Weekend at Piñera's

Doug Tompkins may have started something. Since the US environmental philanthropist succeeded in having Parque Pumalín declared a formal nature sanctuary under Chilean law, Sebastián Piñera - elected Chile’s president in 2010 - has created his own private nature reserve in the virtually roadless southwestern sector of the Isla Grande de Chiloé. This past weekend, for the first time, I visited Piñera's Parque Tantauco.

Since acquiring the property and declaring it a park in 2006, Piñera - who consulted with Tompkins about the project - has built an attractive guesthouse, an elegant campground with modern bathrooms and a spacious quincho for cooking, several hiking trails, and a series of refugios (shelters) along those trails for hikers who brave the park’s nearly incessant rain and soggy forests. At the same time, he’s created a plant nursery to reforest areas damaged by fire and logging, principally near the park’s overland entrance at Chaiguata, near the city of Quellón.

The park’s nucleus is its headquarters at Caleta Inío, a settlement created some 30 years ago to exploit the area’s extensive kelp beds. Accessible only by foot or motor launch from Quellón (2.5 to six hours away, depending on the vessel), Inío has a permanent population of about 50. Many of them are now park employees; others benefit from the park’s presence by offering lodging, meals, and handicrafts for sale. Given Inío’s isolation, they also benefit because Tantauco’s daily launch takes them to and from Quellón for free, on a space available basis (paying passengers have priority).

During my weekend, I stayed at the park guesthouse (pictured above), which offers only bed and breakfast, unlike Pumalín (which has a full-scale restaurant). I took my meals from the simpática Doña Silda Cadín, whose kitchen produced far better food than I had any expectations for. Her greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes, for instance, formed the basis of superb salads, and her carbonada (beef stew) and grilled fish were as good as, or better than, any restaurant in Quellón. She also offers decent accommodations, with full board and even satellite TV in the evening, for less than US$40 pp.

On arrival at Inío, I took a three-hour hike on the Sendero Punta Rocosa (pictured above), a trail that climbs to a solar-powered lighthouse erected by the park and then loops through rocky headlands punctuated by several small, secluded beaches. Tantauco, in fact, may have some of South America’s most beautiful secluded beaches, even if the South Pacific at this latitude is a bit too chilly for swimming except on the warmest summer days.

Though Tantauco’s really in its early days, one trek appears likely to become an instant classic: several hikers I met, almost all of them Chileans, had completed the five-day, 52-km Sendero Transversal from Chaiguata (reachable by bus from Quellón) to Caleta Inío, where they would catch the launch back to Quellón. En route, they stayed at the four simple refugios, which eliminate the need to carry a tent. The shelters also have cooking facilities and latrines (not flush toilets).

At first glance, the daily distances suggested - ranging from 7.5 to 15 km per day - sound pretty modest for experienced hikers at low altitudes (the trail’s highest point is only about 250 meters above sea level). That’s misleading, though, because a good part of the route crosses soggy (sometimes muddy) terrain and involves climbing up, over and down fallen tree trunks. Many but not nearly all of those trunks have steps cut into them, even then, they are often slippery and require caution to avoid spills and sprains (both of which I experienced over the weekend). In some areas, boardwalks, bridges and staircases make things easier.

Another option is the Sendero Quilantar (pictured above), a two-day, 22-km loop from Caleta Inío that includes a night at Refugio Quilantar; I hiked part of this route on Sunday. All trails are clearly marked with bright metallic triangles every 100 meters; at regular intervals, these also have numbers that indicate progress along the route. Still, given the area’s copious rainfall and winter storms that often knock down trees, maintenance is a major issue.

Combined with whale-watching in the Golfo de Corcovado, Parque Tantauco could make Quellón a notable eco-tourism destination. At the same time, Tantauco lacks some of the attention to detail that Tompkins brings to Pumalín and his other projects - Tantauco’s guesthouse, for instance, lacks double-paned windows, there are no books (though there are bookshelves), and there are no towels (bring your own). Electricity comes from a diesel generator (there are no suitable sites for a hydropower turbine, but wind power is a real possibility here).

It’s hard to imagine that Piñera can’t afford a wind turbine for Tantauco - his fortune, made largely through LAN Airlines and the pioneering implementation of credit card payment systems in Chile, must be immeasurably larger than Tompkins’s. On the other hand, for the Chilean president, Tantauco is just one of many projects; conservation appears to be Tompkins’s principal life goal.

In any event, I would recommend visiting Tantauco sooner, rather than later, before it’s become a fixture on the international eco-tourism circuit. If not, though, there may be at least one other option - across the Golfo de Corcovado, near the even more isolated settlement of Melimoyu, the Sociedad Naturalista Patagonia is assembling a 100,000-hectare ecological reserve in and around the 2400-meter Cerro Melimoyu. Sebastián Yancovic Pakarati, one of the of the Sendero Transversal hikers I met at Inío, is working on that project, which is not yet open to the public (in fact, from the website, it’s not clear that it ever will be). Sebastián, interestingly, is of Croatian and Rapanui (Easter Island) descent.

Lemonade at Tantauco

A short time ago, I received the news that my photograph of Laguna San Rafael will grace the cover of the upcoming third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia, whose manuscript I am in the process of finishing up. I’m pleased partly for ego reasons - I’m proud of the photograph - and partly because it means an extra paycheck (most Moon authors, by contract, provide their own photographs for the books, but there is no additional payment unless the publisher chooses one of your shots for the cover).

I’m also disheartened, though, because most if not all of that paycheck will go to pay for the blown head gasket on my otherwise trusty Nissan Terrano, which I use to explore the Southern Cone countries as I update Patagonia and my other books. It happened, fortunately, within the city limits of Quellón, on the Isla Grande de Chiloé, and I was able to get a well-equipped mechanic to look at it immediately.

That said, it will take at least four and perhaps seven days to get me back on the road - part of the machine work has to be done in the city of Castro, an hour to the north, and the upcoming weekend means an unavoidable delay. I’m not particularly fond of Quellón as a city but, that said, I will use my lemons to make lemonade by boating out to Sebastián Piñera’s 118,000-hectare (456 square mile) Parque Tantauco, the Chilean president’s own Pumalín-ish conservation project on the southwestern shores of archipelago’s big island.

Thursday afternoon I met Tantauco’s Quellón-based administrator Alán Bannister (despite the name, he’s 100 percent Chilean, but with English and German grandparents) and arranged an excursion that will let me spend the weekend at Inío, the park headquarters in the most southwesterly part of the park. In mostly roadless Tantauco, it’s three to four hours away, depending on the speed of the launch used to get there. There are a guesthouse, campgrounds and hiking trails throughout the park, but limited access has kept the number of visitors down.

I spent about an hour in conversation with Bannister, talking about the park’s origins and legal status, its conservation and educational initiatives, its natural and cultural history, and its future as an eco-tourism destination. As with my interview with Kris McDivitt Tompkins, I won’t have time to transcribe and edit it until later this year, when I return to California. Still, I should have more to say about the park after my return on Monday (presuming the fine weather here on Chiloé continues - part of the route crosses the open Pacific, where rough seas can delay departures and returns.

Paine's Road Back; Chiloé Update

In the aftermath of the recent wildfire at Torres del Paine, the Chilean government is trying to do what it can to salvage the season – whose peak is normally January and February – in the country’s iconic national park. With that in mind, they’ve adopted measures that can only be described as small-minded: in the country’s costliest park, whose entrance fee for foreigners is roughly US$30 (Chilean residents pay about US$8), they have decided to allow children under age 15 in for free.

This is a half-hearted measure at best. Many if not most of Paine’s visitors are foreigners, and very few of them bring children under age 15. Chilean families do, of course, but a relative handful of them are trekking the backcountry as most overseas visitors do. It’s hard to see this as an effective incentive for foreign visitors to head to the gateway city of Puerto Natales (whose economy depends on the park) and on to Paine, given the publicity the fire has gotten and the fact that the Argentine settlement of El Chaltén (pictured below), which offers comparable trekking in the adjacent Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, costs nothing to get in (other sectors of the park, most notably the Moreno Glacier, do impose a charge).

I’ve always objected to differential fees for foreigners, which both Argentina and Chile do in a haphazard manner, and not only because it’s flagrantly discriminatory (and don’t get me started on “reciprocity fees”). As a policy, differential charges assume that foreign visitors are more affluent that locals, even if they’re from neighboring countries. From a long-term perspective, it makes a bad impression on budget travelers who, if they make their initial visit as peso-pinching backpackers, might refrain from returning as prosperous professionals.

Still, if the government really wanted to make an impact, it might announce, for example, that park entrance would be free of charge for January and February, or perhaps even through April (when the trekking season ends for all practical purposes). Alternatively, it could include Paine in the new national parks pass, announced last year, that permits entrance into all Chilean parks, except for Paine and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for one calendar year.

Meanwhile, last Sunday’s New York Times revealed its list of 45 places to go to in 2012, and two of them were in southernmost South America: Chilean Patagonia (No. 8), and Chiloé (No. 37). Both figure prominently in the new third edition of my Moon Handbooks Patagonia title; for the former, the Times mentions two new Paine-centric properties, Tierra Patagonia and The Singular, that opened only very recently. The other property is one that’s nowhere remotely close to Patagonia, though it does enjoy a spectacular location less than two hours from Santiago.

For Chiloé, the Times notes that “President Sebastián Piñera has plans to share the island with the rest of the world,” but inexplicably overlooks any express mention of Piñera’s spectacular new Parque Tantauco (pictured above and below), a conservation and tourism project that I explored last February. It does mention the new airport near the city of Castro, which will improve access to the island, and environmental concerns over a 56-turbine wind farm. But the failure to mention Tantauco borders on negligence.

Airbridge to the Archipelago: Chiloé Gets an Airport

For the scenic archipelago of Chiloé, communications with the Chilean mainland have long been an issue. Only a few years ago, the government shelved plans for a grandiose toll bridge across the Canal de Chacao, which connects the main island with the mainland via continuous ferry shuttles from the port of Pargua. According to the online Santiago Times, though, the first commercial flights are due to begin in 2012 to Mocopulli, about 20 km north of the city of Castro via Ruta 5, the insular segment of the Panamericana, the Pan-American Highway.

Castro is a central point on the Isla Grande, the big island, but it’s presently three hours away from the nearest commercial airport at Puerto Montt by bus, which includes a half-hour ferry crossing. Still, just finding a suitable site for a jet runway had to be a challenge on its rolling if not quite mountainous topography.

When the flights begin, attractions like Castro’s own palafitos (houses on stilts, pictured at top), Parque Nacional Chiloé, the picturesque bayside towns of Chonchi and Dalcahue, and the wilds of Parque Tantauco (pictured immediately above) will be easier to fit into brief itineraries. Chiloé is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its shingled churches and chapels built by Jesuit missionaries in late colonial times; those are scattered around the archipelago, which includes dozens of other inhabited islands. The one pictured below is a church at the village of Tenaún, presently undergoing a major restoration of which only the facade is complete; note the scaffolding on both sides.

According to the earliest reports, LAN Airlines will fly thrice weekly from Santiago, at least in summer, and Sky Airline may follow suit. Still, with a population of only about 40,000 in and around the city, plus another 100,000 or so scattered around the rest of the archipelago, it seems likely that some flights may land in Puerto Montt before continuing to Castro.

There has been speculation that, eventually, some flights might continue to the southern Patagonian city of Punta Arenas, where many Chilotes (as natives of the archipelago are known) work because of Chiloé’s traditional poverty and high unemployment. If so, this would also benefit the tourism industry, because Punta Arenas is the traditional gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, Chile’s single most famous attraction.

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Road Trip Update: Chile's Carretera Austral

As the southern hemisphere winter sets in, there are few tourists along the Carretera Austral - which I have described as Chile’s top road trip - but what’s happening now in northern Patagonia’s Aisén region will have repercussions for the upcoming season and the coming decades. As Patrick Symmes details in the current issue of Outside magazine, the controversy over five new hydroelectric dams in the thinly populated region - two on the Río Baker and three on the Río Pascua - concerns a potential environmental catastrophe.

In his article, Symmes details the controversy over two new dams on the Río Baker (pictured here) plus three on the Río Pascua, plus a 1,500-mile transmission line that would require a 500-mile clear-cut through its forests (the online version of the article will not be available until next month, but there is a gallery of accompanying photos). In a country that lacks conventional energy resources - Chile produces perhaps 10 percent of its own fossil-fuel consumption - half the electricity comes from hydropower, which many Chileans consider the default option.

In terms of flow, the Baker is Chile’s biggest river and there are ideal dam sites along the Carretera Austral just north of the town of Cochrane (population about 2,200). Nevertheless, there is determined local opposition, including holdout farmers unwilling to surrender their prime bottomland even for an enormous payout that would set them up for life (it’s only fair to add that some locals support the project enthusiastically). The nationwide campaign for Patagonia Sin Represas (Patagonia Without Dams) and others have done their utmost to publicize the threat to the Baker but, as Symmes says, they have relatively little clout among Chile’s power brokers.

Except perhaps one: despite belonging to a center-right coalition, recently elected President Sebastián Piñera is a philanthropic conservationist who has set aside a large densely wooded portion of southernmost Chiloé as Parque Tantauco, a private nature reserve open to the public. In doing so, he followed the example of US conservationist Doug Tompkins, who created Parque Pumalín on the mainland across the Golfo de Corcovado, and with whom Piñera has cordial relations (unlike Chile’s previous center-left governments, some of which distrusted Tompkins intensely).

I can’t begin to analyze all the intricacies of the Baker controversy here - either buy the magazine or wait until Symmes’s article comes online - but I did write about it in more detail in a post in late 2007. It’s worth adding that the project would also affect the pending Parque Nacional Patagonia, a project to which Tompkins and his wife Kris McDivitt are major contributors. It’s also worth adding that the hydroelectric project would not help Aisén residents directly - all the power generated would go to metropolitan Chile.

Meanwhile, there’s another environmental controversy in the border town of Futaleufú, the whitewater rafting capital that’s the gateway to its namesake Class V river (pictured here). In its waters, scientists have discovered the so-called “toilet paper algae,” an invasive diatom that attaches itself to rocks and other submerged surfaces. Native to cool temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, but now found in New Zealand and Chile, Didymosphenia geminata kills off insects that fish feed on and, thus, could damage the area’s fly-fishing industry.

As the algae has likely arrived on rafting, kayaking and fishing equipment, foreign and Chilean operators may have to prohibit the use of imported gear. In the long run, it’s also a danger to the pristine clarity of the “Fu” and other rivers in the region but, unfortunately, local authorities seem to take it less seriously than the recreational operators.

There is some positive news out of the region. Carolina Morgado, of Parque Pumalín, has written me that work on the highway south from Caleta Gonzalo - closed since the 2008 eruption of Volcán Chaitén - is due to begin soon, and the park will reopen its Caleta Gonzalo facilities, including cabañas, a restaurant, and the visitor center, in the upcoming 2010-11 season. In the pending Parque Nacional Patagonia, meanwhile, “We have finished a lodge at Valle Chacabuco, and it’s a beauty.”

Conservation Conversation: Kris Tompkins's Patagonia, Part 1

Earlier this year, I stayed at the new lodge at Valle Chacabuco, the ambitious Chilean conservation project of environmental philanthropists Doug Tompkins and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins. In the course of my brief stay, I had the opportunity for an extended conversation with Kris (pictured above, center, at the lodge) over the proposed Parque Nacional Patagonia, including several topics related to the park and their other projects.

Because the conversation was so lengthy, I’m breaking it up into two parts; part two will appear in the near future. It covers their projects in both Chile and Argentina, under the auspices of the non-profit NGO Conservación Patagónica (CP).

WBB: I’ve met Doug before, and I’ve met you extremely briefly. Doug is in the press a lot more than you are.

KMT: A lot more.

WBB: I don’t know much about you personally – can you give me a nutshell biography?

KMT: I was born in California…fourth generation ranching family. I went to college, graduated and started working with Yvon Chouinard, who had climbing equipment for a couple years and then in 1973 we started Patagonia company. I started running that business a couple years later and retired in 1993 to move to southern Chile with Doug to start working in conservation.

WBB: Do you spend all your time here in South America? I understand you spend the summer in Pumalín and the winter in Iberá (Argentina).

KMT: Yes. I mean, we’re residents of the United States, we go between Chile, the United States and Argentina, but the great majority of our time is here. Our time is spent six months in Chile and six months in Argentina, being based out of those two places – we move around a lot.

WBB: With regard to Valle Chacabuco (pictured above), when did you acquire the place? Did you do so with the idea of creating a park?

KMT: In 2004. When we started coming through here in 1993, we looked at it as the kind of place you would like to turn into a park. We talked to the owner about it and he wasn’t necessarily interested, so we just went on and did our things and then, several years later, we heard that it might be up for sale, and that’s how it got started.

WBB: These were the Belgians? How long did it take to arrange the purchase? Were there any other bidders?

KMT: Yes, it was Francisco De Smets. To answer the first part of your question, it took about a year and four months from the time he said he was considering selling to the time that we actually took over. A lot of that was spent negotiating the price that we were prepared to pay versus what he felt was acceptable. Once a deal was struck, it got out into the press that and there was a group, non-government related, that was opposed to the deal. They put up a competing bid and that took about four months of very public back-and-forth about who would end up with Valle Chacabuco. Finally, at the very last hour, we were able to make a bid and close in a way that the owner thought was appropriate. It was brutal.

WBB: Who was the competitor? Was he planning to continue it as a wool estancia?

KMT: Ricardo Ariztía. Mr Chicken, though he has many other holdings besides chickens. He and about five other guys, for anything but conservation.

WBB: What’s the area of the estancia?

KMT: We originally bought about 173,000 acres. Since then, we’ve added three of four nearby inholdings to the park. We have one neighbor who’s not interested in selling. He’s surrounded by us and a touch of Reserva Nacional Jeinimeni. He has sheep and cattle.

WBB: How does this differ from Pumalín in setting it up, since this is not going to be a private nature reserve? What's the difference between the two projects? Will Conaf take over?

KMT: Well, of course, the landscape is different. We hope Pumalín will become a national park too. Both will fall under the new Ministry of the Environment, and will be going to whatever new national park system that they are going to create.

WBB: Is there a timeline?

KMT: The timeline was to have Valle Chacabuco donated by 2017. That was always the timeline, but these things are very opportunistic, often politically driven, so it could be sooner. It just depends on who the president is and all the infrastructure is set, and we feel the park is ready to go toward a donation. Then you have to see what the timing is. Our idea is not to hold onto it, but to make it into a national park.

WBB: By the infrastructure, you mean finishing the buildings, campgrounds…?

KMT: Campgrounds, trails, everything you’d find in a world-class national park.

WBB: Where are the campgrounds going to be, mostly along the highway?

KMT: The principal ones, certainly, the biggest of them all will be at the foot of this valley, and another at Casa Piedra as you go up toward the [Argentine] border. We will have a few campsites up in Lago Chico and other places, such as Lago Cochrane. They won’t be big fancy campgrounds, but there’ll be designated places where people can camp.

WBB: Does this property extend south to Lago Cochrane?

KMT: We go all the way to the lake, and then all the way to the border along the lake. The national reserve is contiguous.

WBB: How open to visitors is the park at the moment? Are there enough campgrounds functioning at the moment?

KMT: That’s the thing, that’s why we need to get two campgrounds going immediately because we’ve got visitors and, other than the lodge (pictured above), we have a little campground back here where stragglers and volunteers camp out, but that’s not a public campground per se. People can use it, but it’s not what you want visitors to be using. So people are welcome, but usually for the day, or they’re stuck in the working campground.

WBB: Will the facilities resemble those at Pumalín, in terms of what they offer in the campgrounds and such?

KMT: Yes, you know, a group area for cooking, some individual campsites, with little quinchos, and then a lot of places where people put up their tents and use the public bathrooms and showers.

WBB: Cold showers?

KMT: Yes.

WBB: Before we get onto that, I want to bring up the issue you mentioned of presidential power, whoever happens to be in power at the time. How has the current president responded to initiatives like this?

KMT: As Chilean presidents go, I think Sebastián [Piñera] has got a real chance to be remembered as a president who is very concerned about conservation. He has his own conservation project.

WBB: I have been to Tantauco, at least on the edges of it.

KMT: He’s also declared some areas as new protected areas. Is it a lot, well, he’s only been in office a year, but he certainly understands the necessity to have active protected areas, and that’s pretty rare.

WBB: Can he bring along the rest of his constituents, or his party, on the issue? If not, can he bring along enough of them?

KMT: I have no idea, but I doubt it. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t either. Chile has changed a lot since we started 20 years ago. We had a guest here the other night, a friend of ours, from the business community of Chile, and he has a significant place here on the other side of Lago Cochrane, and he really sees that as a private conservation initiative. Andrónico Luksic has a place down in Villa O’Higgins that they consider to be a conservation project. Little by little, things shift, just as they did in the United States.

WBB: Even now there remains a lot of opposition to expanding protection of public lands in the United States. Just in terms of infrastructure, I was surprised when I got in here yesterday to see the size of the restaurant. Are you anticipating tour buses coming through?

KMT: Yes. In another 25 years, you have to imagine Yellowstone when it was first designated a protected area, not a national park yet, there was almost no way to get up there until they put the train in. You have to imagine this park and other parks like it 25 or 50 years from now when there will be a lot of people coming, up from El Calafate and over, when Ruta 40 is paved.

WBB: That’s progressing faster than the Carretera Austral.

KMT: I mean, it’s happening fast over there and here.

WBB: Would you expect an expansion of something like the lodge here?

KMT: That’s not in the master plan, I can tell you that for sure. But after a certain point, we won’t be the ones to decide that.

WBB: You are encouraging people who have an interest in conservation, who have the means, to become donors.

KMT: We have an active fund-raising program for this project. Little Conservación Patagonia cannot possibly create this 650,000-acre park without partners. Impossible. It’s too big. CP started in the year 2000, the first project we did was the Monte León National Park. Have you been there?

WBB: I have been to Monte León (pictured above) several times. Looking at it from a distance, it seems it was simpler to accomplish that project on the Argentine side, or at least quicker, than it was to do this in Chile, at Pumalín. Would that fair to say?

KMT: They’re so different. Pumalín (pictured above) is almost 800,000 acres, and Monte León was a one-purchase, 155,000-acre sheep estancia that was going broke. It’s so difficult to compare the two. Monte León was fast because right after we made the donation, [the late former Argentine president] Néstor Kirchner came into power and he’s from Río Gallegos, and in order to make it a real national park you have to cede jurisdiction from [Santa Cruz] province to the federal government, and the provinces hate the federal government. But Kirchner came into power just months before the Río Gallegos legislature had to vote on that and he called up and effectively said, “I don’t want to look like a schmoe, everybody get in line and vote for this thing.”

WBB: So it was good timing.

KMT: So much in life is good timing. Monte León would have languished as a national park, but without real jurisdiction if Kirchner hadn’t happened to come into power then. He’d been governor forever of Santa Cruz and was able to strong-arm them – ceding jurisdiction requires a 100 percent legislative vote. Imagine trying to get that – that’s why it was so fast. We did it in 18 months. Little CP can manage that kind of project, which we did and we did it fast, but the scale and complexity of this project is different, and so this is the only project we have where we have partners and we absolutely couldn’t do it without them.

WBB: This is the first one where you’re using partners? How many partners are there? All foreign partners, or Chilean partners as well?

KMT: It’s the only one. There are many partners. Ever since we brought the property, I couldn’t have waltzed in here and spent enough money to have bought the initial property, US$10 million. We could do a lot of that, but we couldn’t do all of it.

The partners are mostly foreign, some European, one Chinese man who’s a business partner and the rest from the States.

WBB: Do you still run into objections because the participation is so overwhelmingly foreign?

KMT: We don’t get any objections to it, because this project is 100 percent run by Chileans. This project pays Chilean taxes, people have never cared nor would they analyze where all the funding has come from, they know that CP is a US-based public charity. Where the funding comes from, we don’t hide it, it’s no secret, but what people care about is who’s working here, who helps make the decisions about what’s going to happen, just as they wondered about with Pumalín and Corcovado, will we make national parks out of it? Well, now we have a track record for doing so, so I don’t think people worry about that. Certainly the government’s not worried about it.

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