LA LLEGADA AL SUR
Agapito and Juan were both intelligent, philosophically inclined and advanced beings and Juan knew better than to be cynical of the lack of preserved wilderness in a foreign land. The exoticism that he carried as well as the romanticism that Agapito carried was naïve and they could only blame themselves for being let down but they both still wanted that experience of the Wilderness – Juan a bit more so. So they continued south – zigging and zagging now and again into the forest wall and swamps of the Amazon, across the vast altiplano of Bolivia to which Agapito would later return, past the nitrate and guano fields of northern Chile, over and around the dotted volcanoes that speckled this landscape, through the vineyard of central Chile and Argentina to the lakes, fjords, glaciers and jungles of Patagonia, the end of the world.
In Patagonia they found the four elements to be as present as their four limbs, as the four stars of the Southern Cross – they were impossible to ignore. The fire of the volcanoes The water of the ocean, rain, rivers and glaciers The earth of the jagged peaks and ancient trees that cut into the sky The air that never stops moving.
They found giant Alerce trees that maybe existed at the same time that Egyptians were beginning to write. The stories in the trees’ rings record over 4,000 years of history. Juan likened them to the redwoods of California. And like the redwoods, they found logging cutting into this history with mighty saws, hauling them out of the once-vast Valdivian rainforests. Juan became disheartened and began to wonder if their search for the Wilderness had been made in vain. If not here then where? Continue to the South Pole? They both agreed that true Wilderness is not wilderness out of lack of options. Not wilderness in the way that icy mountaintops or polar icecaps are wilderness, not void of life. These wild places are wild out of necessity, out of impossibility. The Wilderness they sought was full of life but devoid of the rapid alterations of humans – the kind of place that gives us a glimpse of what lies beneath our dim-blanket of human awareness, hairless human skin and creative impulse, humans hands before we invented the hammer.
EL VALLE
Together they found the Valle Cochamo tucked in the mountains lining one-such rainforest in the northern fjords of Chilean Patagonia. In this region around 6 meters of rain falls each year. A Fog Goddess (yes, she’s obviously a she-goddess) perpetually plops on her soggy haunches for 350 days of the year, and the valley was shrouded in mist as they approached 20 kilometers from the coast. And even for the first week they camped at La Junta, the confluence of the valley’s two largest rivers, they saw no more than the trees around them, clouds and rain keeping any other sights mystifyingly veiled. And oh, this moved them into something more primordial, with visual stimulation around them being fuzzy and mystifyingly blurred, the landscape within them became increasingly intriguing – it was as if they moved in a time where substance existed but form had not yet been found, perhaps like the primordial soup as the first molecules were beginning to come together. With all the moisture it definitely felt like a soup, organic of course.
In their closed world they moved back to a sort of nascent beginning where all possibilities were still being considered, no rules put in place about what this world could look like. True, they were oblivios, hidden in a cloud and unable to see the massive 3,000-foot granite cliffs that bordered the valley on all sides, or the rancher’s house right across the river. It was a dream, really, stumbling with a frame of reference that extended no further than the billions of water molecules right in front of their eyes and for all they knew, this was the entire universe. Their search for Wilderness became a search of inches rather than one of thousands of miles. What this allowed was for the landscape to take on a formless existence, one where they could make up their own story, like children still putting the pieces together for this strange life. The bamboo they cut through and pulled in attempts to explore steep valleys and peaks became snakes, each one with wisdom about how to grow old with a youthful snap. They heard the water molecules so thick in the air bumping into one another and making music like the symphony of the spheres, and when they listened even closer it seemed that they could hear the symphony of the fundamental superstrings. As they crossed a river once, they truly felt that they were in the pulsing veins of Pachamama with the fog around them obviously adding to the feeling of being INSIDE her.
Even Juan was in rapture and at one point found Agapito in the fog after losing him for four days and said, “I art thou and I am inside thou! Hallelujah, hermano, THIS is what we were looking for!”
And it was during these intense meditations in the fog that they realized Wilderness to be ubiquitous, and the apparent loss of it in the physical world simply being manifest of the loss of it in the spiritual world. Humans would lash out into the wilderness of the natural world for fear of embracing the wilderness within themselves: the one that Jesus explored for 40 days or that aborigines explore in a rite of passage Walkabout – the vast irremovable Wilderness with strings that tie this physical place to the raw expanse of universal spirit. And it is true that these natural places open these doors, moving the outside in and the inside out.
EL RETORNO
Around day 18 of exploring the soggy underside of the Fog Goddess, she decided to stand up and wring out her damp underpants in a sunny spot for a while to allow Juan and Agapito a larger view of the wilderness they had been stumbling through. They rubbed their eyes – eternally thankful for the Fog Goddess and all the introspection she had allowed with her suffocating squat – and allowed them to scan this massive landscape unveiling. They could finally see the warped crown of the 4,000-year old Alerce trees and, sitting in the grassy meadow of La Junta, their view turned skyward and toward the horizon. A dozen granite domes emerged from under the Fog Goddess as she stood up and Juan spoke of his first time walking into Yosemite Valley. They could see distant glaciers at the head of the valley and both felt they were in one of the most beautiful places in the world. They also both agreed that this was not the Wilderness they thought they were looking for 5 months prior. Juan pointed to the wooden ranch house with Alerce shingles and said, “Nope, not it, see, the house there? Definitely not what we were looking for.”
They both laughed as they embraced both the macro and micro views of the world around them, giving thanks to each and feeling a bit naïve in expecting that their search for Wilderness need take them thousands of miles from home.
Agapito kneeled down and peered beneath a bush, giggling “Oye Don Juan el Viejo, have a look under here, I think I found it. I don’t see a single trace of the human fingerprint in here.” His nose was in the dirt and was talking about a square inch of earth.
As Agapito stood up, Juan put his hand against his chest and said, “You know ‘Pito, I feel the strong presence of Wilderness right here. And I’m ok with that cabin over there, just as I’m ok with leaving this place and the pursuit of wilderness. I’ve been around, mi hijo, and I learned something new when I’d thought I was done learning. And I’m ready to head back out of here. While we go, though, let’s do a k’intu with some of those leaves you have left from Peru. I’ve never been much into blessing and prayer but that soggy lady changed something in me. How do you do a k’intu?”
“Here, I’ll do it.”
“No, show me and I’ll do it. It’s time I learn something about blessing and prayer rather than just thought and action.” And Agapito fetched his bag of coca leaves, explaining how to pick the finest leaves for the offering and stack three of them in a fan. He explained the symbolic convergence of the four directions at Tawantinsuyu, with east as rebirth and insight, the west as death and wisdom, the north as clarity and cleansing and the south as the source of wisdom from plants as well as reproduction and regeneration. He showed him how to also recognize the convergence of these directions in here and now, in the place they stood as time and place were intricately woven together. And then finally the sacred breath that is blown on the offering and following these steps, Juan performed his first k’intu.
They allowed the breath to carry. They actually felt Juan’s breath turn to a breeze. As the breeze turned to wind it began to howl and a song took form in the trees and the high passes of the surrounding peaks. The three coca leaves were lifted from his hands and began to dance. One leaf spun to the ground and was covered by the earth. Another hovered around eye level and rose to the crown of a nearby Alerce before moving back to eye-level and quivering there. The final leaf fluttered up then swirled back down before a gust put it into flight far above and out of sight.
With three tiers of the universe auspiciously marked with the wind and leaves by this k’intu they decided it was time to move out of the valley. As they walked down the trail a wall of bamboo sprouted in their wake and the Fog Goddess squatted back down and began her cold-dank perspiration. Cochamo vanished behind them and they carried Wilderness with them.
The Cochamo Valley is one of the most spectacular and wild pieces of Patagonian wilderness that remains. The preserved Alerces, Valdivian Rainforest, wildlife and watersheds are among the last of their kind in Patagonia, a place where similar landscapes were abundant in the recent past. Add to this the ribboned waterfalls and gigantic granite mountains and you have one of the most beautiful valleys in the world, deserving of the comparisons drawn between it and Yosemite. The place is receiving increased visits from backpackers but plans are underway that could open a road through the valley to Argentina. This would be a disaster for the preservation of this one-of-a-kind gem of natural splendor and would open it up for logging, mining and development. Who will benefit? This story is obviously not unique, just worth sharing. And conversations about this being a developed vs. developing or first vs. third world issue must be kept for another page.
Rio La Junta Cascadas (natural waterslides)
5.11a crux of 22pitch, 3,000 foot Bienvenidos a mi Insomnia
The Soggy Fog Goddess
La Gorila framed on the 16km approach
Slacking at Refugio La Junta
Agapito and Juan were both intelligent, philosophically inclined and advanced beings and Juan knew better than to be cynical of the lack of preserved wilderness in a foreign land. The exoticism that he carried as well as the romanticism that Agapito carried was naïve and they could only blame themselves for being let down but they both still wanted that experience of the Wilderness – Juan a bit more so. So they continued south – zigging and zagging now and again into the forest wall and swamps of the Amazon, across the vast altiplano of Bolivia to which Agapito would later return, past the nitrate and guano fields of northern Chile, over and around the dotted volcanoes that speckled this landscape, through the vineyard of central Chile and Argentina to the lakes, fjords, glaciers and jungles of Patagonia, the end of the world.
In Patagonia they found the four elements to be as present as their four limbs, as the four stars of the Southern Cross – they were impossible to ignore. The fire of the volcanoes The water of the ocean, rain, rivers and glaciers The earth of the jagged peaks and ancient trees that cut into the sky The air that never stops moving. They found giant Alerce trees that maybe existed at the same time that Egyptians were beginning to write. The stories in the trees’ rings record over 4,000 years of history. Juan likened them to the redwoods of California. And like the redwoods, they found logging cutting into this history with mighty saws, hauling them out of the once-vast Valdivian rainforests. Juan became disheartened and began to wonder if their search for the Wilderness had been made in vain. If not here then where? Continue to the South Pole? They both agreed that true Wilderness is not wilderness out of lack of options. Not wilderness in the way that icy mountaintops or polar icecaps are wilderness, not void of life. These wild places are wild out of necessity, out of impossibility. The Wilderness they sought was full of life but devoid of the rapid alterations of humans – the kind of place that gives us a glimpse of what lies beneath our dim-blanket of human awareness, hairless human skin and creative impulse, humans hands before we invented the hammer.
EL VALLE
Together they found the Valle Cochamo tucked in the mountains lining one-such rainforest in the northern fjords of Chilean Patagonia. In this region around 6 meters of rain falls each year. A Fog Goddess (yes, she’s obviously a she-goddess) perpetually plops on her soggy haunches for 350 days of the year, and the valley was shrouded in mist as they approached 20 kilometers from the coast. And even for the first week they camped at La Junta, the confluence of the valley’s two largest rivers, they saw no more than the trees around them, clouds and rain keeping any other sights mystifyingly veiled. And oh, this moved them into something more primordial, with visual stimulation around them being fuzzy and mystifyingly blurred, the landscape within them became increasingly intriguing – it was as if they moved in a time where substance existed but form had not yet been found, perhaps like the primordial soup as the first molecules were beginning to come together. With all the moisture it definitely felt like a soup, organic of course.
In their closed world they moved back to a sort of nascent beginning where all possibilities were still being considered, no rules put in place about what this world could look like. True, they were oblivios, hidden in a cloud and unable to see the massive 3,000-foot granite cliffs that bordered the valley on all sides, or the rancher’s house right across the river. It was a dream, really, stumbling with a frame of reference that extended no further than the billions of water molecules right in front of their eyes and for all they knew, this was the entire universe. Their search for Wilderness became a search of inches rather than one of thousands of miles. What this allowed was for the landscape to take on a formless existence, one where they could make up their own story, like children still putting the pieces together for this strange life. The bamboo they cut through and pulled in attempts to explore steep valleys and peaks became snakes, each one with wisdom about how to grow old with a youthful snap. They heard the water molecules so thick in the air bumping into one another and making music like the symphony of the spheres, and when they listened even closer it seemed that they could hear the symphony of the fundamental superstrings. As they crossed a river once, they truly felt that they were in the pulsing veins of Pachamama with the fog around them obviously adding to the feeling of being INSIDE her.
Even Juan was in rapture and at one point found Agapito in the fog after losing him for four days and said, “I art thou and I am inside thou! Hallelujah, hermano, THIS is what we were looking for!”
And it was during these intense meditations in the fog that they realized Wilderness to be ubiquitous, and the apparent loss of it in the physical world simply being manifest of the loss of it in the spiritual world. Humans would lash out into the wilderness of the natural world for fear of embracing the wilderness within themselves: the one that Jesus explored for 40 days or that aborigines explore in a rite of passage Walkabout – the vast irremovable Wilderness with strings that tie this physical place to the raw expanse of universal spirit. And it is true that these natural places open these doors, moving the outside in and the inside out.
EL RETORNO
Around day 18 of exploring the soggy underside of the Fog Goddess, she decided to stand up and wring out her damp underpants in a sunny spot for a while to allow Juan and Agapito a larger view of the wilderness they had been stumbling through. They rubbed their eyes – eternally thankful for the Fog Goddess and all the introspection she had allowed with her suffocating squat – and allowed them to scan this massive landscape unveiling. They could finally see the warped crown of the 4,000-year old Alerce trees and, sitting in the grassy meadow of La Junta, their view turned skyward and toward the horizon. A dozen granite domes emerged from under the Fog Goddess as she stood up and Juan spoke of his first time walking into Yosemite Valley. They could see distant glaciers at the head of the valley and both felt they were in one of the most beautiful places in the world. They also both agreed that this was not the Wilderness they thought they were looking for 5 months prior. Juan pointed to the wooden ranch house with Alerce shingles and said, “Nope, not it, see, the house there? Definitely not what we were looking for.”
They both laughed as they embraced both the macro and micro views of the world around them, giving thanks to each and feeling a bit naïve in expecting that their search for Wilderness need take them thousands of miles from home.
Agapito kneeled down and peered beneath a bush, giggling “Oye Don Juan el Viejo, have a look under here, I think I found it. I don’t see a single trace of the human fingerprint in here.” His nose was in the dirt and was talking about a square inch of earth.
As Agapito stood up, Juan put his hand against his chest and said, “You know ‘Pito, I feel the strong presence of Wilderness right here. And I’m ok with that cabin over there, just as I’m ok with leaving this place and the pursuit of wilderness. I’ve been around, mi hijo, and I learned something new when I’d thought I was done learning. And I’m ready to head back out of here. While we go, though, let’s do a k’intu with some of those leaves you have left from Peru. I’ve never been much into blessing and prayer but that soggy lady changed something in me. How do you do a k’intu?”
“Here, I’ll do it.”
“No, show me and I’ll do it. It’s time I learn something about blessing and prayer rather than just thought and action.” And Agapito fetched his bag of coca leaves, explaining how to pick the finest leaves for the offering and stack three of them in a fan. He explained the symbolic convergence of the four directions at Tawantinsuyu, with east as rebirth and insight, the west as death and wisdom, the north as clarity and cleansing and the south as the source of wisdom from plants as well as reproduction and regeneration. He showed him how to also recognize the convergence of these directions in here and now, in the place they stood as time and place were intricately woven together. And then finally the sacred breath that is blown on the offering and following these steps, Juan performed his first k’intu.
They allowed the breath to carry. They actually felt Juan’s breath turn to a breeze. As the breeze turned to wind it began to howl and a song took form in the trees and the high passes of the surrounding peaks. The three coca leaves were lifted from his hands and began to dance. One leaf spun to the ground and was covered by the earth. Another hovered around eye level and rose to the crown of a nearby Alerce before moving back to eye-level and quivering there. The final leaf fluttered up then swirled back down before a gust put it into flight far above and out of sight.
With three tiers of the universe auspiciously marked with the wind and leaves by this k’intu they decided it was time to move out of the valley. As they walked down the trail a wall of bamboo sprouted in their wake and the Fog Goddess squatted back down and began her cold-dank perspiration. Cochamo vanished behind them and they carried Wilderness with them.
The Cochamo Valley is one of the most spectacular and wild pieces of Patagonian wilderness that remains. The preserved Alerces, Valdivian Rainforest, wildlife and watersheds are among the last of their kind in Patagonia, a place where similar landscapes were abundant in the recent past. Add to this the ribboned waterfalls and gigantic granite mountains and you have one of the most beautiful valleys in the world, deserving of the comparisons drawn between it and Yosemite. The place is receiving increased visits from backpackers but plans are underway that could open a road through the valley to Argentina. This would be a disaster for the preservation of this one-of-a-kind gem of natural splendor and would open it up for logging, mining and development. Who will benefit? This story is obviously not unique, just worth sharing. And conversations about this being a developed vs. developing or first vs. third world issue must be kept for another page.
Rio La Junta Cascadas (natural waterslides)
5.11a crux of 22pitch, 3,000 foot Bienvenidos a mi Insomnia
The Soggy Fog Goddess
La Gorila framed on the 16km approach
Slacking at Refugio La Junta
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