The rumors of my death...

...have been greatly exaggerated.

I'm back at home in Seattle, trying to adjust back to the idea of summer and the so-called real world. I plan to put up a few posts in the next week or so with pictures and witty commentary from Peru (Sacred cities in the clouds! Love gods of the Amazon! Amazonian river boats!), the north of Chile and Bolivia (Driest desert in the world! Gigantic salt flats! Pisco! Gazing into other galaxies!), the middle of Chile (The valley of paradise! I heart Pablo Neruda! Santiago is not as ugly as everyone says it is!), the Chilean and Argentinean lake districts (Scaling volcanoes! Scenes of spectacular beauty! I work for a week!), and my return to southern Patagonia (Whales! Surprising re-encounters with Tasmanians! The delicious flesh of innocent animals!).

I expect you all to wait with breath bated.

Escape from the sub-antarctic

Here are my housemates, Rina and Melisa, enjoying the balmy subantarctic fall weather on Isla Navarino. Seasons change fast at 55 degrees south.


Rina and I left Puerto Williams on the ferry to Punta Arenas on April 14th. It's a thirty hour navigation through impossibly remote channels full of albatross and whales and bordered by glaciers and rocky mountainsides covered in southern beech forests, and is, of course spectacularly beautiful.


I spent a couple of days in Punta Arenas working on my Elaenia albiceps paper, and then went to the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in Argentina to camp for a few days. I ran into a group of five Magellanic woodpeckers in the forest there, and still couldn't get a good picture despite the fact that I was only about a meter away from them.


I also fell madly, passionately in love with Cerro Torre. It defies words.


From there I went back to Torres del Paine to walk on Glacier Grey, which also defies description. It also involved ice axes and crampons and stuff, and how awesome is that?


Walking on the glacier is like walking through another world.


I also scaled a sheer wall of ice. Using ice axes.


Did I mention the ice axes? And that the wall of ice was sheer? (Ok, almost sheer.) Next I am going to climb K2.


And then I left Patagonia on the Navimag, which is a three day navigation on a ferry through the spectacular fjords, etc, between Puerto Natales and Puerto Montt, or so they tell me. For me, it was a three day navigation through a rain cloud with eighty gringos and several hundred sheep and cows, which was, I suppose, fun in its own way.


Continuing north, I spent a couple days in Corral, a tiny town near Valdivia, being fed horrific quantities of limpets (they have really, really big limpets in Chile) and assorted other shellfish by Rina's mother, and then continued on to Santiago. Tomorrow I fly to Lima to meet my little sister Alison for a whirlwind tour of Peru.

Hummingbirds

In April the notro (Embothrium coccineum) flowers for the second time, and one species of hummingbird, the Green-backed Firecrown (Sephanoides galeritus), comes to the island to feed on the nectar of the bright red flowers, possibly to fuel up for their winter migration northwards. Rina and I spent three days camped on the coast mist netting at the very end of March, and caught and banded four individuals, two males and two females. Neither of us had ever handled, much less banded, a hummingbird before, so we were pretty thrilled by it all.

Getting a band onto a leg that tiny exactly the easiest thing I have ever done, but with patience and tweezers we managed it. We make the bands ourselves, out of tiny strips of metal.



The first female.



The first male.



The second female.



The second male. The hummingbirds have incredibly long wings, and I think that they look like tiny, iridescent green rocket ships.

Tongue Birds and Tree Horses

My favorite insect here is the caballito de palo, which means little horse of the wood. It is a giant weevil, and plays dead on being picked up.



We caught a juvenile female Magellanic Woodpecker in the mist nets in March, only the third individual that has been caught and banded in seven years of mist netting on the island. Magellanic Woodpeckers are the biggest extant woodpeckers in Latin America, and are second only to the (maybe extant) Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the western hemisphere as a whole. It was extremely exciting to catch and band it, but I was also somewhat afraid it was going to stab my eyeballs out with its huge, tree shattering bill. I can’t imagine what it would be like to handle an adult.



A Fire-eyed Diucón.

Los Dientes de Navarino

Towards the end of March I finally managed to find time to do the trekking circuit around the Dientes, the jagged mountain range that cuts Isla Navarino in half lengthwise. The circuit is marked, with cairns and blazes on rocks, but there is no real trail, and many of the blazes have faded or disappeared, and this, combined with the rather extreme remoteness of the area and the instability of the weather, makes it a pretty serious five day hike. (While I was in Torres del Paine a group of Israelis had to be rescued from the Dientes by helicopter by the Chilean navy. Apparently they called their parents back in Israel on their satellite phone, and their parents called the Chilean embassy in Israel, and the embassy somehow arranged the rescue.) My hiking partner, a volunteer from England, and I were stuck for two nights at our first camp due to substantial snowfall during the first night, and then said English boy decided that he was sick and had to go back to town, leaving me alone in the wilderness to finish the trek. This was probably a good thing, really, but that is another subject entirely. I didn’t see another human for the next four days, until I got back to Puerto Williams, and had an amazing time.

Coming over the top of the first pass, in the snow. The trail follows the mountainside on the right just below the jutting bands of rock to the next pass, visible as the low point between peaks roughly in the middle of the picture.



I thought that the landscapes in the Dientes were actually more beautiful than anything I saw in Torres del Paine (apart from the glaciers), but I am deeply biased.





The entire circuit, apart from the very beginning and very end, is above 400 meters, and it was well into autumn at that elevation. The colors were amazing, especially for a northwest girl such as myself accustomed to the unchanging greens of the conifer forests back home.



I was probably lost when I took this picture. I was lost for a while on my fifth day, and only barely made it to a viable campsite by dark.



The last pass, on my fifth day.



Looking over the edge of that last pass. My campsite was at the far end of the lake, and sunset was approaching frighteningly fast. It was a very steep, and very intense descent followed by a race against the sun around the edge of the lake. The wind that night was so strong that at times it bowed the tent poles enough to touch me, lying in my sleeping bag in the middle of the tent.



The last day, Puerto Williams coming into view. You can see the buildings of the defunct fish farm where the trek officially ends directly below, the coastal road (this is Navarino’s only road, in fact), and Puerto Williams in the distance in the third bay. A friend happened to be driving by just as I came to the fish farm, so I was saved the two hour walk back to town along the road.

Mas all del fin del mundo...

I returned to Puerto Williams in the middle of February, and adjusted back to life on my small sub-antarctic island.

Puerto Williams as seen from the Beagle Channel, taken from the boat from Ushuaia to the penguin colony.



Puerto Williams again, taken from the ferry to Puerto Toro. My house is the super cute pink one with the spaces on either side. You can see Los Dientes de Navarino in the background, between the two hills.



Rina and I went to Puerto Toro on the ferry for a day in March. Puerto Toro, on the eastern side of Isla Navarino, is the real, for real, actual southernmost settlement in the world (as long as we leave Antarctica and its plethora of military bases and research stations out of the equation), and exists for the sole purpose of fishing. There are something like 35 residents and almost as many fishing boats, and its only contact with the outside world is the ferry, which comes twice a month. We wandered around for a couple hours, and had coffee at the house of the world’s southernmost policeman (carabinero), and then went with his daughters to see the trenches, observation posts that are remnants of the conflict with Argentina.



The Beagle Channel is a seething mass of dolphins, sea lions, penguins, albatross, and sundry other seabirds, so we spent our hours on the ferry navigating from Puerto Williams to Puerto Toro and back outside peering through binoculars. There was also this impressively sized shipwreck, apparently led (presumably accidentally) onto the rocks by the boat guiding it through the channel.

Torres del Paine

My tourist visa for Chile expired at the end of January, so I took the boat to Ushuaia, up the coast and across the Beagle Channel in Argentine Tierra del Fuego, to reset it, and then travelled on to Chilean Patagonia to spend eleven days trekking on the circuito grande in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. It’s very, very strange to come from Puerto Williams (the southernmost town in the world) to Ushuaia, which bases its public image around being the southernmost city in the world and calls itself “El Fin del Mundo.” It was as if the town I had lived in for some three months had magically ceased to exist once I crossed the channel into Argentina – even when I took a boat trip to a penguin colony east of Puerto Williams and we passed by in view of the town, it still didn’t exist in the eyes of the Argentines. (This is why, incidentally, in a gesture symbolic of the relationship between Argentina and Chile, the slogan for The Comuna Cabo de Hornos is “Mas Alla del Fin del Mundo.) It was also strange to arrive in Ushuaia because it is full of things that I am no longer accustomed to, such as paved streets, cars not on the brink of total mechanical collapse, buildings of more than one story, restaurants, and well-dressed people going out to said restaurants.

Torres del Paine was, of course, amazing, full of jagged mountains and glaciers and the odd topography where the flatness of the pampa crashes into the cordillera.

Climbing towards the Paso John Gardner, the circuit’s highest point.



The view of Glacier Grey from the top of Paso John Gardner, where the wind gusts so hard that it is literally impossible to make forward progress against it, although it luckily ebbs for brief periods in which it is merely really, really hard to walk forward. Glacier Grey is part of the Camp de Hielo Sur, an incomprehensibly vast expanse of ice that stretches northwards for some 300 kilometers along the Chile-Argentina border. Coming up over the pass into the wind and being confronted with my first view of the ice field filling the valley below me may well be the most awe-inspiring thing I have ever experienced.



The trail from the pass leads down and then along the glacier, never descending all the way to the edge of the ice. I camped, and in the morning I noticed what could, concievably, be considered a way down to the edge of the glacier, which is to say that there was a footprint in the moss and a vegetation choked crack in the face of the rock. I went to the guardaparques, and asked if it was possible to climb down. No, they told me, it was absolutely not allowed, but…it would take about an hour, and wasn’t that hard. Maybe an hour to get down. So, after deciding it would be way, way too dangerous and that I would probably break all my limbs and then fall in a crevasse and die, I climbed down to touch the glacier. (It actually reminded me a lot of going to the ice caves in Washington State with my father when I was little…something about the quality of the air that close to so much ice.)



I spent two nights at the high camp in the Valle Frances, sharing the campsite with two Swiss geologists who had been there for three weeks, and, finally ready to move to a new site, were trying to figure out the best way to get their backpacks full of rocks and all their gear back down to the main trail. The Valle Frances is implausibly beautiful, but it snowed all during my second night and I was unspeakably cold.



And, finally, Las Torres themselves. Here they are from below at dawn – I climbed up to their base the day before, in the afternoon, and didn’t bother getting up before sunrise to climb up again for the dawn, which I kind of regret.

Pajaritos

A couple from the mist nets...

The teensiest, cutest bird ever. This is a cachudito, or Tufted Tit Tyrant.


Me with a rayadito. They are way fiercer than they look, and bite really hard while being untangled from the net.


And a couple from the seagull colony...

A hatching Dominican Gull chick, working its way free of its egg.


Fluffy, cute Dolphin Gull chicks in their nest. The Dolphin Gulls, being fierce and brutal birds, will try to kill any chick that isn't theirs the second it leaves the nest.


Here are adult Dolphin Gulls defending their chicks from each other. The gull colony is a pretty exciting place.

Orquideas y Visones

The orchids here are amazing, and grow everywhere, like weeds.

Orquidea Amarilla (Gavilea lutea).


Orquidea Chica (Chloraea chica). This one apparently is not officially recorded to occur on Isla Navarino, so it's cool to see it.


My favorite, the palomitas (Codonorchis lessonii).


Baby mink, being adorable and invasive. We were very lucky to see them.

Paisajes

The plane that I arrived on in November, the DAP, with the Dientes de Navarino visible behind it.


The Beagle Channel and Argentina, taken from in front of my house. This is the view from my kitchen and living room.


Looking east up the road, again from my house, in the aftermath of a rain storm.


The Beagle Channel.


The trees in exposed places here grow into permanently windblown shapes.


Up on the Cerro de la Bandera, looking west.

Photos

Tierra del Fuego wetland:


A stream in pristine forest:


An enormous castorera (beaver dam):


Drowned forest resulting from a castorera:


My first view of Puerto Williams, from the air:


This sphagnum (peat) bog turned out to hold about forty tiny populations of Tayloria dubyi:


A jilguero (Carduelis barbata) captured in the mist nets


Gaviota Austral (Larus scoresbii) nest:



Part of the gaviota colony at Punto Gusano, with Puerto Williams visible in the background:


Caiquen (Chloephaga picta) nest, with eggs.


A caiquen nest with hatchlings.