Reserve 12 nights in Aysen, Chilean Patagonia

This is the far end of Route 7, the road Chile signs as the Carretera Austral. It comes 1,240 kilometers down the country and then stops at Villa O'Higgins, because the ice in front of it has no road through it and is not going to get one. Twelve nights here means driving the last third of that road yourself.

Reserve 12 nights in Aysen, Chilean Patagonia and what you are actually reserving is three fixed points: a boat that goes once a week, a list a ranger reads at a hut before anybody steps onto ice, and the only house with beds on the far shore of a lake 2,742 feet deep. Everything between those three is yours. Which night you spend at Puerto Rio Tranquilo and which at Tortel, whether you sit out a wet day at Cochrane or push south into it, where you eat and when you start.

No air ticket is sold here. The long leg out of New Orleans, LA and the domestic hop that follows it are yours to book, and we would rather you had both in hand before we hold the boat, because that boat runs on one day of the week and moves for nobody.

The last 224 kilometers of Route 7

Cochrane is the last town of any size: about 3,500 people, a square with a clipped hedge around it, the last cash machine and the last full grocery for four days. South of there the pavement gives up for good. The road runs washboard gravel above the Baker, which moves more water than any river in the country, near 1,100 cubic meters a second where the Neff comes in, and at that junction the grey meltwater and the blue lake water run beside each other without mixing for the length of three football fields.

At Puerto Yungay the road stops at a fjord and starts again on the other side. A flat ramp boat worked by the state closes that gap in 45 minutes and takes no fare. In January it goes three times, first at ten, and it does not go at all when the wind is up in the channel. We hold nothing there and cannot. Queue by nine or lose the day.

Then Tortel, where roughly 500 people live on seven kilometers of cypress boardwalk and there is no street anywhere in the village. You leave the pickup on the hill and walk down. It is about 180 steps to the lower houses, and everything that arrives, a mattress, a stove, a sack of cement, comes down those steps on somebody's back.

One crossing a week down Lago O'Higgins

Villa O'Higgins sits 224 kilometers past Cochrane with nothing in between: no pump, no repair, and no signal across 130 of those kilometers. The lake begins where the road ends. The arm running southwest toward the ice is the deepest water on either American continent, and nothing crosses it on anything you would call a timetable. One company works the run to the far shore and back, once a week outside the few high weeks, weather permitting, leaving at half past eight in the morning for a reason you can watch develop: the westerly strengthens all day down that open water and by two in the afternoon it is at 35 to 45 knots.

That company holds the license for the lake, carries you under its own terms, and invoices you itself on its own account. We reserve the two seats and the 44 pounds of freight that goes with each of them, and we telephone the house on the far shore the evening before to say that two people are coming.

The house has four rooms, eight beds, a wood stove in the middle room and a generator that runs seven until eleven. Dinner is at seven, there is no second sitting, and there is nothing else cooked within a day's walk. Breakfast is at eight. In January the afternoon reaches 57 degrees at the water and the night falls to 34. People walk the shore trail, watch the glacier front three miles up the arm where it stands about 250 feet out of the water, and go to bed early because the reading light is one bulb on a generator that stops.

Somebody asks every season about walking on from that shore into the next country. That sits outside what our office arranges and outside anything it will advise on. The seats, the beds and the ranger list are held on the Chilean side and nowhere else.

The permitted day above the Exploradores valley

The second fixed point is 500 kilometers north of the first, and you drive to it. From Puerto Rio Tranquilo a gravel road turns west and climbs 52 kilometers up the Exploradores valley to a hut with a gate beside it. The tongue above that hut comes off the northern ice field, 1,600 square miles of it, and loses 4,900 feet across its final 12 miles, which is what leaves it standing in blocks and towers you can pick out from the road.

Walking on it needs a permit. The company running the day pulls that permit in your names off a list that closes 48 hours before, and a ranger reads the list at the hut at half past seven in the morning. Nobody unread goes through the gate. The day itself is nine hours: two hours through lenga and coihue forest, ninety minutes of moraine that shifts under the boot, four hours on the ice on a rope of five with crampons, then the same moraine going back down. Twelve people go up in a day and that is the cap, which is why the list closes when it does.

Between those two fixed points you have nine nights and nothing booked in them. Most people spend two at Puerto Rio Tranquilo for the marble along the lake shore, one at Cochrane, one at Tortel on the boardwalk, and leave the rest loose for weather. That is what the nine nights are for.

Reserving the twelve nights

Name the dates, not the month. The boat leaves one day a week and the ranger list is capped at twelve, so a month is not a question anybody can price. Give us the exact days and a costed answer against those days comes back inside two to four working days, and it will say plainly if one of the three fixed points is already taken.

Nothing on this page belongs to us. The house at the far shore belongs to the family cooking in it, the boat to the company licensed to work that lake, the pickup to whoever you hire it from, and the ice day to the operator holding the concession above the valley. Each of them bills you directly, in its own name and on its own account. Our office collects nothing at any stage and has no mechanism for it.

The Pine Gazette is the name Pine Gazette Bookings LLC works under at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, Louisiana 70001. Telephone +1 (504) 832-6194 if you would rather talk the dates through, or write to bookings@thepinegazette.com. If anything on this page reads wrong against what you find on the ground, corrections@thepinegazette.com reaches the person who keeps it current, and we would want to know.