Valle Chacobucca

hey! We made it!
After something like 60 hours of travel over the course of about 5 days, Justin and I were dropped off at the side of the road near ¨Entrada Baker". A friendly American named Cameron(who had previously tried to contact Conservacion Patagonica) decided on the spot to jump off the bus with us. He´s touring around for a few months before beginning a Fulbright Fellowship in Bariloche, Argentina to study massive "die-backs", i.e. single species mass extinctions and will just be visting the park area for a few days.

Two Brits (jay and amy) and an Kiwi (Femke) also arrived yesterday and will be newbies with Justin and I. Also, two American girls from UC Berkley are here for a few more days doing a pilot for one of their dissertation. We had a big table of gringos at dinner last night, and it was fun to be surrounded by intelligent outdoorsy people again. I had forgotten again how much I missed it since leaving Williams.

We just had a quickie powerpoint introduction to the project. Very Cool. We head up to go start pulling fences this afternoon and have a BBQ with the other volunteers up there. We´ll be out for roughly a week then before we come back here and have a few free days. Schedules are not necessarily weekly, so I won´t necessarily have internet access every Saturday for instance.

The park is literally filled with Guanaco (llamas ancestral wild cousin)--far more common than even whitetail deer in Western PA--, skunks, and we´re already seen a fox twice now. Amazing to be so surrounded by wildlife.

Jon, can you please try to get some topo maps while you´re in Santiago (apparently the army-government are the only ones who have them) and then get maps of Reserva Nacional Jeinimeni at Conaf in Coyhaique. I had checked Conaf in Santiago, but they just referred me to the Conaf in Coyaique.

Pictures will arrive at some point, sorry. Looks alot like the picture in my first blog post, except everything is really far far bigger than in the picture. Absolutely beautiful spot. I immediately feel like I could stay here for a year pretty easily, but we´ll see how pulling fencing changes that opinion.