Chilean National Parks — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

The title of this post is kinda vague, but I’m including several parks that we visited over the course of a few days. As you’ve noticed from these posts from Patagonia, we prefer nature and wild places to cities with crowds.

The next park we visited was Ventisquero Colgante, with ventisquero translating as “snowdrift”. This is a hanging glacier with impressive waterfalls, and of course it took a moderate hike to get to a nice viewing area.

This is the runoff from the glacier that you can see a bit of, in the upper center of the next picture -

Blankets of mosses and ferns covered everything, including rocks!

Water, water everywhere (running down hillsides)…

… and even down the middle of the trail…

… making things just “a bit” muddy -

As we were climbing, we heard a big boom and knew that part of the glacier broke free. We were bummed that we had probably missed our only chance to witness this, but we had to just keep climbing. At the top, we reveled in the big picture…

… and I enjoyed using my long lens to appreciate details -

When I looked up details on the falls, I found that they are estimated to be 1,800 ft tall, but could be 2,000 ft, due to a lack of reliable measurements. This puts them among the 5 tallest waterfalls in South America. I really liked how the water just turned to mist by the bottom -

As I was watching the mist swirling and starting to take a video of it… (please be sure and open the video in a browser, and have the audio on) -

… I caught it!! Wow - that was some boom!

I also loved the blue of the glacier -

So, we were moving on…

… passing more rivers and mountains -

Most bridges are one lane…

… even over the widest rivers -

The next day we had to leave our beautiful Lago Yelcho…

… and head to Pumalin Park. This is a 1,000,000 acre national park created by Tompkins Conservation, endowed and led by Doug and Kris Tompkins of North Face and Patagonia, Inc. fame, respectively.

We wanted to hike to the viewpoint of that glacier you see in the picture above, but unfortunately, the road to it was being repaired (and was going to reopen 2 days after we left!). So, we happily settled for a quiet walk in the woods…

… except for a loudly babbling brook…

… and this lil’ fella -

This is a Chucao Tapaculo, and they are only found in southern Chile. He put on quite the show for us -

After driving nearly 2 hours around to the other end of Pumalin Park, we were able to visit the ancient Alerce trees. They are known to live for thousands of years, and to me, they somewhat resembled redwoods, but are actually in the cypress family.