Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia by Nancy Pfeiffer

Author:Nancy Pfeiffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRAVEL -- Essays and Travelogues
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Chacabuco Valley had never been forested or burned. Grassland was the natural state of the open steppe. At the far end of this gigantic valley, near the Tamango Reserve, I had marched out of the lenga forest into the open sky. Soon, I would be back in the safety and comfort of mature lenga forest.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that this land would be purchased with the intent of linking the Tamango Reserve to the south and Jeinemeni Reserve to the north in order to create a 722,000-acre national park. With a new national park the size of Yosemite, a bridge for two, now separate, populations of huemul was also in the making.

The next afternoon was hot and calm. Thankfully we traveled in the shade of mighty lenga trees. Just over the pass we got our first introduction to what was to become the bane of our existence. Tabanos, a gigantic version of the horsefly, swarmed around us, taking huge chunks of flesh from any unprotected spot.

Tired of dragging Chucao, I decided to ride him and use Tamango as pilchero. Tamango knew the drill and simply followed along without the rope. I was congratulating myself for figuring this system out when we came across a dried-up lake. Tamango suddenly dropped to his knees. A dust bath was just what he needed to rid himself, if only temporarily, of those horrid, biting tabanos. He lowered himself to the dirt, and before I could turn around and gallop back yelling and waving, he was fully over onto his back, rolling on our gear.

As I hammered smashed cooking pots back into a usable shape, I remembered a man I had seen at a trailhead. He had gently lifted two cardboard boxes from his pilchero, and unwrapped a hundred eggs, each carefully nestled in a piece of newspaper, not one of them broken.

Just in time, Lago Jeinemeni, clean, blue, and sparkling in the hot afternoon sun, came into view. Saddles stripped, the three of us waded into the cool, sweet water.

Coming out of the mountains and dropping into the desert, I saw the first people I had seen in days. Two English tourists sat beside the road, the woman waving so frantically, I thought she was hurt.

“Lorry!” she hollered.

In the distance, a truck was approaching. I wondered if she was going to throw herself in front of the truck in her desperation to get out of there.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They will stop.”

And they did. Torrie the “lorry” driver offered them a ride on top of his load of firewood.

“There is a nice place to camp with water and grass just ahead,” he told me. “Some workers are building a puesto, just stop by.”

I was delighted to hear it. I was afraid I had passed the last green grass and water for a long, long way.

The puesto José and Francisco were building was made of adobe. Trees are rare here. Dirt is abundant. Adobe is cool in summer and warm in winter, and it doesn’t rain enough in a hundred years to erode the bricks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.