Day 3 – On which we find out why the Circuit is closed.

The wind was manic, pummeling us about the head and chest as we worked our way up the snowbound track. Yesterday’s blue skies had given way to a sinking, gray ceiling and we hoped to get over the pass before the weather shut us out.

So far we’d seen nothing that could stop anyone with even rudimentary mountain experience. But it was clear the trail had to be “closed” to keep out the hostel-crawling Euros who might otherwise require a costly rescue.

Leaving the calmness of Campamento Guardas a ranger stopped us on the trail. I think he asked us where we were going, but as usual when spoken to in another language, my ears seemed to lock up and the words just spilled over me like so much murky water.

“No comprendo Espanol,” I pleaded.

“Paso Campamento?” he replied as simply as he could, referring to the next camp.

“Oh, si, si! Claro,” I replied in half truth, still worried that we might end up in a Chilean jail for hiking on a closed trail.

We moved on and came to another big washout. The one the night before had a length of blue faded perlon knotted and hanging from a large lenga root. This one had a sign: “Trail closed”.



Next to the sign were two packs and their owners -- an English couple who’d clearly never been to the Alps in Spring, -- were probing the edges of avalanche debris as if it were toxic.

“Are you going for the Circuit?” I asked when we, too, stood on the slide.

“We wanted to,” he said, “but we’re told it’s closed.”

Peggy and I marched by the gal waiting on the slide's edge, following a set of footprints across the corn-snow and upwards to the gully’s bank. From here there was no trail, so we made our way upslope to where the washed out trail reached the cut, calling down to the nervous Brit to follow the rim back up to the trail after they’d crossed.

Beyond, the trail zig-zagged up and down, sometimes through linga forest. Many of the trees were infected by a weird globular fungi that grew on burls. They looked like orange herpes on crusted brown warts. There was no wind yet and the trail was littered with the local Patagonian fox scat, coyote-sized.

The Grey Glacier was big and ablating below us. It looked like so many Alaskan glaciers, more melted than cracked. Who says the warming’s not global? People who stay inside and do little else besides count their money, I guess.




As we reached the rather abrupt tree and snow line, the wind picked up and we lost the trail under the snow. Two sets of footprints weaved through the stunted nirre shrubs – Frenchmen we’d heard who were the first round the circuit had passed through a few days earlier. Hopefully we followed one set of tracks higher, until we could see trail markers poking through the snow. Most of the snow was ankle deep, sometimes to the shin, but easy.




By the time we reached the pass, I was chilled and Peggy didn’t want to stop. Over the pass there was more snow, knee deep and what looked to be an hour or more of it. It looked and felt like Alaska but the wind howled in scary Patagonian gusts that threatened to -- and once did -- knock us over.




“IT SEEMS LIKE IF IT GETS CALM, A BIG WIND IS COMING – LIKE A ROGUE WAVE AT SEA!” I shouted.

“YEA, IT’S LIKE OLD MAN WIND IS TAKING A DEEP BREATH BEFORE HE BLASTS US,” Peggy yelled back.

We stopped behind a boulder to put on another layer, choked down some calories and froze. The boulder did little to shelter us.


No sooner had we left knee deep snow – but not the wind -- than we struggled through shin-deep mud. The trail braided out into a maze of deep, stinky, wet tracks. Like a whitewater river filled with rapids, these mud runs were punctuated by sharp-sticks and undependable rocks, with no means of missing the foot-sucking mires. Poky-spined califate brush filled any dry land to waist height between the muck pits.

“This is why the trail’s closed – they haven’t put in the board-walk yet!”

We endured this for an hour, until the trail-braids coalesced within a wind-ravaged forest, leading us down stream to a rickety bridge across the puppy-sized Rio Perros.




We crossed the bridge and shortly walked to the Los Perros camp with its run-down refugio, an empty mountain tent, and a green-tarped yurt with voices.

Inside, two Dutch boys smoked cigarettes and jumped out of their boots when we threw open the door.

Wide-eyed and with mixed-English accents they asked us about the route over the pass, whether or not they should attempt it. They, too, had heard the Circuit was closed but had hiked here in two days from the Park entrance.

One had learned Spanish in Mexico and spoke some English with an American accent, some with a Brit accent, and still more in Aussie. His pack was a travel bag with rollers.

“You won’t be able to pull that over the pass,” I joked, “the mud’s too deep.”

He smiled and asked earnestly, “Do you think we can make it to Grey tomorrow?”

“Oh yes,” I encouraged. “It’ll be hardest at the beginning. The mud and the snow are deep, the wind will be very strong and in your face, but you can do it – unless it snows tonight, you can do it. Just follow our tracks.”

I was glad we’d met no one on the other side who’d told us that.

It would have spoiled the uncertainty we savored.

Day 2 – On which we hike too far, too fast, and hurt ourselves.

Camp Carretas had a shelter and we hung gear to dry over night, camping in our floorless pyramid shelter in the lee of a pile of logs.

While our first day had been windy and rainy, the cold and wet whispering “hypothermia my pretty”, the next morning dawned sunny and new, elaborate bird trilling and song in the forest overhead. While yesterday I wondered why anyone would come to Patagonia, today I saw why.

We slept in until noon, luxuriating on our two inch thick, full length Thermarest pads (5 pounds each with chair rods and covers) and warm sleep gear. The sun warmed the interior of the ‘Mid. It was the best rest we’d had since leaving Anchorage four days ago.

We slept in long enough that other hikers arrived to make camp before we’d climbed out of bed. A conversation drifted into our tent between an American finishing the W and a young Aussie-American couple just starting.

I heard the words “Circuit” , “closed”, “giving it a go, anyway” and decided to get out of the tent and join the conversation.

Lucien and Carey were at the end of their five month tour, mostly in South America, and, like us, had come to expensive Paine just for the Circuit. And they, like us, were going to give a go.

“It’s only about seven hours to Guardas,” I butted in. “And it doesn’t get dark until nine thirty. Are you guys going to camp here tonight?”

We gave them our spot and hustled out into the wind at three in the afternoon.



“This wind is bi-polar,” Peggy observed. “It’s just crazy, how it goes from blowing you over to dead calm.”

The trail paralleled the Rio Grey, a high-volume, smooth flowing river that drained Lago Grey, a main Park’s highlight as the huge Glacier Grey dropped off the Southern Patagonia Icecap and disgorged its calving bergs into the lake. Bergy bits floated downstream.

“That water looks nice,” she commented. I was pleased to hear this, as I hoped we would finish our week-long trip with a float down the Rio Grey, the two of us in our big packraft. “It looks like the Noatak.”

The trail wove in and out of thickets of southern beech, bonsai’d and bent from the wind, then through wind-blasted meadows saturated from the spring rains and melt.

The Cuernos – or Horns – were out in full splendor.

“They look like some of that chert we’ve seen, worked into arrow-heads,” Peggy commented and indeed they did, like the big chunk of rock that stone tool makers cleave their heads from.

The first ten km went quickly and we passed through the surprising development of buildings, lodges, eco-camps, tents, and the catamaran dock that made up Refugio Lago Pehoe. Climbing above the small village – not sure what else to call it – we were running late. It was already six and we were coming to a hilly and windy section along Lago Grey.

We moved into stunted nirre scrub. It clung to the raw glacier scraped landscape like alders, but with smaller leaves and smoother bark. The nearby icefield, big glaciers, and icebergs in a glacier-carved, gray colored lake, cast a more Alaskan look than any place I’d ever been. It looked like the Kenai. Hell, it looked like the terrain above Skilak Glacier where it dumps into its own iceberg filled lake. But two aspects said not-Alaska: first was the tourist-choked trail and second were the rime encrusted black spires and white granite towers above.

Peggy, in her always pragmatic way, had insisted we bring the mega-foam pads, our car-camping sized, Deluxe Thermarests. And in her responsible way, she’d insisted on carrying them, because “I don’t want you to hurt your back.”




But now, with me pushing the pace to get to the Camp Guardas (which was free – most campgrounds in Torres del Paine cost around $7 per person) our camp luxury burdened us. I felt like Col. Randon on the River of Doubt expedition, wishing for lightness but happy to be comfortable. But unlike Pres. Roosevelt I didn’t step forward to help.

So in the fading light of a southern beech, when kilometers feel like miles and hours pass like minutes, a whimper drifted up the trail. Peggy had strained her knee.

I should have taken those pads, I thought to myself. Peggy soldiered on.

Soon after, we crossed a brook bouncing down a rocky gully, and there was Campamento Guardas.

Beneath a gap in the spring green canopy of 60 foot lenga trees, we pitched the ‘Mid, dressed warmly, and ate a Jet-Boil dinner. Soon after I fell asleep, but Peggy, like a horse that had been ridden hard and put away wet, couldn’t eat much and didn’t sleep as I learned in the morning.

But so far we could see no reason not to push on with the Circuit. We headed onward and upward for the most remote part of the Circuit, the pass from Lago Grey to Rio Perros.

Day 1 -- On which we enter the Park

We walked a mile and a half before Peggy hooked us a ride: a late model, double-cab pickup.

Peggy smiled that big, heart-melting toothy smile of hers and we jogged to the vehicle, its cab full of smoke.

"He's a smoker," I warned.

"I don't care. Let's get out of here."

I pulled open the door and tried my favorite Spanish phrase on the driver.

"Hablas usted Ingles?"

"No," came the reply. I breathed deep. This used to be fun. When I was younger. Now it was just a hassle.

"Vamanos Torres del Paine?"

"Si."

We threw our stuff in the back and hopped in.

The driver sped over the gravel roads, making Peggy nervous. She and I spoke boldly in English. There's no way she'd let me drive that fast, she said. I told her, I knew that, but couldn't ask him to slow down.

Somehow, between drifting through corners and fishtailing down straightaways, the driver and I exchanged names and professions -- Bernardo operated an outboard motor tour down the Rio Serrano, a big river forming the southern border to the Park. The only other packrafters I'd heard of here -- a German couple on a round-the-world bike-tour -- had paddled the 10 km down the Serrano and around the edge of one of the lakes. We planned to hike and raft the 150 km around the Paine massif, paralleling the classic Paine Circuit.

Bernardo dropped us at the bridge over the Serrano, pointing out three Andean condors soaring over the river. We stepped into the weather, an overcast sky wanting to rain but seeming unable to with such an unrelenting wind. The famous peaks were obscured by cloud.

It was three miles of more gravel, into a head-wind to the Park gate. The rain finally made it to the ground when we ducked inside the guard shack. Met by humorless Chileans in uniform, we discovered that the Paine Circuit was closed. We would have to do the much more popular, shorter, and un-packraftable "W".

One guard spoke very good English, and said that the route was closed because there were bridges out and avalanches.

"OK," I lied, "we'll do the 'W'".

We paid our $50 entry fee (as you approach, then enter Paine, all things become more expensive), headed out into the blowing rain, and hiked up the trail toward the first camp, Carretas, about 10 km away.

Pairs of Magellan geese, as big as our Canada geese but colored like a nesting ptarmigan couple -- he in rust and white front, she in rust alone -- whistled like kids blowing through reed whistles. Noisier were the giant plovers, the lapwings that screeched and wheeled over us every 100 m or so.

"So, what are we going to do"" Peggy asked, knowing the answer. I hadn't planned this trip for over five years, nor spent an extra $2000 on our round-the-world tickets for this, our sixth continent, to follow a bunch of Euro-hostel crawlers in their drunken binge tour from refugio to refugio along the "W" trek.

"We're going to do it anyway."

"What if we get caught?" Peggy had visions of us fined or thrown in a Chilean jail for walking a closed track.

"Hablas usted Ingles? No comprendo Espanol, senior, permisso."

November 22, 2008 – Punta Arenas and beyond.

The skidding touch down jolted me awake. Peggy was there next to me, wide-eyed if not bright-eyed, and certainly not bushy-tailed – rather butt-bruised after days of sitting.

We’d been traveling for 13 hours, that on top of the flights and airports between Anchorage and Miami. And it had all been eastward travel, six time zones east of home to here, Punta Arenas.

Our plan was ambitious: catch a taxi to town, check into a hostel, find out where the grocery store, bus, and outdoor store were; then eat, shop for food, maps and fuel, buy bus tickets, pack, sleep, eat, and catch a bus at 9 AM for Puerto Natales, 3 hours north; then hitch-hike 70 miles further on to Torres del Paine National Park.

All with my very limited Spanish vocabulary: my two most-used phrases being, “Hablas usted Engles?” and “No comprendo Espanol.”

It felt like we were in an adventure race, a race with no other teams, trying only to beat the clock. We were happy that is was so near the Austral summer solstice, and this far south: it got light by five AM and stayed light until nearly ten at night. The late spring light was like a form of amphetamine, getting us up, keeping us moving.

The three hour bus ride was far better than I expected. Peggy soon caught sight of one, then many, rheas (called nandu here) – very cool South American ostrich-like bird -- then flocks of flamingos, the giant plover-like lapwing, and beautiful white-necked, Magellan geese and black-faced ibis.

Twenty-four hours after landing in Punta Arenas, we were in Puerto Natales, the famous Patagonian wind whipping up the blue waters into waves with black-necked swans bobbing like corks.

We hurried out of town, hoping we’d catch a ride with someone who spoke English and was headed all the way to Torres del Paine.

November 21, 2008: So many landscapes, so little time.

Suppose you had just one place to go and just 10 days to do it in all of South America: where would you go and what would you do?

We decided to make it packrafting in Patagonia, and picked the Torres del Piane Circuit as our destination.

Why? Well, the Amazon is too hot and reading “River of Doubt” about Teddy Roosevelt’s epic there has probably forever put me off to that region.

Peru? I don’t like the altitude and Chris Flowers said there’re too many cows, even if the Cordillera Blanca are beautiful.

Ecuador? The Galapagos are too expensive (and there’s no packrafting there) and my memories from the Raid Gauloise adventure race of 1998 left the foul taste of Giardia in my mouth.

Argentina? Been there, done that, at least up ‘round Bariloche, which felt too much like “Patagonia Lite” for a return trip. As for Fitzroy and Cerro Torre, awesome mountains that they are, it just doesn’t look that good for a multi-day hiking and rafting trip Brooks Range-style that we are looking for.

Chile? Now we’re talking! Torres del Paine (“Towers of Paine”) National Park has a compact range of beautiful and unique peaks. It has its namesake peaks, sculpted granite of the cleanest and sheerest variety. It has the unique Cuernos del Paine (“Horns of Paine”) -– those signature black-capped granite monoliths – as well, some more typically alpine looking glaciated summits like the Paine Grande.

And it has a world class circuit trek, which while very European with its trail of pesos, refugios, and Euro-trekkers all around also offers up a series of waters, perfect for an extended packrafting trip.

So given just 10 days in South America, a packraft, and a partner with a penchant for cool weather and mountains, we headed for Torres del Paine.

November 20, 2008 -- Family

Miami: Peggy bounced out of bed and threw open the drapes. Bright sun and blue sky spilled through the window. A surprisingly cool breeze blew into the hotel room.

I turned over and groaned, trashed by jet lag and an internet hangover.

“He drove all the way down to see you.”

She was right, he had, but more sleep appealed more than visiting at that moment. “He” especially would understand that sentiment.

Peggy and I had left for Seattle after midnight, bivouacking on arrival on the floor at Gate C10 amid half a dozen airport campers. We woke to CNN “news”: Al Quaida’s welcome message to Obama and the story of an eight year old boy confessing to gunning down his dad and another man who, he said, were “suffering.” We suffered through until noon, then flew non-stop to Miami, suffering still more headed east and sleep deprived. 

It was 10:30 at night when we finally reached Miami. We’d overnight there before heading for Santiago and Punta Arenas.

We hadn’t seen my father since the end of Cody Roman’s first year in college, over two years ago. As a father myself, I was more empathetic now about parental visits, but, as usual, it took Peggy to actually make family a priority.

“Get up!”

Dad’d driven down the day before in his neat little 1995 Acura Integra, and picked us up at the airport.

That night we hit a Wendy’s to bolster our slim air travel intake. Peggy and I had split two donuts, a whopper, and airplane snacks over the last eighteen hours, and none of that in an effort to maintain her girlish figure.

While waiting for the spicy chicken burger meal at the drive-up, steam erupted from under the hood of the sexy-black Japanese sports car.

“Ahhh….Dad,? Your car doesn’t usually smoke like that, does it?” I hoped that somehow we were parked over a steam pipe exhaust, or maybe it was just the humid night between the sea and the Everglades.

“No!”

Alarmed we pulled forward and parked. I handed Peggy the fast-food and swung open the door. Thick fluid ran down the asphalt like green blood spilling from Achilles’ heel. There was a lot – it looked like a full engine-plus-radiator’s worth between this spill and the pool glistening at the drive-up.

It was hard to see where it had bled out. There was green on top of the radiator and all over the front of the engine.

By the time we reached the hotel parking lot, the car was overheating.

“Damn.” He muttered under his breath, “I just had some work done and we put in some antifreeze before heading down.”

We scared ourselves with worse case scenarios – a cracked block or blown head gasket. There was some oil on my fingertips when I felt around a bleeding wound. More sleuthing showed a full reservoir. Hmmm.

We poured a liter’s worth of water into the radiator, engine running, and looked to see where it bled out.

A headlamp in his hand and peering under the six inches of clearance between the chassis and the asphalt, Dad spotted the leak and risking greasy hands I felt the hole itself where a worn hose went into the block.

“Good job, Son! You found it. And that’s a cheap fix.”

“Dad, it was a group effort. But I’m glad that the problem is not serious. We can at least sleep easy tonight.”

And that was good. Because I was exhausted, yet satisfied that we'd done something as a family -- namely solving a crisis.

Into the Wild

A year after the movie, nobody else has died at Bus 142.

It's been a bit more than a year since Sean Penn's film version of Jon Krakauer's modern Alaskan classic, Into the Wild (first published itself in 1996) came out. There was an Eddy Vedder sound track of the same name and even an independent documentary oddly called The Call of the Wild, a century old title belonging to another story of Northern cheechako hubris.

An entire year! And yet none of the new pilgrims to "Bus 142" out on Alaska's Stampede Trail have yet died. So sure were Healy residents that even more "idiots" would stumble out there with little food and less sense, that they proposed the Bus be removed as an attractive nuisance. Another version of that most common sentiment of Alaskans who've moved up here: "I'm here, shut the door".

There's a long history of tourists visiting the Bus, starting soon after it was abandoned as a makeshift camp along an old mining road leading from Healy to Antimony Creek, site of an antimony mine on the Clearwater Fork of the Toklat River, now in Denali National Park.

Winter time saw mushers, snowmachiners, maybe a trapper on snowshoes, or a even an XC ski-tourist. Fall-time saw mainly hunters, like the ones who discovered McCandless dead there. Summer vistors were rare. Until twenty years ago when early hell-bikers Jon Underwood and Bob Kaufman pedaled their mountain bikes into Alaska's Denali National Park, then packrafted the Toklat River to the Stampede Trail (a trip recently repeated ).

This was only four years befor Chris McCandless, aka "Alexander Supertramp", stumbled on ol' Bus 142 and infamy. The Stampede Trail, mostly overgrown with alders, studded with boulders, and often flooded in beaver ponds, was also the route taken by Mark Stoppel and myself in 1989 when, en route to Lake Clark, we stopped at the Bus during a thunderstorm and cooked up some noodles.

The bus, parked in an opening between two creeks, the trail, and a black spruce bog, was a pleasent shelter, with a 55-gallon wood stove, two beds, shelves, drawers, and chairs. We left noodles and other food there, as our packs were heavy and we wanted lighter loads and didn't need all the food we carried. In retrospect it was a bit like setting a trap. No doubt McCandless found both food and shelter there, enough to get him through through to break-up when he became trapped in the wild.

In September 1992, we had just moved back to Alaska when I read with interest the Anchorage Daily News story about an unidentified, partially decomposed body in the Bus that Jon, Bob, Mark, and I had visited only a few years earlier. Like everyone in Alaska and ultimately America, I wondered who it was and how his end had come to pass. The answer came with Krakauer's piece in Outside Magazine in January 1993.

In the summer of 1993, pretty much a year to the day after McCandless had died, Jon, Andrew Liske, and I pedaled mountain bikes to the Bus. It was an easy day in and we spent the night there. Jon in his characteristic way of investigation found McCandless artifacts a plenty, artifacts used to reconstruct the story of McCandless' demise.

There was the grizzly skull with the "signature" of Alex. There was the "manifesto" on the plywood, his pants, a log desperately shoved in the wood stove, his chewed toothbrush and lost gold crown. As a biologist, I took offense to Jon when he challenged my identification of the ungulate bones outside the bus as small moose, not caribou.

"Are you sure?" he asked. I held back my impatience. I didn't tell him I'd butchered a dozen moose and caribou in my years in Alaska, that I held a PhD in Biology.

"Yea, I'm pretty sure. It looks like a young cow to me." The nose bones were long, relative to the brain case, and the crown more bowed.

I empathized with the young dead man. He'd clearly made a mistake, no bigger a mistake than I'd made when I was young and shot an animal, then improperly stored the meat. The only difference was that I was lucky enough to find a way out of the situation I was in -- lucky, not smart. And this kid was no more stupid than me, or any of the rest of us who come to Alaska for the same reasons he did - because we want something else, something beyond what disappoints us so in the "Lower 48". Andrew, Jon, Dan and I were all sympathizers, making us the first "Bus Pilgrims".

And yes, many more of us will die in Alaska, from the lethal intersection of bad luck with innocence, naivety, ignorance, negligence, or plain old stupidity -- call it what you will. But the arrogance of most Alaskans, those typically overweight and comfortably esconced on the grid, their outdoor experiences limited to fly-in fishing and ATV hunting, will lead them to second guess. As if it's a simple fact that "real Alaskans" hide from the "real Alaska" with modern technology making them better equipped to survive than those who seek to test themselves without cable TV or the contents of Cabellas catalogs.

As if Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer and all the rest who've told the McCandless story without as much of a snicker and sneer as with sympathy and substance don't really get what it means to be a "real Alaskan." But I guess it's true: to be a "real Alaskan" you simply can't die before your first winter up here is over.