Conguillo National Park — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

For our last full day in Chile, our travel agent had given us a choice of relaxing at a lake, or if we weren’t “volcanoed out”, we could visit one more national park. Guess which one we chose? We LOVED our decision. When we first drove in, we were immediately captivated by the desolation from previous volcanic eruptions (the last of which was in 2008) -

Llaima volcano is considered one of the most active volcanoes in Chile -

Of course we went hiking one last time, and enjoyed walking through a cool, shady forest canopy at first -

… and yes, there were Arcuaria trees -

It was neat to see a young one up close, and see how/where the branches form -

As we gained altitude, we caught glimpses of what we’d be seeing at the top viewpoint -

Off one side of the ridge we were hiking, was a deep valley with numerous waterfalls…

… and the other had Llaima volcano and Conguillo Lake -

You can see why Arcuaria trees are also commonly referred to as “umbrella trees” -

Near the top, we suddenly started seeing interesting…

… and beautiful flowers -

I loved this wildflower field -

Do you see the “tiny” volcano on the left side of the next picture? That’s Villarica, about 100 km away. It was the one that Steve photographed glowing at night.

I loved being able to take close ups of Llaima -

On our way down, Steve pointed out these interesting bodies at the top of this one Arcuaria -

Upon researching this I found out that these are male cones, while the big green balls I had photographed before were female cones.

Since I have always documented our hikes by length and altitude, I’ll do that one last time here. This trail, Sierra Nevada, took us 4 hrs to cover 8 miles and a little over 2,000ft elevation gain.

Now, back down in the park, there was a secluded little lake called Arcoris…