Last week this column described a sailing voyage from Tierra del Fuego to Cape Horn and through the Beagle Cannel I took with four old (emphasis added) friends. In addition to the rigorous sailing, the graceful seabirds and majestic scenery, we spent a day and a half at an estancia (the Spanish for ranch) at the head of a fjord called Yendegia. What follows is a brief recount of our visit to this stunning area, where its American owner, Doug Tompkins, who started two successful clothing companies, North Face and Esprit, is trying to return an entire valley and mountain range to its original vegetation and complement of wildlife
February 10, 2010
Last night we turned north into the fjord known as Yendegaia in the dark, watching the depth meter once we reach the head of the fjord as we crept toward shore. We finally anchor at Caleta Ferari, the location of a vast 80,000-acre estancia, where our captain plans to introduce us to José the Gaucho, the ranch’s caretaker, who has wildish horses he rents.
When we head ashore the next morning to the estancia, our first mate, Laura, warns us that the scene may be “a bit rough,” which immediately proves to be the case when we find a collection of horse and hooves shanks on the beach that have been gnawed to the bone by the gaucho’s innumerable dogs. Because the estancia’s owner wants to return the area to its wild state, the gaucho’s job is to round up wild horses and cattle and eliminate them from the range, so they will not compete with indigenous wildlife, which explains the innumerable dogs whose role it is to reduce the wild horses to piles of bones.
José the Gaucho greets us in handmade horsehide chaps and a black beret with his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. In a sling across his back, he carries an 18-inch blade called a falcone. Life may be simple and rough here on the estancia but José is clearly a rakish fellow. The gaucho is a man of few words and doesn’t speak any English, so that settles any sustained effort at communication. He has rounded up the horses from the huge outback pastures-there are 40 of them that have been tamed-and has saddled six of them up for us.
We climb aboard a variety of horses of various colors and sizes and head away from the beach with José at the head of the horse column. One of our company remarks that this is not what he remembered from 4-H-horseback riding back in elementary school. We take off through thick brush, across beaver flooded terrain; we ford streams, cross bouldery outwash plains and follow muddy trails along the lacustrine forest on the banks of the meltwater river as we make our way up to the head of the valley. These old mustangs have finally found their calling. Suddenly we are cabelleros! José, a real cabellero hand rolls cigarettes at a full canter while the rest of us mostly concentrate on keeping one leg on either side of our horse with our minds in the middle.
When we reach the head of the valley after a two and a half hour ride, we dismount and José stays with the horses that he tied off under a huge mountain headwall amid a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid landscape. We begin on foot up over the terminal moraine and through and unearthly landscape that has been massively reshaped by the grinding glacier. Vast slabs of melting ice have been stranded in front of the receding glacier and we feel like small specks walking up the valley toward the ice face at the edge of the high corrals of the williwaws. When we finally stop after an hour and a half near enough to the ice face and rest a few minutes, the naturalist looks up and sees three large raptors circling overhead. Laura thinks they might be condors.
We return to where the horses are grazing and mount up to head down the valley. We have been joking nervously about the return ride, especially one of us who is having a new experience as an equestrian because we suspect how eager our mounts are to return to the shore to graze for the night. The one member of our company who knows something about riding takes off in the lead-his stepfather had bought a stable where he worked as a kid, so he is one with his horse. José gallops easily past him and then it is all over-we are instantly all at a full gallop down the valley as the landscape opens up-and it’s Katy Bar the Door. Most of us, most especially yours truly-are holding on for dear life. At one point both of the naturalist’s gormy hiking boots come out of the stirrups at once, which at a full gallop recalls Gabby Hays flailing along in the mud behind Hop Along Cassidy. The ride, which took two and a half hours to the head of the glacier, is compressed (compressed is the operative word) into less than hour during the return-one of the wildest single hours in our long lives.
When we finally get back to the estancia, it is all several of us can do to dismount and pretend to walk down to the shore where Miles, our captain, comes to retrieve us and gently lift us aboard the dinghy.
Que dia! What a day!
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.