Chile Expedition

Exploring the "Lake Region" of the Andes Mountains

20241210-20250101

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Background 

A few years back, Kathleen and I visited Argentina and were impressed by the mighty Andes Mountains: huge snow-covered peaks, steep valleys and large water courses (assuming there was snow melt).  South America is divided into several climate zones, each heavily influenced by these tall mountains.  Both Argentina and Chile are "long countries" in terms of latitude spanned - desert/tropical in the north, glacial in the south.  The crest of the Andes form the border between these two countries and the wind direction and the Andes determines where the rain falls.  In the north, the prevailing winds are from the east resulting in Argentina's northern region being lush jungle.  On the Chile side of the mountains, however, the tall mountains result in the driest desert on the planet - the Atacama.  There is a short transition zone and south of this zone, the prevailing winds come from the west, over long fetches of the open South Pacific.  The result is the opposite of the conditions in the north:  Chile gets the rain and Argentina is in the rain shadow.  The result is Chile gets the verdant forests, large lakes and wide rivers with plenty of fresh-water fish. In Argentina, the result is the semi-arid Pampas in the Patagonia region.

A short look at a map or any guide book will tell you that the distances involved are too vast to explore in only a few weeks: Chile spans latitude -13 to -55 which is a bit over 2600 miles.  So rather than risk biting off more than we can chew, we elected for 3 weeks of open travel in the central part of the country - the weather transition zone.  We'll save the Atacama Desert and the far-southern austral regions for other trips.  Our plan is to fly via LAX to Santiago (the Chilean capital) and then head to the beach.  December is the start of the austral summer, so our timing should be perfect.  We'll spend a few days in Vina del Mar and then fly south to the main southern city Puerto Montt at the north end of the fijords where we'll get a rental car and head north back to Santiago.  Our trip back north is on the order of 800 miles or so and will take 2 weeks.  Our planned path is through the Lake District that starts just north of Montt and continues to about half-way to Santiago.

Path

We made heavy use of the Pocket Earth application on our iPhones.  We both purchased Pro licenses that allow download and offline storage of full-country topographic maps and Wikipedia highlights.  We ran tracking "on" every day and amassed huge track files that AirDrop and email had trouble handling.  Since we were unmotivated to solve the issues while in-country, we saved screen shots of the track, shown below.  Cell service in Chile was very good, but not available everywhere, particularly in the deep canyons of the Andes.  For whatever reason, likely due to interruption of the cell service, Pocket Earth stopped tracking on both of our phones at about the same location.  It had been rock-solid for several weeks, and we were checking it every day, but got lazy so there were some missed areas in our track logs.  Happily, these missed areas were in the "uninteresting" part of our travels.  The tracks below are reduced-sized screen shots taken during several points in the trip.  The Santiago track was included for completeness.

Track 1 (less Vina del Mar) shows a "hole" from Lonquimay to Victoria, likely due to the steep canyons.  Tracking also stopped when we approached hydroelectric dam at Ralco.



Track 2.  Tracking stopped at Ralco and remained off until we checked it again in Santa Cruz.



Track in Santiago.  Path to and from airport was not included.

Details

The link table below contains links to the photos and dialog for each of the days of the trip.  This table will be updated as the effort progresses.  A variety of cameras were used to document this trip including our Sony A1, Fuji XT-4. and, of course, the ubiquitous iPhone. 

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Photos and Text Copyright Bill Caid 2024, all rights reserved.
For your enjoyment only, not for commercial use.