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The Vista Social Club1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
The next morning, we hike up a ridge next to the resort to see what we’d heard the night before. The wind immediately sweeps the weight from Lynn’s shoulders, but my spirit is slower to lift. I am too busy trying to match this landscape against memory. I have seen this place before but never all at once: alpine peaks, glacier-fed lakes, semi-arid grasslands, flat outcrops, deciduous forests bursting into autumn colours, coastal tumult. All of Canada in one square mile. Explora’s luxurious campus is located at Salto Chico, where the emerald Lago Pehoé empties down into the Rio Paine. It lies deliberately low upon the land, allowing the view from the ridge to be dominated by the peaks known as the Horns, and behind them the obelisk-like towers, or torres, which give the park its name. “Ten thousand years ago, as the glaciers receded from this area, they formed the topography of the region,” explains Juan, our shaggy twentysomething guide from Santiago. Lynn, a self-schooled geology buff, loves talk of receding glaciers. “The Laurentians, the Alps, Patagonia – always it’s the glaciers,” I whisper to her. “Is there any landscape they can’t forge?” She laughs at my joke and ignores my cynicism. As the details person in the relationship, I am rapt by the balsam bogs at our feet: a native plant that looks and feels like moss on a rock but is, in fact, a densely packed, low-lying shrub. It strikes me as a clever wind-resistant adaptation. We pass a massive cubic boulder looking out of place atop a hill. Lynn says it’s called a glacial erratic, the geological term for something the icefield left behind by mistake. I feel like Patagonia is the planet’s largest-scale glacial erratic. Never has a roaming icefield been so inspired, or so schizophrenic, as to leave behind such diverse terrain. We arrive at a nearby ranch for lunch and are greeted by a rack of lamb. Called asado, it’s the entire beast stretched out and roasted over an open-pit fire. Local gauchos will carve your preferred cut – leg, shank, rack – on demand. An afternoon hike takes us over rolling pampas. We walk alongside a fence and come upon a large herd of guanacos, the llama’s ratty-coated, baby-faced Patagonian cousin. We spot two condors circling in the distance, and as we walk through a shallow valley, more and more join them until there are dozens of three-metre wingspans aloft – a living funnel cloud. The smooth, grassy landscape is so markedly different from the ridge, it seems we cannot be just two kilometres further south. |
