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tapaculo, a red-breasted bird like a steroidal
robin, several of which could be seen hopping
about in the undergrowth.
Eventually we faced the glacier, a strangely
wintry sight against a backdrop of almost
tropical fecundity. Meltwater tumbled down
the cliff face and fed a lagoon the mineral-
green color of surgical scrubs. We heard the
occasional crack and boom, like a violent
storm, followed by the sight of a car-size piece
of glacier breaking off and falling down the cliff.
It was our first close encounter with the ice
that had shaped this remarkable landscape.
WE EXPLORED Aysén’s geological history when
we swung back south to Coyhaique, where
we visited the new Museo Regional de Aysén.
This museum occupies a beautiful clapboard
building with a zigzag roof modeled on a
traditional rural warehouse. Andrea Muller,
a friend of mine who lives in Santiago, runs
the exhibition program for Chile’s network
of national museums, of which the Museo
Regional de Aysén is a part. As Aysén has
become better known over the past few years,
she explained, the locals, who have until now
lived on the margins, wanted their story told.
The exhibition begins with an installation
about the ice cap that covered this area in the
last ice age and sculpted the landscape. It then
displays the paraphernalia of frontier life—boats,
boots, knives, radios, and a reconstructed puesto,
or hut. In 1937 the state decided to colonize
Aysén. The government offered free land to
anyone who would cultivate it. This seemed like
a good deal, and people came not only from Chile
but also Germany, Belgium, Britain, and even the
Middle East (today, in the little town of Chile
Chico, you can eat wonderful hummus and baba
ghanoush). But in order to cultivate the land, the
settlers had to burn the trees that covered it. The
fires they lit destroyed more than 7 million acres
of native forest. As we looked out of the museum
windows, we saw the result: vast empty plains.
They were not, of course, the first people to
live in the area. Two hours south of Coyhaique,
in the shadow of Cerro Castillo, a soaring
mountain with a jagged edge like some peculiarly
cruel instrument of war, we walked to a low
overhang at the foot of a cliff. Here the rock is
covered with the prints of human hands,
belonging to both children and adults, in green
and orange pigment. Charlie and I were the only
people there that morning, and we couldn’t
resist measuring our own hands against one of
these ancient imprints, careful not to touch
the marking, made perhaps by another young
couple passing this way millennia ago. Later
I called Francisco Mena, an archaeologist in
Coyhaique whose grandfather founded
Staffers María Jesús Guzman and María Cristina Diaz in the kitchen of
Mallín Colorado Ecolodge, a hotel overlooking Lake General Carrera.
A Chilean myrtle tree near Lake General Carrera.
TAL0620_F_AysenChile.indd 79 FINAL 4/21/20 8:19 PM
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