It’s the bones I can’t get out of my head. Ribs, spines, skulls, femurs – plucked clean and bleached white as the snow glittered on the distant peaks of the Torres del Paine. Every hour, every day here in Patagonia, in an endless cycle unfathomable to modern human life, the guanaco – a wild cousin of the llama – must graze among the remains of its brethren. As befits Mother Nature’s capricious cruelty, they can’t even do that in peace. Crouching in the grass or in the brambles surrounding it could be the majestic animal that brought me to the bottom of the world. The apex predator of the Andes Mountains.
The cougar.
In the US, the puma is often seen as a nuisance – and certainly not an attraction for tourists like grizzly bears, bison or wolves – but in Chilean Patagonia the puma is a star. Photographers from all over the world pay big money to photograph these lonely big cats, and Netflix has captured a number of famous cougars. At the invitation of Quasar Expeditions, the cruise and tour operator, I recently spent a fall in the Torres del Paine tracking and viewing these beautiful creatures – sometimes up close.
Quasar put together a trip for me that was simple but full of promise. They would spend two and a half days with their cougar trackers on the trail of one of America’s most regal animals. This is followed by a day and a half of activities typical of a guest at Torres del Paine Explora Lodge, one of the world’s most iconic hotels. And then two nights in Santiago at The Singular, a luxury hotel in the heart of the bohemian Lastarria district, with a roof terrace overlooking this special city.
Explora Lodge in Torres del Paine
In an age of assembly line tourism where everyone is frankly wasting their money going to the same places to check off the same boxes, this trip was a reminder of the value of spending a sometimes significant amount of money on a great stay. experience. It is still possible to do something that is, for lack of a better word, special.
The lodge is located in Torres del Paine National Park, named after its distinctive mountain towers and full of glaciers, rivers, mountains and wildlife. Puerto Natales is the closest airport to the park, a scenic two-hour drive. Unfortunately, the flights from Santiago are in the morning, making it virtually impossible to connect directly to a night flight from abroad. The other option – the one I took – is Punta Arenas. Located at the bottom of America, it’s a five-hour drive to the hotel in the Patagonian steppes, a landscape eerily similar to eastern Colorado and western Nebraska. Looking back, I wish I had added a night in Santiago to the front end so I could relax and get used to the hotel before flying to the nearest airport.
Puma safaris are similar to most land safaris. You wake up about an hour before dawn and shuffle vaguely to greet your driver and get into the car. It takes about 45 minutes to reach the ranch east of the national park, where Quasar guides are among the few outfitters allowed to go off-road to spot cougars.
The road cuts a ribbon-like path through the foothills and past lakes in the morning as the sun slowly rises before you. It’s a dizzying race to get there with just enough light to hopefully see the cougars in action – prowling, hunting, on the move – but not so much sun that they want to stop their crepuscular activities.
However, with nature there are no guarantees. On African safaris, potential disappointment is mitigated by the fact that there is something there So a lot of different types of large animals. Puma safaris are more like tiger safaris: you’re there to see one animal and they’re elusive. That said, as my driver JP pulled into the heart of the ranch on my first morning there, a radio call came in from Christian, the tracker. He had found a mountain lion. Just as JP started to answer, he stopped the car. On a small hill, about ten meters from the car window, was another cougar!
After admiring her for a few minutes, we bounced down the road to look at the cougar the tracker had spotted. Blinka was the name given to her by the guides here, and she crouched in the grass, her eyes focused on a guanaco lying alone on the slope below. Tawny colored, Blinka is something of a miracle. She has only one eye – the other was lost when she was three months old and an older man attacked her and her brother – and is missing one of her teeth. She walks with a slight limp because she broke her leg while raising two cubs, both of whom survived.
Grazing guanaco in Torres del Paine
Two guanaco kills the night before led to the incredible luck of watching seven different pumas that morning. In that mix was Daniela, the Norma Desmond of the cats here, always ready for her close-up. With hearts beating more with excitement than fear, we followed her on foot as she walked over small hills, stopping to gulp some water, occasionally sniffing the air, always standing still and striking a pose to take. And on the way to lunch we were told it was a rare sight: a young man fording the Paine River.
Once the temperature rises even a little, the chances of seeing cougars in action virtually disappear. After all, they are cats and the day is for resting. Not quite miraculous is how I would describe my tracker Christian’s skill in spotting a sleeping cougar in the various rocky hills. Even with binoculars and knowing exactly where to look, it took tremendous concentration and often watery eyes to actually distinguish a languid cougar from a rock. Photographers often stay in the field hoping to get a nice photo of a resting cougar. My first day I stayed there too and spent the time learning about these creatures and their environment.
It turns out that the puma remains a somewhat mysterious creature for naturalists, constantly upending accepted knowledge. These cats, which can weigh up to 400 pounds, were once thought of as solitary creatures, but here they are certainly not and will often share a kill. Their habitat is one of the largest in the world, stretching from Alaska across 28 countries to the bottom of Chile. Those in Patagonia are believed to be the largest, largely because of the guanaco. These hefty rusty red camelids, one of four in the Americas (llamas, alpacas and vicuñas are the others), are the main food source for the pumas and here they are in abundance.
Their bones may be scattered across the land here, but they are not an easy target. They have remarkable eyesight and employ a system of sentinels who constantly scan the land for pumas. In fact, trackers often rely on guanaco alarms to find cougars in the wild. And while I wouldn’t exactly call them beautiful, there is something sublime about watching a herd of them gallop across the mountain range with towering mountains as a backdrop.
The safari involves quite a bit of waiting. Sometimes he sits crouched and ogles a lounging cougar. Other times, given the crashing wind, time is spent watching through binoculars or crossing fingers in the car hoping a resting cougar will move.
The cougar Paine captured by a Quasar guide
After a morning with winds so strong they turned a waterfall into a spout that blew back up against the rocks, my luck continued through the afternoon of the second day. One of the young males, a gunmetal gray cat named Paine, had been spotted. We got out of the cars and started walking through the fields, never in his way, but stopping at places he might want to pass, which he did, sometimes within a thirty-foot radius. The only other guest at the ranch that day, a professional photographer, was downright giddy. Paine had paused at the top of a ridge with the jagged Torres del Paine on the horizon and turned to look at the valleys behind us. A money shot in the world of nature photography.
Patagonia tours with Quasar last five or four nights and range from $6,600 to more than $13,150 per person, depending on the season and type of accommodation. However, within that lies the freedom to adapt. Some want non-stop cougars. Others, recognizing that Patagonia is simply one of the most beautiful places in the world, want to do some outdoor activities. After two and a half days of cougar tracking, I spent the remaining day and a half taking advantage of the dizzying array of treks and horseback rides that Explora Lodge offers.
The lodge itself is perhaps one of the most famous in the world. If the name isn’t immediately familiar, most will recognize a photo of one of the rooms with views across the glacial lake to the Torres. From a distance, the hotel looks quasi-futuristic, like something the Norwegian firm Snøhetta would design. But the lodge is made entirely of wood, painted white on the outside and covered with planks of honey-colored wood on the inside. The design is sober so as not to distract from the hotel’s surroundings.
The hotel offers 13 different horseback riding tours and dozens of walks and overland tours to keep guests entertained. While that’s a lot of options, what’s available varies. Everything down here is determined by the wind. It’s a wind that makes you reconsider ever describing anything at home as “a windy day.” On rides you can see it darting and swirling across the surface of the water, generating whirling dervishes of icy mist.
During dinner, the howling wind outside enhances the feeling of coziness in the simple wooden room. While I was determined to do the day hike in the French Valley, a wind that groaned the hotel left only one option: the hike to the base of the torres. This is the “signature” walk for the park, but luckily it wasn’t high season yet, so it wasn’t overly busy. And at 13 miles round trip, it’s long enough to thin out in sections.
Best of all, when I arrived at the small lake at the base and sat down to eat my lunch, the wispy clouds covering the towers drifted away. Apparently the luck I had had with the cougars had not run out yet. I was allowed to dine with a clear view of one of nature’s wonders.
