For many, the name Patagonia, with a stylized mountain ridge line as its corporate logo, is nothing more than the imaginative moniker of a California outdoor clothing line with stores in more than ten countries. However, for the company’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, an American alpinist from Maine, it proudly commemorates his successful 1968 ascent of the sheer granite spire of Mount Fitzroy, technically, one of the most difficult climbs in the world. This legendary Andean peak is in the heart of the geographical area known as Patagonia – the great wedge of continent that forms the southern tip of South America. Here, giant waves, born on the shores of Antarctica, assault wild rocky beaches, and inland, great tracts of grassy steppe sweep beneath immense cerulean skies and nurture exotic creatures with exotic names such as guanaco, rhea, tinamou, caracara, and huemul. And above it all, rise the chiselled flanks of the mighty Andes, home to some of the most spectacularly beautiful mountain landscapes on Earth, where magnificent Andean condors soar on wind-swept wings and elusive, golden pumas hunt the treeless slopes.
I travelled to Patagonia for the first time in 1992 when Joe Van Os and I led an exploratory trip to assess the region’s merit as a photo destination. At the time, Patagonia was well known to trekkers and climbers, but few photographers knew of its beauty and allure, and no other photo tour company ran trips to the area. What we saw astounded us with its visual magnificence. Since then, Van Os has run dozens of successful photosafaris to Patagonia. This past April was the eighth time I led a trip to this visually beautiful part of South America, and as always, it did not disappoint.
After a sumptuous welcome dinner in Buenos Aires, we left the next morning on the three-hour flight to Calafate, known as the gateway to Los Glaciares National Park, the largest national park in Argentina. From the airport we took a private bus to the small mountain village of El Chaltén, the trekking capital of the country. En route, we saw countless guanacos, wild members of the camel family and the progenitors of the domestic llama. No matter where we walked in the village, we were overshadowed by the jagged peaks of the flanking mountains, with the 11,168-foot Fitzroy Massif being the most prominent among them. For the next three days, we explored the surrounding Las Vueltas River valley and grassy steppes, always beginning and ending each day attempting to capture the visual glory of Fitzroy and its accompanying peaks. The weather gods blessed us with remarkably photogenic skies, and as a result, we captured the mountains in a range of lighting conditions. Also, during our stay in El Chaltén we were treated to several additional photographic highlights.
- A juvenile black-chested buzzard eagle feeding at length on a dead king salmon in the shallows of the river.
- A dozen crested caracaras, a pair of buzzard eagles, and an Andean fox sequentially feeding on a guanaco carcass, while an inquisitive Andean condor wheeled overhead.
- The picturesque Chorillo del Salto waterfalls that plunge 65 feet and continue as a gentle stream flowing through a rust-tinted forest of southern beeches. The trees had become gnarled and weathered over the years by the persistent winds for which Patagonia is notorious. Adding to the experience was the sighting of a pair of rare Magellanic woodpeckers that were mining the tree trunks for hidden edibles.
After a final morning with the golden light of sunrise bathing the flanks of Mount Fitzroy, we retraced our steps back to Calafate, where we stayed for two nights to explore the legendary Perito Moreno Glacier. Until 2020, while most of the glaciers in the world continued to melt and retreat in response to global warming, the Perito Merino Glacier was in a remarkable state of equilibrium. Since then, however, even this massive glacier cannot contend with the rising world temperatures, and it has also begun to slowly retreat.
The Perito Moreno Glacier is just one of 48 glaciers spilling out from the edge of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, reputed to be the world’s third largest reserve of freshwater after Antarctica and Greenland. On the tour, we were able to capture the photogenic glacier from two different vantage points. In the morning, we used a multi-level boardwalk to explore different viewpoints of the glacier’s three-mile-wide terminal face that rises an average of 240 feet above the turquoise blue waters of Lago Argentino. Later, in the afternoon, we took a boat trip that allowed us to closely approach the sun-washed northern face of the glacier, where we were able to capture its creviced surface from an angle not normally possible.
After the scenic splendor of Los Glaciares National Park, we made the all-day journey to Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, for my money, the most beautiful park in all of South America. In the words of author William Leitch, Torres del Paine “is not a mere park, but a park of parks, a destination of travelers to whom a park is more than a place in which to be entertained, but rather an experience to be integrated into one’s life. Torres del Paine is the sort of park that changes its visitors by setting standards of sheer sensory impact against which all other parks are thereafter measured.”
Soon after we crossed the border into Chile, we happened upon an old fashion, traditional cattle drive in which half a dozen classically garbed gauchos, riding muscular horses and aided by a throng of 15 barking dogs were herding roughly 100 cattle from one pasture to another providing us with a spectacle that our local guide Juan said was rarely seen today.
Once we settled into our hotel in Torres, we spent the next five days exploring the wonders of this fabulous mountain park. Every morning, we spent the sunrise hours photographing the Horns of Paine, one of the most recognizable mountain features of the park. By using various locations and vantage points, we were able to take advantage of a range of photo opportunities. The weather in the mountains can always ruin the best of photo plans, but once again, as had happened in El Chaltén, the weather gods were benevolent, and we enjoyed a mix of sun and cloud that made for some exciting landscape imagery. With five shooting days at our disposal, we were able to revisit areas to view them in different lighting conditions. In our meanderings, we repeatedly photographed the famous Towers of Paine, sometimes with Lago Amarga in the foreground and at other times it was Lago Azul. The various waterfalls and rapids that interrupt the flow of the Paine River, which was often flanked by the orange and red flush of autumn southern beeches, were other exciting landscape opportunities. Torres del Paine is not only known for its landscape beauty but also for its wildlife richness. Because it was autumn, most of the migratory birds in the park had already flown north to gentler climes for the winter. As a result, we focused on several of the park’s resident mammals, in particular the guanacos and Patagonian gray foxes, and with both species we were remarkably successful. However, there was one legendary mammal, the puma, known in North America as the cougar or mountain lion, that we all hoped to see, but no one expected it to happen. Nevertheless, late on the afternoon of our fourth day in the park, our collective wish came true. For nearly an hour, we watched a mother puma and her two six-month-old cubs crisscross back and forth in front of us, sometimes lounging, sometimes wrestling for possession of an old armadillo carcass, and at other times searching for a fresh one to hunt. For a critter junkie like me it was the icing on the cake and the perfect way to end this year’s Patagonia’s autumn mountain landscapes.
