Gringo Tur: Kickin' it Stateside: Isla Navarino and the Dientes Circuit

About a week ago we traveled by zodiac from Ushuaia (on the tip of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina), back into Chile to Puerto Williams on Isla Navarino. Not quite the end of the world, but as close as we got without time to harass the Chilean Armada into letting us hitch a ride to Cabo de Hornos or means to take a high-class yacht further south to Antarctica. Because of land disputes that are ongoing between Argentina and Chile there is no regular boat that runs between Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, although it is very close, separated by only the Beagle Channel.

Our goal was to hike the Dientes circuit, a trail that encircles the Cordon de los Dientes...a jagged, toothlike (hint the name ¨dientes¨) mountain group that is visible in the Southern landscape from about everywhere we had been in Tierra del Fuego. I was dragging at the first part of the hike due to about three days of almost no food due to a nasty gastroenteritis (and was probably driving Andrew insane with my frequent rest stops), but was improving over the first few days. We had printed out what we thought (at the time) was an overly-detailed brochure of the hike that is published by the Chilean ministry of Natural resources, but we were glad to have all of the details we could get when we were actually on the trail. It snowed pretty heavily during the hike, making route finding a bit of a bitch. The trail was not marked well and compass bearings, although easy to do, took you through some pretty scrappy brush and slowed things down. Needless to say, we retraced our steps pretty frequently throughout the circuit. We passed through alot of snowy alpine areas as well as boggy, beaver damaged forests. More than 20,000 beavers live in the mountains of Isla Navarino, and you can definitely seen the impact they have made. Many fallen, dead trees, dams that change the direction of the water flow and flood areas that were not flooded in the past.

We finished the hike in about 4 days, and made it back to Puerto Williams. It was a burly hike, and now I can say that I´ve done the ¨most southerly trek in the world¨. However, we were definitely ready to be done with the trek...mostly because of the weather and difficulties with trail finding.

Packing into the zodiac with a disembodied hand