Cycling Your Ash Off? Conquering Volcán Osorno

Yesterday, I left the ferry port of Hornopirén in the morning but, instead of continuing toward Puerto Montt – the formal starting point of the Carretera Austral – I left the the highway at Caleta Puelche to turn east on Ruta A-691, a narrow winding gravel road along the Estuario de Reloncaví (pictured above) en route to Petrohué, in Chile’s Parque Nacional Vicente Pérez Rosales. It was a slow drive, disrupted by road work in several places, though some northerly parts of it were paved just before and beyond the town of Puelo (where I had been before, approaching from the north).

It took four hours to drive the roughly 200 km from Hornopirén to the town of Ensenada, at the eastern end of Lago Llanquihue, where I had lunch. After that, I headed to Petrohué, the lakeport locality where the Cruce Andino to Argentina starts, and where I would be staying at Petrohué Lodge, with views of Lago Todos los Santos. It took a while to get there, though, because an urban-like traffic jam coincided with the end of the Conquista Volcán Osorno, a 77-km mountain-bike competition, with more than a thousand riders, around its namesake volcano (pictured below).

There were plenty of spectators along the route, and riders sometimes had to dart between automobiles on the gravel road within the national park boundary (outside that boundary, there’s a wide bike lane that goes all the way to Puerto Varas, 65 km to the west). The riders, though, had looped around the north side of the volcano and passed through what is normally a hiking trail before arriving at Petrohué.

I couldn’t speak to any of the participants, but this morning I asked a national park ranger about the wisdom of allowing such a major competition through an environmentally sensitive terrain of mid-latitude rain forest. While this was the 13th such competition, it was the first since the eruption of nearby Volcán Calbuco, which dumped large amounts of ash here last April. According to what he told me, many riders had to dismount because of deep ash, and he implied that this could be the last such event – at other times, bicycles are not permitted on park trails.

I sympathize with cyclists – I’m one myself, though I prefer paved roads – but I would still argue that this is not appropriate to the environmental goals of a national park. I’d hope that the organizers would find a more suitable route in an area that abounds in suitable terrain – though none of that terrain has quite the majesty of Osorno’s Fuji-perfect cone (pictured above, as seen from the eastern shore of Lago Llanquihue).

Johnny Cash at Calbuco? Chile's Ring of Fire Erupts Again

In my academic field of geography, one of the specialties is natural hazards, a topic which was never central to my own research but which always attracted my attention. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where we felt the massive Alaska earthquake of 1964 and the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 (though I had moved away by then, a friend in Seattle, 96 miles to the north, told me that he thought the sound was someone slamming his front door very hard). I’ve lived through many earthquakes in the Bay Area, most notably the 1989 Loma Prieta (World Series) event.

And, of course, I’ve spent plenty of time in Chile, which has given me the opportunity to write about earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and floods (especially in recent weeks). Now, near the southern mainland city of Puerto Varas, one of my favorite Chilean destinations, the 2,003-meter (6,570-ft) Volcán Calbuco (pictured in the BBC video above) has upstaged the more northerly Volcán Villarrica, about which I wrote only recently.

In fact Calbuco (pictured above in quieter times) was one of my backup climbing choices after the recent closure of Villarrica to climbers, but I never actually made it Varas this last summer (though I passed nearby en route to Puerto Montt for the ferry to Puerto Natales). After Calbuco unexpectedly blew yesterday, I wrote my German friend Andreas La Rosé of Puerto Varas’s Casa Azul hostel to ask the effect there, and he seemed unconcerned: “Until now we have south wind and no rain. So no ash! In the moment everything is fine!”

That, however, was not the case for residents of Ensenada, a picturesque town at the east end of Lago Llanquihue. From Puerto Octay, on the north side of the lake, Armin and Nadia Dübendorfer of Hostal Zapato Amarillo wrote me this morning that “the volcano has settled down for the moment. The Ensenada area is seriously affected and was evacuated yesterday afternoon. Last night there were tremors and [a second] eruption was powerful, with thunder and lightning, the column of ash red with reflection from the lava.”

My friend Franz Schirmer, a Swiss-Chilean who owns Petrohué Lodge about 20 km east of Ensenada, sounded almost non-plussed: “Lots of noise, sand, ash and a spectacular lightning storm last night. Everything’s fine and now we’re working on removing the sand…” Interestingly, he referred me to his Twitter account, which included photos of him and his children at Calbuco’s crater two weeks ago; I wonder when – if ever - I’ll get that opportunity to do that hike.

Meanwhile, most of the ash seems headed eastward and, across the Argentine border, the residents of Bariloche are preparing themselves for an ashfall that could match that of the Cordón Caulle eruption of 2011. That could affect the upcoming ski season, as it did then, and air traffic to and from Argentine Patagonia.

Llanquihue's Forgotten Lakeshore

Shaped roughly like an equilateral triangle, Lago Llanquihue is one of southern Chile’s most visited areas, thanks to towns like Frutillar, with its Germanic charm, and Puerto Varas, with its distinctive architecture, exceptional accommodations and fine restaurants. Both enjoy panoramas of Volcán Osorno, its snow-topped cone mimicking the perfection of Fujiyama.

For more than a century now, the bus-boat shuttle from Varas across the Andes to Argentina has been a cornerstone of the local economy, but there’s another part of the lake that gets too little attention: from Puerto Octay, at its northern tip, a newly paved road follows the lakeshore southeast to reach the hamlet of Ensenada, where it meets the road from Puerto Varas.

For a couple decades, I’d seen this road on the map but until a few years ago I had never driven the length of it – clearly it was scenic, but it was narrow, slow and mostly loose gravel. I often received letters from cyclists who told me about battling tábanos, the large but harmless horseflies that buzzed them as they pedaled up the hills (Except in early summer, when the flies are numerous, the road makes an ideal cycling route).

Now that the road’s completely paved, though – other than one graveled stretch of just 300 meters – I decided to drive it again on a Friday afternoon in December. I started from Puerto Octay, where the density of German-style architecture may be greater than in either Frutillar or Puerto Varas – I loved the historic Hotel Haase, with its second-story wrap-around balcony. Beneath its steep-pitched roof, the arched interior of the Iglesia San Agustín displayed glistening woodwork and walls.

I didn’t eat in town, but made a brief stop at the Casa Ignacio Wulf, another architectural landmark where Lácteos Octay lets visitors sample the cheeses at their retail outlet. Then I hit the highway to the southeast, foregoing the first paved segment to take a shorter gravel road along the lakeshore at Maitén, with Osorno’s symmetrical cone never out of sight. Just two days after Christmas, it was a balmy if breezy day, but only a handful of locals were enjoying the black sand beaches – in a week, though, they’d likely be packed.

Beyond rows of conifers that yielded volcano views, the route continued through a dairyscape of Guernseys and close-cropped pastures to Puerto Fonck – one of numerous small ports that dotted the lakeshore in the days when even gravel roads were a distant dream. I stopped to see the steepled German church and restored graveyard, where all the tombstones bore surnames like Galle, Konrad and Opitz, before intersecting the paved road at Puerto Klocker.

At Klocker, there’s a gravel turnoff to La Picada, where a good footpath lets hikers traverse the volcano’s northwestern flank to arrive at Petrohué, on Lago Todos Los Santos, where the catamaran crossing to Argentina starts. The paved route continues to Las Cascadas, a second-home beach community where I had hoped to lunch but, in the limbo period before New Year’s, I could barely find an open grocery for a chocolate bar that had to suffice until dinnertime.

Beyond Las Cascadas there’s no public transportation, but the newly paved road – with a wide bike lane - hugs the shoreline even through some very rugged areas such as Abanico, where a cantilevered bridge overhangs the lake. At a wider spot in the road, I pull off onto a wide spot and walk back to the bridge, where two Brazilian cyclists have arrived from Ensenada but decide to turn back because the tábano attacks are increasing (you can’t swat them when you’re on a bicycle, without risking a fall). Other cyclists, though, continue to speed past me on the downhill segment toward Las Cascadas.

Another reason I stop is because the road cut reveals an outcrop of columnar basalt, similar to others I’ve seen at California’s Devil’s Postpile and Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower. Abanico can’t match the size of those, but its distinctive polygonal landforms continue to fascinate me, even as I brush away the tábanos.

Beyond Abanico, the road soon enters Parque Nacional Vicente Pérez Rosales, Chile’s first national park, and there are several new pullouts along the road for different panoramas of the peak, which looms closer than ever. While the lakeside road proceeds to Ensenada, a steep but narrow paved spur climbs the volcano’s flanks, sometimes passing through forest so dense it feels like a tunnel, before emerging onto a treeless ski area.

In summer, the lifts carry hikers into the high country but, if you don’t care to do so, there’s food at two restaurants, including the stylish new Nido de Cóndores (pictured above). Otherwise, at Ensenada, it’s a right turn back to Puerto Varas, or a left to Petrohué.

Ferry Tales From Petrohué

Over the weekend, I spent a couple nights at Petrohué Lodge (pictured above), at the west end of Lago Todos los Santos, in Chile’s Parque Nacional Vicente Pérez Rosales. The Petrohué area, which takes its name from the river that drains the lake, is the lacustrine the starting point for the Cruce Andino, the trans-Andean tourist shuttle to the Argentine city of San Carlos de Bariloche that started precisely a century ago, in 1913. At that time, lake steamers, horses and mules carried the tourists and their baggage, but today it’s a bus-boat relay that reaches its peak in summer but operates all year.

In fact, the service across the Andes started in the mid-19th century to deliver products from bustling Puerto Montt to Bariloche at a time when the Argentine settlement was a precarious frontier hamlet, remote from Buenos Aires. Petrohué Lodge’s owner Franz Schirmer has recently built a tribute to his own family in the Museo Pioneros de la Patagonia, an impressive visual chronology of the area from pre-Columbian times to the present, paying special tribute to his great-grandfather Ricardo Roth and other key figures here.

One interesting fact is that, in 1913, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the earliest tourists to enjoy the scenery of the Cruce Andino (formerly called the Cruce de Lagos, it also navigates Argentina’s Lago Frías and Lago Nahuel Huapi). Roosevelt met Argentine explorer and conservationist Perito Moreno, who had earlier donated part of a land grant to create the Parque Nacional del Sur (now Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi), and his presence undoubtedly contributed to the fact that Todos los Santos and its surroundings became Chile’s first national park in 1926 (the photograph above, from Argentina’s Archivo de la Nación, shows Roosevelt on the Argentine side). Ironically, Pérez Rosales himself was responsible for promoting native forest clearance to establish German colonists in the area.

Another intriguing fact, the Swiss-Chilean Schirmer told me, is that a couple years ago he discovered a photograph proving existence of an aerial tramway intended to replace mules as the means of transport for goods across the Andes – something he had always thought was just a legend. Contacting a German scholar in Leipzig where the tramway was built, he managed to locate the blueprints and, later, he identified the route by overflying the park in a small plane. He and his father found remains of some of the towers, one of which is replicated in the museum (pictured above).

The project, unfortunately, failed because a protectionist Argentine government clamped down on trade from Chile, and it fell into disuse – well, non-use, actually, because it never really got a chance to function. Still, it makes for a good exhibit in a museum that bears visiting, with descriptions in readable English as well as Spanish.

FERRYING YOUR BIKE

At this time of year, the Cruce Andino is a daily event, with the catamaran Lagos Andinos carrying Argentina-bound passengers to Peulla in the morning and returning with their Chile-bound counterparts in the afternoon. It’s also possible to spend the day in Peulla and return to Petrohué in the afternoon.

Meeting Saturday’s afternoon boat, I was a little surprised to see so many arriving cyclists – who can ride part of the route - because through-paying passengers have priority. For several years, Cruce Andino has been reluctant to carry bicycles but, at present, they’re happy to do at no additional cost, even in the peak summer season. That could change as traffic recovers from the worldwide tourism downturn of 2008, but for now it’s good news for two-wheelers wanting to enjoy what Roosevelt did – always presuming, of course, that the weather holds in this fickle climate.