• Andean Geotrail Blog (In English)
  
• Fat Cyclist
  
• Our Long Haul Honeymoon
  
• The Andean Geotrail
  
• The Andean Geotrail Blog (In French)
  
• Up In Alaska
  
• Walking the Andes (In French)
  
• Ze Movers (In French)
  

Cruzando la Frontera

By Chris Thompson - 2009-03-10

Deep blue glaciers were suspended high above us, obscured by the thick clouds hanging around the mountain tops. The deck was slippery with water, it was raining as we slid along the cold blue surface of Lago Desierto. As the boat cut through the water, the anticipation built like the bow wave the boat pushed up in front of us. The steep black cliffs released their granite grip at the north end of the lake. A small patch of green grass and woods sat behind the small wooden dock. The Argentinean border station sprawled across the edge of the lake, small curls of smoke lazily drifted out of the tin chimneys. We left our boat and walked towards the border post. Bored soldiers sat inside in front of the television and ‘toman la mate che’, sipping the ubiquitous tea from wooden cups. After our passports were stamped, we set out to find Chile. There wasn’t even a sign to indicate where the trailhead was. Behind some horse stables, we found a rickety wooden bridge that seemed to lead up the side of a muddy slope. The bridge was the path to more than just a hike through the woods.

We lay at the foot of the Andes, the gigantic ‘Campo Hielo Sur’ , or the southern ice country. A giant cap of ice that births more glaciers than you can shake a stick at peeked over the ridge above us. Thousands of waterfalls streamed down the sides of the mountains, filling the deep icy blueness of the lake below us. The Campo Hielo Sur fed the cold wind that froze us to the bone. It fed the massive Lago O’Higgins that stood between us and the Carretera Austral. It fed the border conflict between Chile and Argentina, who still fight over it’s massive water reserves. It fed the glaciers, hard icy fingers, that gouged the land out so long ago. The mountains that stood in our path, the deep gorges that we descended into, the cloudy passes we crawled up, all fed by the Campo Hielo.

So there we stood, below the blue glaciers and black rock, standing on the muddy trail, looking up. We realized that our necks seemed to be angled too far back for this to be a normal hiking trail. This is the sort of neck bending that goes on at firework displays. It was already nearly one in the afternoon, so we started off. For the next eight hours we would be sweating, shivering, pushing, slipping, dragging, and falling up, and up, and up. After the first hour, we had barely covered half a mile. The trail was a deep muddy rut carved into the ground by so many horse trains and rain storms. Exposed roots grabbed at our legs and panniers, suddenly arresting already precarious progress.

We were leaving Argentina. Our passports stamped at the shores of Lago Desierto, we had set out on a trail to the Chilean border station that lay on the shores of Lago O’Higgins, on the other side of the pass. Somewhere in-between was the ‘frontera’, or the official border between Chile and Argentina. This pass is one of the few legal foot crossings between the two countries. It was to be one of the highlights of this part of our trip, and I had been waiting for it with anticipation. As we crossed into Chile, we were entering Patagonia, and starting our trip on the Carretera Austral, the remote southern highway Pinochet carved through Chilean Patagonia in the 1980’s. Deep lush forests, craggy mountains, glaciers suspended overhead like so many blue-white clouds: Patagonia. After the dry brownness of the pampas, the windswept bareness of the ranchlands, Patagonia lay before us like some sort of dream.

The dream was crushed a few hundred yards from the border. I was face down in the mud, halfway across a creek. My bicycle was sitting on top of me. It was probably a good time for a break. All this pushing and pulling, lifting and throwing, was getting a little too hard. I remembered suddenly that it wasn’t the best idea to take a nap in an icy bed of mud. “Up and at ‘em“. The border was only a few hundred yards away, marked by a single metal cairn. Ahead were what looked like the remains of a road, long forgotten, laying in a shallow grave of fist sized rocks. In a few kilometers, it actually became ride-able for the first time in seven hours. Never has pedaling a bike up a steep rocky incline felt so good. Perched on the edge of a cliff, we slowly descended down the windswept road, our brakes ground to useless powder by the wet and grit. We had made the border crossing between Lago Desierto in Argentina, and Lago O’Higgins in Chile. Dripping passports in hand, we arrived at the Carabineros’ border station, cold and wet. Method of travel: bicycle. We received our entry stamps. “Bienvenidos a Chile“.