Incognito Patagonia

By Cristian Donoso

This is the story of a journey exploring the hidden domains of West Patagonia, one of the most hostile and unknown regions in the world. Threatened by the carcinogenic predation of the human species, this indomitable land, one of the last untouched bastions on planet Earth, cries out to get worldwide attention for the conservation of its lands and waters under the status of World Biosphere Reserve.

Piecing together the fragments of a famous shipwreck

We were getting ready for our fifth trip to the archipelago of Guayaneco, to search for the exact site where the British frigate HMS Wager shipwrecked in 1741, misfortune that gave birth to one of the most astonishing sagas in the history of navigation, and that between its survivors was John Byron, a 19-year-old midshipman that would soon become commander of the 15th circumnavigation of the planet, and grandfather of the famous poet, Lord Byron.

In 2006 we had already dived down to the last corner of the breakers of the Northeast of Wager Island, one of the largest islands of the archipelago, finding no sign of the ship. This submarine exploration ended dramatically with a furious storm that seized one of our kayaks with everything in it, including our camp and a valuable metal detector. But new clues from files in Seville, Madrid, and London, and a conversation with some indigenous men from Puerto Edén that spoke to us about two cannons that they had seen while they where canoeing in the area of the wreck more than half a century ago, drove us to retake the search on those desolate coasts of West Patagonia.

From Santiago, Chile, we traveled with Juan Pablo Ortega more than 2500 km (1553mi) down to the mouth of the Baker River, which reaches the ocean by opening its path between the two largest continental ice fields in Patagonia, surpassed in size only by those in Antarctica and Greenland.

Traveling on a dangerous highway of rubble and mud that serpents its way between wild and hazy mountains, we finally arrived at the Baker’s delta, where Caleta Tortel is located, a village of 400 inhabitants impregnated with the fragrance of cypresses and that hangs from a crag where no room is left for streets, only for pedestrian crossways.

That is where our journey would begin. But first, we would have to spend some days dealing with the naval bureaucracy that did not want to authorize us to set sail in our kayaks and to navigate in a self-sufficient manner. Having taken care of this first obstacle, that at times seemed to be more troublesome than the worst storm; we rushed anxiously paddling with all our strength in search of the oceanic breakers where the Wager had succumbed.

Our course to the ocean was an extensive and narrow passage of labyrinthine channels with powerful tidal currents and a grand setting of daring precipices full of waterfalls and proud forests attached to the slope. Midway, awaited the Messier channel, a great abyss that runs from north to south, dividing these archipelagos into two sections with very diverse climates, being it noticeably more hostile towards the west.

The sea of freshwater where we were navigating, dyed turquoise from the two rivers with the largest average discharge in Chile, the Baker and Pascua, diluted as we approached the brackish and abysmal waters of the Messier. The furious appearance of the north entrance of this channel, that on other occasions had forced us to wait several days to cross it, now presented itself suspiciously kind.

Distrustful, we entered without losing any time, raving with the memory of the drastic changes that had surprised us before on other extensive crossings, and with the vertical kilometer that separated us from the sea bed and its mysterious predators. Just as we had feared, towards the end of the crossing rose a powerful front wind, forcing us to paddle vigorously to advance meter by meter.

Leaving the Messier behind, we entered a narrow passageway, where we raised our sails and went half surfing half flying over the waves at an impressive speed, holding on to our paddles and soaked in adrenaline, until we struck upon the tens of ghostly islets that announced the entrance to the Fallos channel, last country of the last canoers of the end of the world, and our gate out to the Pacific Ocean. Towards the end of the day, we stayed on a beach of white sands just in front of Alacrán Island, where half a century ago died the man who would later become the last leader of the ancestral inhabitants of these regions, a group of canoeist nomads that were for a long time were considered to be the most primitive humans on the planet.

We finally got out to the Pacific past a narrowing between two islands, crossing long and mountainous waves that hid the horizon as we submerged in their grooves. This experience was quite intimidating and made us feel like a pair of arrogant dots as we peaked on their backs. At dawn, as we were disembarking, a wave caught us in its eddy and pushed us out of its domains. We were over the southeast isthmus of Byron Island. There, we established our base camp and rushed through the jungle and mud to cross the island to its opposite end, in front of Medora Island, site that past canoers had frequently attended for millenniums in search of pyrite to start their fire, as they stroke it against the quartz so abundant in all the channels of Patagonia. This was the mythic island of fire, a tiny crag severely sloped and located in one of the most extreme and exposed zones of the archipelagos. In front of Medora, at the end of the beach, was the place of the cannons where we had been led to by the people of Puerto Edén. The story indicated that time had stuck the cannons to rocks to which they seemed a part of, and that they were only visible during low tide. After a brief search, we returned unsuccessful to our camp. On our way we found a leopard seal, alone, that showed us how far it could swim from its Antarctic home, and what an excellent set of teeth let it occupy the place of one of the most ferocious predators of the sea.

On the next day we set sail from that beach, cutting the waves that followed and elevated us over their walls of water, like a knife. Back at the labyrinth, we decided to explore the east coast of Byron Island, in search of clues of past canoers, the same ones that had rescued Byron and had taken him to the island of Chiloé, the southernmost of European possessions of the 18th century.

Towards the afternoon, we came across a surprising find. Next to the mouth of a river, on top of a beach of peat, we found the ruins of a stone corral that had probably been built by the same rescuers of the Wager’s castaways. John Byron himself had given us some clues about the use this could have had by writing that one of the methods employed by past canoers to catch fish consisted in having their dogs, conveniently trained, hem in the fish at the corner of a pond or lagoon, where the savages would them remove them with no difficulty. This archeological find, unprecedented in this zone of archipelagos, raised such an interest in the scientific community, that little after communicating it in our Page of Pursuit online, a scientific mission was organized to study it in depth.

From that ancient construction, and maybe just like the old Patagonian tribe that rescued Byron had done centuries ago, we crossed to the south of Wager Island coasting it to the north under the wing of its overflowing jungle, in search of what remained of the hull of a wooden ship found a few months before by the Scientific Exploration Society in Dover. Looking at the setting of that find, we found ourselves appalled by the damage perpetrated by this British expedition over such a fragile ecosystem, one of the most untouched in the world that runs as a candidate before UNESCO to become a World Biosphere Reserve. The felling of trees to build protection against the wind and to clean the ground where a very large tent was mounted, in addition to the trash abandoned, was a depressing sight. The fragment was located in the basin of a small river, some 30m (98ft) from the shore, and in it could be appreciated part of the ribs and the skin of a wooden ship. Even though a posterior sample analysis had concluded that they were built with evergreen oak, an endemic species from the north of Europe that dated back to the 18th century, for us its identification as the HMS Wager was not conclusive, given the numerous shipwrecks at that time in those stormy waters. Our goal, therefore, was to find the cannons and the iron ballast, irrefutable proof of the identity of the ruins and the exact site where the shipwreck occurred. To find them, we dived in the coast immediate to the English find, doing a careful sweeping of the seabed that concluded with no success after a long exploration that left us cold and extenuated. We had better luck on the coast, finding other ribs, an old wooden pulley, forged iron nails, and a carved and buried cypress rod, which we believe could have been part of the cross raised in 1766 by the Jesuit José García, during the first official mass given in these latitudes.

Putting and end to this search, but with the intention of retaking it in the future, we paddled south, finishing the circumnavigation of Wager Island and returning to our rhythm of long distance navigation, now with a very different exploratory objective.

The disappearance of a lake in the domains of the “huemul”

From the violent oceanic coast of Guayaneco, we took the East side of the Messier Channel, navigating relentless on that labyrinth in direction to the southwest, with our destination the home of the largest colony of “huemul” (Hippocamelus bisulus) that has been discovered. The “huemul” is a deer endemic to the south cone of South America, declared an endangered species, and the continental valleys to the east of these southern archipelagos are one its last shelters. But that zone had another characteristic that brought our interest upon it. In it a great lake had suddenly disappeared some months before, drawing the attention of the press worldwide. We wanted to explore the north area of this empty basin that until then had only been observed from the air. Following a complex network of channels, where we had some serious problems setting up our camps, we finally reached the overwhelming front of glacier Bernardo, one of the 16 that we would visit during the expedition. Before even reaching the bottom the Bernardo fiord we saw some beige dots moving along the coast. As we approached them we began to see clearly that they were “huemul”, and in large numbers. After disembarking and now very close to them, we realized something else. They were not afraid of us. On the contrary, we were able to get almost close enough to touch them. Being in between these beautiful animals, docile and wild, in a setting of snowy mountains colored in red by the last light of dusk, and with the magnificent Bernardo glacier dominating in the background, was a sublime experience. Something about it made us recall Eden, or perhaps the last fragment of a perfect world that seems to be extinguishing irreversibly.

Farther away from the glacier was the lake that had disappeared. After a brief inspection of the area we saw that it was easier to access it through another fiord, the Témpano, located more to the south. Then came two days of navigation through a furious gale, with snowfalls, hail, and a short bow wave that made or advancing slow and exhausting. At the end of the second day we made it to the front of the Témpano glacier, after a long nocturnal navigation and 15 hours of nonstop paddling. From there, we began an exploration that took us through forests, swamps, and mountains, where there were also “huemul”. Towards the end of the way, we climbed up a moraine and suddenly stumbled upon an immense empty basin with enormous ice floes spread out like stranded ships. It left us appalled, certainly another site that seemed surreal, like taken from another world. Through the cliffs that flanked that gigantic ice container, we found a very fast route that took us to the north side of the extinct lake, an area never visited before. In that place we found a large valley that connected with the Bernardo fiord, thus stating the possibility of the communities of “huemul” in Témpano and Bernardo forming actually one large community. Leaving behind the lost lake and the Témpano fiord, we went south on the Messier channel, and with the help of our sails and a powerful north wind that would soon turn into a terrible storm, we reached the tiny indigenous village of Puerto Edén, where the descendents of the last canoers of West Patagonia live. There, Mario Sepúlveda was waiting for us. With him we would take on an expedition to the Patagonian ice peaks. In 23 days we had covered more than 600km. But, as you will see, this was just the beginning.

The unexplored world behind a dike of ice

Lake Greve and its surroundings had been kept as one of the last great unexplored areas of South America. Contained in a walled granite basin, bordered by a cool jungle on occasions denser than the densest area in the Amazons, and with seven glacial tongues pouring over its waters, between them the largest glacier in South America, Lake Greve seemed for the imagination an inaccessible universe. Our expedition pursued not only to reach its virgin waters, but to cross it from its opposite sides, separated by more than 50km (31mi), something that many thought would be an impossible challenge due to its dense layer of icebergs that formed a very well consolidated ice field, either for its saturation, freezing of intermediate waters, or mainly, from the drive from the wind. To these difficulties must be added the infamous climatic adversity of the region.

Our intention was to carry out the traverse in a completely self-sufficient manner, without any previous deposits of food or gear, or the support of an external vessel. The essential objective was not to intervene with the landscape, by not abandoning equipment nor leaving any kind of trace behind.

We set sail from Puerto Edén with Mario Sepúlveda, and after navigating near 110km (68mi) on the border of the Exmouth promontory, where we were stuck many days waiting for the end of a storm, we remounted our quarter of a ton of gear up to the Caupolicán or Capitán Plateau, in Campos de Hielo Sur (South Ice Fields), an enormous cold plain that elevated over 1400m (4593ft) of altitude from the coast where we had disembarked, in the interior of the Exmouth fiord, and that was the great barrier that we had to overcome in order to reach lake Greve, our main objective of exploration.

In order to be able to remount the plateau from the ocean, we had to go across marshy jungles, and help ourselves with ropes and anchorages, lift our kayaks on a very steep slope of peat and staggered walls, always under the ferocious scourge of the rain or the wind. One time, on the ice plateau, we advanced nearly 40km (25mi) to the north, on an area not extent of danger and hidden crevices, facing a powerful blizzard from the northeast that dragged our kayaks like sleds. We moved through a very dense mist, that confused itself with the white snow, and that made us feel we were traveling in an abstract and homogeneous place, where there was no time or space. It was difficult to keep our direction walking inside that ping pong ball, but guided with our GPS we were able to get to the end of the plateau, where rose the imposing chain of mountains that separated us from Lake Greve, chain that until then had kept free of all human incursion. Here is where our exploration began.

We entered those mountains to a plateau between two peaks, through which we later descended between the cracks of a hanging glacier, with a visibility of less than 20m (66ft). Crossing a ridge and having made the first ascent of a mountain with no name, we hung down a wall of granite covered in snow, of 600m (1969ft) from the surface, very exposed to avalanches. On the descent we successively built terraces with our shovels, where we would secure ourselves and then the kayaks. On the last stretch, an absolutely dark night fell upon us, with snowfalls and very strong winds, in which we were not able to see clearly the direction in which we were heading, and the operations, that did not allow for any mistakes, became particularly difficult to execute.

On the base of the wall we were 500m (1640ft) over Lake Greve, in the cold jungle and on the border of a semi-frozen lagoon, where the ice layer was not thick enough to walk on it, nor thin enough to navigate it. Crossing the bank of that 700m (2296ft) long lagoon with its large rocks and chaos of branches took us almost eight hours of hard work that concluded in various involuntary dives, not at all pleasant. The last stretch to get to the lake consisted on a staggered slope of granite walls, covered in a very compact jungle, on which we had to hang down, passing the kayaks between gigantic oaks that were attached to the vertical granite tangling their roots with the others forming a solid community network of roots that held them all in place.

Passing on the side of one of the arms of the Brüggen Glacier, we finally went back to navigating, but this time sinking our paddles in completely virgin waters. In a spontaneous gesture of victory, we raised our paddles to the sky. We were the first humans to reach this hidden world in the Patagonian Andes.

We began paddling on Greve’s icy waters, pushing ourselves to cross the 50 km (31ft) that separated us from the impressive waterfalls that drain it. Luck allowed us to count on two days with practically no wind, which made navigation much easier. Nevertheless, in some zones, we had to overcome the icy path having to occasionally mount the icebergs. During this navigation we contemplated with ecstasy the seven glaciers that empty out over this immense 240km (149mi) squared ice deposit, seeing some colossal icebergs not at all usual of Patagonia. We also found semi-submerged forests and an unknown population of “huemul”. All of which made of this unreached place one of the most beautiful I had ever seen in my life.

But the hard work did not end here. On the contrary, we still had the most difficult part ahead, which was to cross the Kawashkar valley up to the birth of the river on which we would return to the ocean. That crossing would leave us very clear why the Greve had been kept unexplored. What came next was an extremely hard portaging through the valleys and neighboring mountains, submitted to a tireless rain, through which we advanced on average less than 1km (0.6mi) each day, moving in between a dense and tangled vegetation, sometimes so dense that it would block our way like a wall, and often made us walk various meters over the ground, trying to stabilize ourselves on a chaos of knocked down logs, covered in moss and ferns that made the holes between them invisible. We also had to shift through swamps and on very slippery granite walls, in which’s bases awaited some deadly pools. Having overcome this formidable barrier, we reached a lagoon that had recently formed by the retreat of the Guacolda Glacier. The lagoon was fed by the waters of Lake Greve that reached here through under this glacier in the shape of an underground river. After sailing its labyrinth of icebergs we rushed to the Témpano Fiord on the Kawashkar River, following carefully its hidden rapids. Once in the ocean, we sailed Angostura Inglesa (English Narrowing) against the wind and tide, to return to the tiny wooden dock in Puerto Edén from where we had set sail 43 days earlier.

Journey to the center of the marble glaciers

After quickly recovering some of our lost bodyweight, by the time that we were loading the kayaks with the necessary gear for the next challenge, we set sail from Puerto Edén, heading to the southern archipelagos, this time with the company of the Catalonian Speleologist Roger Rovira. After our incursion in Guayaneco, that now seemed so distant, we would again reach the oceanic coast, only now we would go to one of the most stormy places in the planet, the west coast of the island of Madre de Dios, located over the 50˚ latitude south, known as the “wailing 50s” in nautical slang, for the powerful winds that show up in the area, often over 90 knots.

Our first goal was to reach the mouth of the entrance of the Barros Luco fiord, which opens from the inside of the island of Madre de Dios to the ocean. We knew this would be no easy task. A couple of years before, the Centre-Terre had made seven unsuccessful attempts to enter that fiord from the ocean, using large pneumatic boats with powerful outboard motors. Our strategy would be to reach that fiord following a different route, which we guessed might have been the same that was used by past canoers to access that dangerous oceanic coast. The access of the canoers to that coast had been tested by a French expedition when they discovered a cave with stony paintings in a cape of Madre de Dios that looks to the Pacific, leaving the question open as to how could that site have been reached by such a fragile water-craft as the kawashkar canoe.

Along with that objective we also intended to remount the karst located immediately to the north of the Barros Luco fiord, in an area that had never before received the incursion of any expedition. We hoped to discover caves, photograph them, and survey stalagmites to be used to support the study of past climates in Patagonia.

That way, from Puerto Edén we passed progressively from more stretch and secure channels to ones more open and exposed. Towards the end awaited the famous Trinidad Channel, which we thought would be our greatest difficulty. We were right, but we would have to wait until our return to know its implacable fury. At first, it did not present any major challenge. We followed the south coast, and near the Lamero Fiord, we began to penetrate the marble domains to the heart of Madre de Dios, crossing a complex labyrinth of fiords, on occasions so narrow that they formed tidal currents impossible to paddle, which forced us to disembark and drag the kayaks on the shore. At the end of that passage of very stretch channels and fiords we found a small waterfall. Farther was a lake that was not included in the nautical charts or topographies, having been misinterpreted by cartographers as the continuation of the fiord.

Towards the end of the lake, after dragging our kayaks along a 200m stretch, we reached the depths of Barros Luco. This confirmed our hypothesis about the feasibility of using this route to reach that area. On the next day, we crossed victorious the formidable marble portico formed by the peaks April and Vertical, reaching the west coast of Madre de Dios.

On our return to the inside of the fiord and leaving our base camp, we initiated a difficult ascent to the top of the karst. The compact jungle where it was low and protected, and the strong wind with rain or hail where it was high and open, again put our physical strength and character to the test. Having concreted the first ascent of a peak, we descended through peat and forests down to the karstic virginity, where we set up our high camp. From here, we directed all our explorations to different areas inland. On two trips to the low camp, we carried all the necessary gear, like ropes, spits, and topographic material. During the next days, our intense exploration began to show results. First it was a sump that got lost in a chaos of blocks into the depths of a giant dome; then, a magnificent depression in the shape of a funnel, a chasm or vertical cavern with a great waterfall which we descended with our ropes, but couldn’t explore it entirely due to the fact that we did not have the necessary equipment. Back at our camp we bumped into a “coipo” (Myocastor coypus, a rodent with similar looks to that of a beaver), which we followed to its burrow but could not photograph. The path was a very dense forest, full of marble wells hidden by the vegetation. The stones that we threw in them seemed to never reach an end. The walls and precipices appeared suddenly, and the gigantic oaks hid the horizon from us allowing us to see only a few meters ahead.

We were now very close to returning to the sea, satisfied with our findings, when we incidentally saw a small stream that passed near our tent and disappear between the vegetation at a distance of no more than 50m from our camp. Many times we had gone right by it without having noticing it. At first, we saw it as something irrelevant because it came down to a small entrance, like others that we had seen before, that ended a few steps to the inside. In fact, we proceeded a few meters to its interior, to a point where it seemed to end. Our curiosity led us to look again in the bottom, finding a crack through which it was almost impossible to pass, due to its narrowness. But since we could not distinguish its bottom clearly, we introduced ourselves by creeping with our heads looking to the side, since it was impossible to face to the front because they did not fit. Descending with some difficulty we got to a gallery in which we could only advance by crawling. To our surprise, as we got further inside, the cavern grew larger to the point of reaching 20m (66ft) of height and 20m (66ft) wide. We finally went 700m (2296ft) inbound. The cavern ended in a siphon, being one of the most extensive ever to be discovered in Patagonia. In it we also found stalagmites, one of them ideal for the reconstruction of the climatic history of the region, due to its size and regularity of formation. This formidable find forced us to delay our departure from Madre de Dios. We wished to topograph at least its main gallery, and we did.

Our departure was a true evacuation. A terrible storm came in and seriously complicated our navigation on the Barros Luco fiord, exposed to very vertical waves which we had to surf. Then came a particularly difficult moment, as we crossed the Trinidad Channel; finding ourselves in the middle of the crossing we were surprised by a violent rainstorm that came from the west and forced us to battle with all our strength with a bursting ocean. During the following days we were forced to paddle for long hours to the limit of our strength, due of a relentless north wind. Adhered to the sloped coast, we tried to use any ledge, cape or rock to protect ourselves from the gusts of wind that stopped us, or worse, dragged us back if we loosened our rhythm. On one occasion it became impossible to overcome a cape at Paso del Abismo (Pass of the Abyss), where the wind closed in and accelerated in such a way that it was impossible to move forward a meter, even if we used all our strength; that made us stop our navigation until the following day. That way, after six days from leaving the Barros Luco fiord, we finally reached the village of Puerto Edén. I had spent more than three months on an uninterrupted journey and had covered more than 1700km. I would now rest for a month, to then finish the last stage of the expedition, where many of the most astonishing discoveries would befall.

Withstanding the darkness of the Gulf of Penas

Cupquelán was the native name given to the fiord where we were at, taking care of the last details to set sail. Like all other indigenous names in the toponymy of this region, no one knows what it means. The Chonos, primitive inhabitants of these regions, disappeared more than two centuries ago, and with them also did their tongue. A month had passed since we had finished the second part of the expedition, and now returned to Patagonia after spending the end of the year’s holidays with our loved ones. We arrived here from Puerto Aysén embarking on a boat that left us at the dock of one of the many salmon fisheries of the region, verifying how this industry has submitted those beautiful landscapes to the pestilence of their productive processes, at the same time that the Chilean Government makes ridiculous attempts to promote the development of tourism in that same area.

From Cupquelán we left with Juan Pablo Ortega, mi old expeditionary partner, with whom I had traveled before to Wager Island some months earlier, and with the bold Ana Bartley, a slight but powerful explorer trained in the faraway lands of Alaska. With a high pressure that freed us of the usually grueling Patagonian climate, we paddled to the San Rafael Lagoon, in which’s east margin agonizes the glacier nearest to the Equator that reaches sea level.

From the lagoon, we crossed by land to Río Negro (Black River), following an old native path, in which it is still possible to appreciate cypress logs placed in parallel to drag canoes and boats. Navigating the rivers Negro and San Tadeo down to their mouths of dead semi-submerged forests, and crossing the great bay of San Quintín, we reached an isthmus more than 100m (328ft) wide where we set up our base camp to undertake from there our explorations to the north area of the Gulf of Penas (Gulf of Sorrows). To the north of that isthmus were the calm waters through which we had made it from San Rafael, and to the south, descending a sloped coast, the violent and challenging breakers of Caleta Sonora that broke in like the successive attack of an army. After many attempts, and with our bows penetrating those walls of water like spears, sometimes mounting them and wining the fight ourselves, and sometimes being crushed by the breaker, we finally reached the domains of the open sea and the path to the caves that are hidden in the cliffs of the Forelius peninsula that awaited to be explored ever since the French archeologist, Joseph Emperarire suggested more than half a century ago that traces of the past canoers could possibly be found there. Getting out and entering the sea mounted on the breakers, we examined the caves of Forelius one by one, without finding any sign of past inhabitants.

Having completed this search, we set our bows south, to the island of Purcell and its tiny satellite islands that from far away seemed like a solitary fortress over the immensity of the north margin of the Gulf of Penas. Crossing the open sea we arrived to its coast flanked by a swarm of foamy breakers and twister-like currents.

Entering the islets of Redondo and Purcell, we went under one of the largest colonies of Imperial Cormorants that we had ever seen, gathered over some inaccessible abysses. Later, passing next to a colony of sea lions, appeared the island of Surania, the southernmost of this group, at the same time that various penguins passed jumping next to us, heading to a rocky headland that we instantly boarded, raising ourselves on it mounted like horsemen over the wave, and quickly disembarking before a second wave swallowed us back.

Once at the top of the headland, while we portaged the kayaks to a safe place, we saw how a group of penguins disappeared frightened among the thickness of the Surania forest. With their heads bent down, and with remarkable skill, they quickly got lost between the trunks and branches. Prepared with a film and photo camera, we silently entered into this mysterious forest. Moving with difficulty between a thicket of mossy logs, we suddenly found ourselves with the curious looks of some of the penguins that barely peeped their heads out from their tiny caves carved between the roots. The scene looked like it had been taken out from a story of fairies and enchanted forests. We moved slowly. We didn’t want to disturb them. After not too long they got used to our presence and we were then able to film and photograph them up close. Deeper in the forest we were able to see more individuals grouped in larger numbers. Our fascination and desire to continue exploring increased as we penetrated the island, but it was getting late and it was crucial that we returned to our camp in Forelius. We did one last take and took one last picture and we went back to the rocks to where we had disembarked.

If setting sail had been a challenge before, now an increase in the violence of the breaker and the formation of a terrible hole during the backwash, made our return to the sea on that same place absolutely impossible. We had to take our kayaks and portage them on the island to the opposite coast, somewhat more protected. Throwing ourselves to the sea lying on top of our decks like a surfer would, we left the bluff swimming away from it and the breaker, as quickly as possible, and from there we paddled with all our strength back to Forelius Peninsula. The untimely arrival of a powerful leeward wind that threw us away from the coast to which we were headed, added to the portaging in Surania, brought upon as a consequence our delay and not being able to count on enough light to disembark safely between the dangerous rocks, breakers and cliffs of the coast where our base camp was. While we tried to find a way out, darkness fell upon us.

Evaluating the dangers of different strategies to reach the coast in the dark, we finally decided to remain in the sea until dawn. Putting our kayaks together with a carabiner and with our forearms leaned firmly on the paddles crossed over the decks, we gave form to a quite rigid structure, a species of catamaran that kept us under sure flotation over an ocean of intercrossed waves with a small vertical wave that came from the north, and another very long, between five (16) and 10m (32ft) high, that came from the west.

To fight the cold, wet and immobile as we were, we rapped ourselves with the roof of our tent. Since the wind blew us away from the coast, to keep our position and not be dragged into the ocean every now and then we had to separate the kayaks and paddle north.

Not being able to see further than 5m (16ft), we kept blowing our whistles to remain near, paddling very closely one behind the other. As we navigated this way it was necessary to keep our stability blindly, since we did not have the possibility to see the waves that attacked us, on occasions very vertical, and put to test all our seaman skills. For orientation we would look at the profile of the highest mountains of Forelius, but only a glance, otherwise they would stay at the blind spot of our retinas, becoming invisible. As unbelievable as this may seem, there were moments in which we fell asleep. Confusing dreams with reality, darkness began to dissipate and that long night began to reach its end. Only then were we able to ponder upon the magnitude of the immense waves that we were riding, the largest that we had ever navigated, and that burst with an implacable fury on the beach of Caleta Sonora, near the camp where Ana was still placidly sleeping. Getting behind an islet that cut the waves, overcoming a powerful twister that formed behind it, and surfing over the remaining wave, we finally set foot on land, extenuated, but unharmed and with all of our gear unscathed. A few hours later, we were lying down warm and dry in our comfortable sleeping bags, from which we would not come out until the next day.

The lost route of the nomads of the sea

Our next objective consisted in reaching the lake Presidente Rios, place where the historian Ricardo Vásquez had affirmed one of the last tribes with no communication with the world could still prevail, persisting this way in the imaginary Patagonian of the City of Caesars, or the last El Dorado in America. In 1945, the flight Trimetrogón informed to the world for the first time about the existence of this great space in the inside of the Taitao Peninsula. That same year, and commissioned by the Chilean government, the German explorer Augusto Grosse realized the first official surveying of the lake, without being able to go further from its draining arm. Four decades later, that same sector would be visited by the documentary filmmaker Francisco Gedda. Besides these two documented incursions of Presidente Ríos, that had left little less than the totality of the lake unexplored, a third apparently existed, much older and that talked about the millennial use given to these waters by the ancestral canoers of Patagonia. This comes down to the journey made by the famous John Byron when he was rescued by a group of canoers and taken from Wager Island to the Spanish colony, the island of Chiloé. In his descriptions of the route followed, full of details, he lets us guess that those nomads of the sea transited between the Gulf of Penas and the Archipelago of the Chonos through the inner lands of the Taitao Peninsula, following a route, that coming from the south, consisted in mounting a river, transporting the canoes by land to a lake, crossing it and finally descending the river of drainage down to the sea, avoiding in this way the dangers of circumnavigating that enormous peninsula. We planned to do that same route on our kayaks, to prove that it was at least possible.

We returned from Caleta Sonora through the protected waters of the San Quintín bay to the Expedition pass, and from there we mounted the Mañiguales River, reaching without much difficulty its high course, from where we did a complete assessment of the route of access to the lake, realizing that it was much easier than our most favorable estimations had been. Once we finished portaging the last of the gear, and while we walked on a place that we had transited many times now, with our footsteps we felt logs buried in the mud that seemed to be regularly arranged in parallel ones with the others. We immediately thought that it might have been set to drag canoes. We began to unbury the logs one after another, seeing each time with more clarity what in the first moment had shown itself almost imperceptibly. We had discovered a path of logs notoriously cut down by man, set parallel at a distance between two and three meters (7-10ft), with the unquestionable objective to help drag small embarkations from and to the lake of Presidente Rios. We had definitely discovered the lost route of the nomads of the sea, the same one that the young John Byron had walked on more than two centuries ago, hand in hand with those extinct canoers.

After communicating this formidable finding on our Page of Pursuit online, we continued on that millenary path, crossing the lake and the river of the same name of Presidente Rios until reaching the island of Nalcayec, the southernmost of the Chonos archipelago.

On the next day we were back at the pestilences of Cupquelán and their pitiful tons of dead and rotten salmon, or back at the limits to where the demolishing voracity of civilization from where we came from had penetrated West Patagonia; civilization which in its unrestrained advance wants us to believe that the Earth is an inexhaustible platform that extends endless, forgetting that it really is a tiny blue sphere, finite, a blue ark that floats like a miracle in the universe.