Ruta 40

Highway 40 in Southern Patagonia looks as if it were carved from Butch Cassidy’s boot, with a sliver from his spur or a tail from his horse that was tossed up into the sky as a cirrus cloud. “Frontier” knows no truer definition than the pampas at the end of the world.

Becoming loose with comparisons, Patagonia is, like, one of those places that other places are compared to. It is raw and gritty, fierce and overt, subtleties are not it’s game, when it wants to speak it does so with a shout. Oh sure, subtleties are there when you look for them, as with any place, they can be found around here, but what smacks you first is the massive and conspicuous extremes of everything – the rise of the mountains, the expanse of the pampas, the strength and persistence of the wind, the excessive precipitation. Patagonia knows no middle-path and its excesses are downright gluttonous. To be honest, its existence is absurd, more appropriate for fantasy or dreams than for reality. And what it inspires is an acceptance of extreme possibilities.

As far as roads in Southern Patagonia go, Highway 40 is on the east in Argentina and the Austral Highway is on the west in Chile. The former is of gauchos (rough and rugged, maté-totting, leather-bound, wind-friendly Argentine cowboys) and the latter is of wilderness (vast, wet, broken-fjords, rainforests and mostly unlivable). Neither of these is a “highway” and although increased pavement and bus-access is steadily turning a Butch Cassidy boot landscape into on of sneakers and city-lights, Highway 40 maintains a level of desolation and solitude so complete that you wouldn’t wish it even upon Edward Abbey to try and write poetry here. We chose to travel the eastern route from Bariloche, winding for 2 days through rolling landscapes, past shrub-grass, chasing guanacos (the region’s camellid) and rheas (a flightless ostrich-like bird) from the road, over rivers, under vast skies, into ranch houses for empanadas, and catching distant and fleeting glimpses of the mountains to the west. The pampas through here are a steppe-ecosystem, sitting in the shadow of the Andes that have captured any moisture in the air and deposited it in endless forests, glaciers, and ice fields, mostly on the Chilean side.

Superlatives and embellishments abound in works written about Patagonia and I am adding to this, for sure. But I take no blame, Patagonia did it to me, has done it to all that have enjoyed its rapture from Bruce Chatwin to Yvon Chouinard. It says what we have all been thinking, gives confidence and substance to our strongest-held beliefs. Highway 40 exists because it must, with nothing cyclical in this argument. It is psychologically akin to dreams of hidden doorways and secret passages a slice of accessibility in the world of the improbable. These paths and passages must exist for us to really believe in possibility. Give us a road, give me a sign, show me the way to your magical under-side, the one seldom seen but often spoken-of, the treasure trove, the mythical chalice, to Moby Dick, to Patagonia. Highway 40 is this.

Once you finally get a view of the spires and peaks near Chalten it could be another mirage, a glistening topographic illusion for contour-thirsty travelers. But there they are, and when you move up into them they sure feel real. The rock is hard and the wind bites and stings as if it were real. And so it is, so it is, everything we’ve been told is true.