edible cenicero del diablo mushroom bursts its white bulb and dispenses its spores, leaving bronze-colored cups, as thin-walled as Japanese porcelain, to fill with rainwater.
Declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1978, Torres del Paine National Park is one of the most remote and unspoiled places on the planet, noted for the Cuernos (horns) and Torres, the landmark towers formed from volcanic granite and sedimentary layers over millions of years, sculpted through at least 10 periods of glaciation, into rugged, emblematic profiles.
[Click to enlarge] Patagonia, Chile; Torres del Paine National Park. | Credit: Macduff Everton
The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is a vestige of the last Ice Age, when ice blanketed Patagonia. Today, it is the second largest ice field in the world, but it too, like the poles, is actively retreating. Grey Glacier is one of dozens of glaciers born from this mother of ice. When moist air currents from the Pacific Ocean meet the frigid air rising from the ice, clouds form in an instant, and wind shreds them like rags flung against the mountain peaks.
We watch weather being born daily: sudden snowstorms, radiant sunshine, rain, and wind. At the end of a tongue of land, the blunt face of Grey Glacier towers above us, staggering, immense, its face scarred with gashes of the deepest ultramarine blue. A glint of blue from a calving glacier may be the only color in a cloud-veiled vista.
Ice is a filter — the thicker the ice, the bluer its color. As the incident light penetrates layers of ice, the rest of the spectral red and yellow hues fall away; only hues of blue and green make it through. Blue blossoms on water float by like ghosts in the night. Icebergs calve and strain with knuckle-cracking sounds, as if they were alive. They are alive. I’m mesmerized by the tinkle-pop music of ice bits melting in the river, when suddenly there is a crash and tearing rasp as a small knob of ice thunders into the sea. At sunset, a milky purple mist covers Cuernos del Paine, a fortress of rock that appears to covet light while cradling cold. Never have pastel shades of pink and blue appeared so foreboding.
[Click to enlarge] Isla Virtudes, Ultima Esperanza, Chile: sea urchin divers anchored off Isla Virtudes. | Credit: Macduff Everton
Winter: The Fjords
Light snow flurries on a winter afternoon. We are greeted by Roberto, who’s standing with his first mate, Enrique, and we all board his small, seaworthy boat. The hold below used for fish has planks on which we lay our sleeping bags. We note a shower head above the toilet in the small head and decide showering is not an option. Central heating is a wood burning stove, on this wood-clad vessel.
As we leave Natales, white-breasted cormorants, tinged pink in early morning light, take flight using Last Hope Sound as a runway, smacking their shadows with their wings on this windless wintery day. Six hours later, after dining on fresh mussels we bought from a passing ship, the sun sinks behind Isla Hunter, and we spend our first night in a sheltered cove in Victoria Bay.
The following day, as we arrive at Isla Virtudes at sunset, a cotillion of albatross dips their bladelike wings, reel in a circle, then soar across the bow. In these frigid waters, the centolla is the king of crabs; sea urchins ring the rocks; hake reside in the depths; sea lions, dolphins, and penguins leap, dive, and hunt; and whales breech and blow. On a map, there are so many islets, some of them yet unnamed, that it appears as if a loaded paintbrush spattered them into being. Many, through this labyrinth of channels, though untenanted of mammals, host a variety of bird and insect life that thrives amid springs and waterfalls. Some florae, such as the cycad, date to the age of the dinosaur. Endangered guaitecas cypress, the tepú, and other moisture-loving plants and mosses flourish. Each lush patch is its own primordial universe.
Roberto Muñoz, our captain, is a fisherman born in Puerto Cisnes in Aysén, the region north of Magallanes. Seventeen years of fishing out of Puerto Natales weights his 30-some years with an accumulative knowledge and respect for the waters. Roberto navigates around small islets and shallows, carefully paying attention to the tides and reading the currents, while simultaneously translating the unseen topography beneath us as if it were braille. Weather can turn in an instant. More than half of his dozen friends who also came to fish the fjords died within the first six years. Even the most freedom-seeking sea dog is at heart a realist. Romantics go off to sea, but only the realists return.
Morning breaks as a streak of cadmium yellow smears the horizon, filling in the crevices between the jagged profile of black islands and gray clouds. We pull anchor and soon arrive at the fishing grounds. Enrique sets several long lines in the deep channel, each marked by a flagged float. He baits sardines onto hooks that stud the line at yard-and-a-half intervals, carping that more than half would doubtless be eaten by clever fish and sea lions. He tosses a 300-yard weighted line overboard — the first 200 yards lead line and the final 100 with baited hooks — and mutters something to himself, perhaps a prayer.
After a few hours, anticipation grows, as Enrique yanks up the lead line with a rapid waist-twisting motion that segues to the first series of hooks. A dozen pull up empty, but then he hoists a merluza as long as my arm onto the deck, followed by several more empties, and then more fish, including one smaller merluza tres aletas. After a long hour’s labor without pause, the men’s reward was 20 large hake and a few smaller fish. A fisherman’s life is, by necessity, circumspect, practical, yet buoyed by hope.
[Click to enlarge] Patagonia, Chile; Sierra Dorotea. | Credit: Macduff Everton
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