heyo
I´m still alive. Back from a week near the Argentine border. We lived in a house. It was weird. I´m so used to living from my tent, the house seemed foreign. Shared rooms also meant that what little privacy we´ve had vanished. Also, the two girls we did have left on Tuesday, so it was a house of 6-9 guys, which if you hadn´t guessed, is a total mess and smells terrible. Jon played mama for the house a lot. He´s still such a good JA.
We rode in a wagon pulled by a tractor for 2 hours to get back to the base camp today--very cold, but cool views. We just raided the pantry here and are heading out for a 6 day backpacking trip. We´re heading into Valle Hermoso (Beautiful Valley) in Jenimeni National Reserve. There are a few lingering gaucho trails left over from the 150 years of pastoral use, but for the most part we´ll be off trail, navigating by map and compass. A friend here is lending us a GPS just in case. According to Christian (the head biologist here) only about 300 people visit the reserve in any year. So the three of us will be a full 1% of this year´s visitors. That´s cool. He also told us to use the GPS to get the location of any interesting prints we see (Huemel deer, puma) or any other interesting critters -- apparently a new species of frog was discovered there only last year. Anyway, I´ll have more to update on in a week.
love mack

Week 5

We´ve just returned from our fourth week here in the Estancia Chacabucco. The last two weeks have been somewhat frustrating work-wise. We´ve just been terribly unproductive. It´s really not our fault -- it has rained nearly every day for the past ten days (while the first three weeks I was in Chile it rained once). The rain kept us stuck at the base camp for a few days last week before we went to Cochrane for the annual festival. The festival was interesting, but since Cochrane is a town of only 3000, the scale was such that you had pretty much experienced everything (a couple times over) within an hour or two. But we were there for two days -- hahah. They had a little rodeo along with the festival, but Jon Justin and I missed the main attraction (bull riding) on Saturday night because went to go get food and the events ran 2 hours ahead of schedule. It was interesting to compare the Patagonian style to the Montana style that I´m used to. They can´t rope here (lasso) -- I mean they do it, just poorly. I realized though that the cowboys I saw at the two rodeos in Montana were all semi-professional/professional while everyone involved here has yet to quit their day jobs. So it was fun. We had lots of bbq and wine and slept in Conservacion Patagonica´s office on the concrete floor.

Our latest location was awesome. For the first time we were stationed in Patagonian instead of New Hampshire. We were camping based out of shack along the eponymous Chacabucco River in the Valle Guanacco. It was gorgeous. When it wasn´t raining.

We returned from Cochrane on Sunday and packed up our tents in the rain on Monday morning. Breaking camp in the rain was terribly uncomfortable and not very well planned out. But it was so refreshing to finally get away from the Estancia (base camp). Internet access is nice, but that´s not why I´m here. It was a decent enough day, when we finally arrived at the new camp and the tents dried out within an hour of set up.

Jon Justin and I forded the river and explored a canyon on the other side that afternoon. It was awesome. I love not having any sort of paths to follow.

Wilderness isn´t wild if you´re stuck on a well marked path.

This place will definitely lose something if (when?) it does become a park, but the Chilean national park style seems to be far more laid back than the US if for no other reason than it´s underutilized. So I think most of the off trail character will remain intact.

Alright. My photos have uploaded (after about 45 minutes) so I need to quit hogging the internet access.

I think we´ll be here for two more weeks then head south.

Oh, and haha, up to 6 months since my last hair cut and 2 months without shaving. Liz will be excited to hear that, but I think she´s the probably only one.

week 2-3

Wow, so it´s now day 27 of ´traveling´ for me. It doesn´t really seem like I´ve been away for very long at all - life has just been moving so super fast since graduation. Justin and I have been here in Valle Chacabucco for two and half weeks. We´ve spent nights in three remote locations and the Estancia, assembled/disassembled our tents 12 times. We´re able to leave some of our gear back here, and even then we don´t really have to hike any distance with our bags - trucks drop us off at each location. Well, Justin and I thought that the group of 11 was a bit unwieldy and oppressive. We´ve since been punished for our hubris by a group of 21 for the last week. More will be leaving this weekend, but that crowd unfortunately includes our much-loved Brits, Jey and Amy. I plan to make our paths cross again in the future - they would be a really fun couple to travel with or even just visit. As the group has become larger, the relative difficulty has decreased or at least become more sporadic. We can now cover nearly two miles of fence in a single day (last Saturday, for instance), so we get to have more half days and days off. The most significant downside is the food. While there was plenty of quantity if not variety with the group of 5-6, cooking for 25 mouths (realistically at least 50-60 servings) is a herculean task on a two burner Coleman camp stove and maybe (if we´re really lucky) a cast iron oven. I really love the ovens. We arrived at our second camp to find a hand hewn rough frame of a shack. Obviously no cast iron oven, and only lake water to drink (turned out just fine for all but Amy and Monica), and horrendously bumpy stumps of bunch-grass covering the entire site (which made for creative if not comfortable sleeping positions). Our third camp had two shacks and a cast iron oven - a veritable shangra la.
The work has been almost entirely removing fences. So that actually means, using little hammer/plier mutants called Pico de Lotos (Parrots beaks) and larger bolt-cutters to pull out staples (humorously called Grampas en Español), while another team rolls the wire and wood post fences. The fences have 5-6 wires strung through about ten little posts between the big posts. The big posts are about 10 inches in diameter, weigh 60-90 pounds, and are sunk 3 feet into the ground. After the staples are removed from the big posts, and the wire and post fence is rolled, another team comes through with big steel pikes and pries the big posts from the ground with a combination of leverage and manpower. Pulling staples is the resting position. Pulling posts is hardest, but comes with long periods of rest between posts and lets all of the teenagers feel like real men in front of the one to two girls who are volunteering. Rolling fences is the least favorite job, since it requires lots of continuous forearm and upper body strength, tons of patience, and really taxes your lower back, and it really doesn´t get any rest periods - there is always more fence. Rolling has become significantly easier over the past two weeks however. Technique has improved slightly, but the body and especially the forearms have really just woken up.
The day-in, day-out of volunteering here isn´t really very exciting. Lots of manual labor, you´re tired and hungry, the scenery doesn´t really matter much when you´re staring at the ground rolling fences for hours on end. But the experience on a bigger level is really amazing. I mean I got to ride a horse (mostly out of control) through the Patagonian backcountry; I´ve eaten sheep slow roasted over a large open pit fire in the traditional style; Jon, Justin, and I rode in the caged-in bed of a pickup across an almost otherworldly landscape on the way back to the Estancia yesterday; I´m quickly learning a foreign language and even beginning to think in Spanish despite my measly vocabulary; and I´ve learned tons about other countries and cultures scattered across the globe (UK, NZ, Switzerland, and Holland).

I started reading a book for pleasure on one of our travel days this last week. I´m reading Lifelines by Stephen Rose - it´s dense theoretical biology with an English vocabulary that often leaves even 3 college-graduate native-English speakers using context clues to deduce meaning. It´s sooo... luxorious. I have barely beat an intellectual eyelash since graduation, but reading this book just leaves me nearly intoxicated with thought. It has probably been the best test so far for my noggin following my explosive bicycle accident in June - I´ve been somewhat anxiously awaiting the moment I find out that some crucial bit of knowledge was dislodged upon impact with the asphault - but it seems like my biology, at least, is still hanging in there. Similarly, I´m not sure I had mentioned before how amazing it is to listen to your own selection of music on an ipod after having not heard music for a week. I didn´t listen to any music my first two weeks down here, but the ipod has slowly crept back into nearly daily use as a general relaxer now. Who needs Chilean wine, when you have music. And on that note, even the terrible boxed wine is good down here. $13 bottles in the states sell for under $2 here. We haven´t caught a whiff of civilization since hopping off the bus at the unmarked intersection of two dirt roads two and half weeks ago though. So don´t get your hopes up about us having a merry old time on local beverage down here. This weekend though the the big festival for the nearest town, Cochrane. One of the staffers who spend the most time with the volunteers is supposedly going to be in the rodeo-ish-thing, so we´re all going to pile into some vans to get down there on Saturday. It´ll be exciting to even see a grocery store or gas station. Exciting like it was on the bike trip, in the middle of South Dakota, 90 miles from the last gas station and 25 miles since you last had any water to drink. The American national urge to ´consume shit´ (in the words of Chris Beeler) has been terribly stiffled here. I suppose it´s sort of like living in a comunist utopia, where there is no money just toil and food. There will be money at some point though. At some point they´ll ask for $15 per day; but til then it´s really pretty cool, espeically as an American, to go so long without touching or even feigning consciousness of money.

Anyway time for dinner. I´ll probably next be back online in another week or ten days. ¡Chao!

17 of us or so, following René to one of his favorite spots, a mountain lake Puma Paradise. He has been tracking the puma here for the last three years. He pulled out the antenna every 30 minutes or so on this hike to check the location of the pumas to prevent us from encroaching on the pumas. We also walked in silence and in single file so as to leave the smallest possible footprint on the flora and fauna.

The white stone beach of the mountain lake we hiked to.

dinner at camp 3.

View from the hike with Justin from Camp 1. This is Lago Cochrane.



A view heading the other direction. The whole area looks like Wyoming or maybe Utah on steroids and about 80 years ago. There is just no sign of life, even from such a high perch with such an amazing view.

I wish that I had made this photo bigger (maybe click on it?). This is the Asado we had on our first full day in the Valle Chacabucco. It´s a whole bull sheep, splayed on an iron cross and slow roasting to a delious feast.

Ahora, mas sabor!

Valle Chacabucco, Aysen, Chile

Wow. so one week down. Justin and I arrived at around 5pm last Saturday and left Sunday afternoon to head out to our work site. Two Brits arrived the day before us (Jey and Amy from Bristol) and a Kiwi (Femke from Wellington) arrived a little after us. The five of us hastily threw our gear into the backs of two pickup trucks and drove for 50 minutes into the Patagonian backcountry. 8 other volunteers had been at this site for the last 6 days. A couple of employees set up an Asada. It was amazing -- basically a giant rack of lamb skewered and stuck into the ground beside a large fire inside a shack. Two hours on one side, an hour on the others. The fatty meat fell off the bone and was simply a fantastic mess of a meal.

After the meal the employees loaded up the trucks with gear and the extra family members who had come to partake, and left 6 of the week-old volunteers to train us the following day. Turns out the other volunteers had all thought they were leaving that day, but Conservacion Patagonica had just changed their minds and decided to leave them for another two days. So yeah they can be a little flaky - but they were good about dropping off enough food to keep us happy.

Oh so the site! We pitched our tents in the middle of a grassy field near an old Gaucho shack. The shack was an amazingly tacked together bunch of sheet metal and hand hewn logs, buuut it had an amazing wood fired, cast iron stove. The view from the meadow was some nice tree-covered and rocky mountains.
The most amazing thing about it was how underwhelming our location was. It was New Hampshire, or maybe Montana, but really nothing too different than something you could find down a dirt road somewhere back in the States. Justin and I both agreed on this and were perplexed by it. After 5 days of pulling fences from 9-5 we took a full day off out at the site. I woke up early to go try to get some sunrise shots over the lake that was supposed just down the valley. Thick, deadly-spiky, scrub barred me from reaching anythign but the closest small hill, but the view from the top of there was enough to correct any misgivings about our location. massive snowy ranges loomed on most sides, but were obscurred from our base camp by the lower hills. Downing some of the ubiquitous stale, white, biscuits for breakfast on the top of the hill, I plotted a more ambitous route for further exploration later in the day. I got back down to camp before any of the others had awoken, stoked the stove, and prepared a second breakfast. Justin and I set off on the hike around 12pm.
The really amazing thing about hiking out here is that the only trails that exist were formed by sheep or cattle and are only still viable if they have be utilized by the massive population of wild Guanaco, and most of the hiking is forced off trail bushwhacking. My two favorite national parks in the US are Capitol Reef and Teddy Rooselvelt -- you probably haven´t heard of them, but that´s why their my favorite. You can set off and not see another soul for hours or days and the parks are so under utilized that you don´t necessarily need to stick to trails. Here, there aren´t even trails to stick to in the first place. And actually, there aren´t even maps -- navigation is easily performed though by simply pulling your barings from one of the many giant mountain ranges nearby. Needless to say it was a great hike.

The work was pulling fences. It was nice and mindless. The kind of thing that you master within about 30 minutes. The large group was a bit much to handle, but once they left the remaining group of 5 (Jey, Amy, Femke, Susan (super nice Chilean from Puerto Montt), Justin and I) was fantastic. We averaged about 3 hours of cooking time per dinner. Highlights include the night we made pizza from scratch without an recipe (or ever having made bread before) in a cast iron wood fired oven. Con Pat drops off bread, butter, jam, cereal, fuit and veggies, yogurt, etc. every couple of days and leave us to cook it up how we see fit.

We´ll definitely all be in great shape after 6 weeks here. Forearms get major workouts trying to role wire fencing, and lower backs will either be ripped or, well, ripped to pieces.

Okay well that was a senseless brain dump. I get about 30 minutes of internet once a week apparently, so I´ll do my best to keep in touch.