Patagonia has that efect on you. It isn’t part of the
ordered world; this a boundless land, pristine and
desolate, unrivalled in grandeur and scale, untouched
by progress and industry and cement and steel. This is a
place where nature is still king. You come to Patagonia to
feel the wildness of the world untainted by human touch.
Now there’s a new way to see it: the Route of Parks,
South America’s most spectacular road trip. Launched at
the end of 2018, the 1,700-mile trail — mostly dirt track
— is an amalgamation of three existing long-distance
scenic routes through Chilean Patagonia: the Carretera
Austral in the north, and the Patagonian Channels and
End of the World Route in the south. To do the whole
thing in one go would take a month or more. So, I decided
to tackle just the northern section, heading from Puerto
Montt, at the region’s northern boundary, to the edge of
the Southern Patagonian Iceield — 700 miles straight
down in three spectacular weeks.
This section is special because it’s still relatively
untouched by tourism. Say the name Patagonia and most
people think of Torres del Paine National Park in the
south. It’s rightly famous: spectacular granite towers rise
from the Patagonian steppe like the spires of some vast
cathedral. Up here, it’s diferent. Tourism is still in its
infancy — it feels adventurous and raw. And, arguably, the
landscape is at its most dramatic and varied too: the lush
rainforests and coastal jords of the Chilean Lake District
gradually giving way to the high peaks of the Andes.
But this is far more than just a pretty drive. The Route
of Parks is the realisation of one of the biggest and most
audacious conservation dreams ever conceived.
It started with one man. Doug Tompkins was a
rebel. Kicked out of school at 17, he set of to climb, ski
and kayak the world. At the age of 23, frustrated with
the lack of outdoor gear available to the mainstream
market, he and his irst wife, Susie, set up the original
The North Face shop, in San Francisco, selling climbing
and camping equipment. Esprit, a clothing company,
followed shortly aterwards. Both ended up as globally
recognised brands, earning their founders a fortune.
But, like a true rebel, Doug gave it all up, sick of “selling
people countless things they don’t need”, as he put
it. Instead, in the early 1990s, he and his second wife,
Kristine, who’d run the clothing company Patagonia
for 20 years, sold up, moved to Chile and began buying
up wild land there, with the aim of protecting it from
development. Then, in January 2018, they did something
no one saw coming: they gave it back.
Last year, the Tompkins Foundation donated one
million acres of wild land to the Chilean people, the
largest private land donation in history, on the condition
that it would be matched by a further nine million from
the Chilean government and used to create ive new
national parks and expand three existing ones in the
region. This new land now links together a total of 17
national parks in the region, 28 million acres in all, from
Puerto Montt, in the north, to Cape Horn, on the southern
tip of the continent — one of the largest swathes of
contiguous protected wilderness on the planet.
Tragically, Doug didn’t live to see his dream come
to fruition; he died in 2015, ater falling into freezing
water on a kayaking trip on Patagonia’s General Carrera
Lake. Instead, it was Kristine who ensured his audacious
plan came to pass. “The Route of Parks strings together
some of the wildest places let on earth,” she would
tell me later in the journey. This is more than a road
trip. This is a pilgrimage through one the planet’s last
wild frontiers.During his five-year voyage around the world,
Darwin stopped in Patagonia, on the southern
tip of South America, and wrote these words:
‘No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved,
and not feel that there is more in man than the
mere breath of his body.’
PREVIOUS PAGES:
Patagonia Park
RIGHT, CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP LEFT: Hiking
the Avilés trail; lora,
Queulat National Park;
Cerro Castillo National
Reserve; guanacos IMAGES: ROSS DONIHUE & MARTY SCHNURE; AARON MILLAR102 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
CHILE