Cool cat On the puma’s trail
Hoping to see the elusive Patagonian puma, Belinda Jackson’s patience pays off with an extraordinary sighting.
To fly over Chilean Patagonia in winter is an exercise in fortitude. Towering rocky peaks rear into stark skies, their long, jagged fingers seemingly reaching to snatch our aircraft.
There are no towns and few roads between the expanse of snowy plains studded with glacial lakes. This is a landscape that demands focus. It’s heroic, epic, and too magnificent to capture in one picture frame. But, of course, we try.
A decade ago, on my first visit to Patagonia and the Torres del Paine National Park, its tourist season extended through the summer only, from November until February.
Now, the action heats up in September, and pushes out until autumnal May. To call wintery July the off-season is an understatement, and in an edgy marketing move, winter in Torres del Paine is being billed as the ‘‘secret season’’. But the secret remains, why would anyone go?
Puffer jacket central
‘‘Patagonia’s going to be all for you,’’ says my Chilean guide a week earlier, as we ride our ponies through the Atacama Desert, 4000 kilometres north of Torres del Paine. Basking in the winter sun in the country’s extreme north, he prepares me for the darkness, the plunging temperatures, and for the sheer inaccessibility of the frozen south.
While he’s talking, I’m privately calculating how many pairs of thermal leggings I can fit under my hiking pants. The average temperature, after all, is 3 degrees Celsius, its provinces bear such names as Ultima Esperanza (last hope), and the maps are waterproof.
There are a few logistics to consider when visiting in winter. For starters, the little Puerto Natales airport (the closest to Torres del Paine) closes in March. There is talk it will open yearround but, for now, its closure necessitates a fivehour drive from the region’s capital, Punta Arenas.
Our icy path is lined with lichen forests and semi-frozen lagoons, which are populated by neonpink flamingos that wouldn’t look out of place on a postcard from Miami. Most of the park’s lodges and camps are closed. The five-star Explora Lodge has always been the exception, joined recently by the four-star Hotel Lago Grey.
Stretching out in Lago Grey’s dining room after a Chilean dinner of guanaco empanadas and ceviche of Patagonian salmon, our puma-spotting group of two plus guide Rodrigo, survey our fellow adventurers. It’s puffer-jacket central, and though no-one’s mingling, there’s a sense of camaraderie among the group. In summer, this well-priced hotel is overflowing.
As we face the full-length windows that frame the Paine Grande, the highest peak at 3050 metres, I detect a hint of smugness in our cleverness avoiding the crowds, and paying half the price for our hotel stay. Today is the winter solstice, and the night has spread heavily over Patagonia, unwilling to relinquish its hold on the land. Dawn pushes against the sky, heavy with cloud that softens into a dusty rose at first light, around 8.30am.
‘‘It’s a different mood in winter,’’ says Rodrigo. ‘‘The sunrises and sunsets are slower, there’s no wind, and the light is softer and smoother, much better for photos. Sure, in summer you have more greenery and birdlife, but winter brings snow and pumas.’’
Our Jeep negotiates the almost deserted icy dirt roads and we have the walks and the lookouts to Los Cuernos – the iconic horns of the Torres massif – to ourselves. It really feels like the end of the
Earth. We are primed and ready to spot South America’s Scarlet Pimpernel of the cat world.
In fact, we are citizen conservationists: whatever we see will be shared with the local Awasi Foundation, which studies, tracks and aims to protect Patagonia’s pumas.
Cristian Asun, its excursions manager, says there’s an estimated 100 pumas in the park, rising to 200 when you include those roaming the neighbouring estancias, or ranches. Therein lies the problem: the largest of this mountain lion species, Patagonian pumas can reach 2.8 metres in length and a slow-footed sheep or calf is an easier catch than a 90kg guanaco, a cousin of the llama.
The Chilean government hauled a protective cloak over its pumas in the 1970s, but they’ve been hunted to near threatened status and it is us, as we protect our food source, who are the culprits.
Furthermore, it’s taken the BBC 30 years or so to film these elusive creatures hunting: little wonder they’re billed as ‘‘ghost cats’’.
Back on the puma trail, long-legged jackrabbits, a favourite puma snack, erupt from the dark edges of the roadside, while guanaco herds, once pushed out by sheep and cattle estancias, leave mounds of brilliant green grass in their wake.
‘‘Guanaco toilet,’’ says Rodrigo explaining their communal bathroom habits. The canny creatures are civic-minded, as well. During a trek over hills (that have been cloaked in the residual fug of an upset skunk) to see cave paintings by the Aonikenk people, we hear a guanaco whinnying an alarm call – a cross between a bark and neigh – and we’re on high alert. This is a key puma signal. Soon after, a large guanaco trots purposefully down our path, passing within a metre of us before disappearing over a ridge.
The omens are good, and standing atop the ridge, we strain our ears and eyes for pumas. The solitary hunters tend to attack uphill, so we wait, searching the skies for condors, eagles or caracas, who circle over kills. Meanwhile, the temperature drops, setting muddy puddles to ice.
‘‘This is Patagonia,’’ says Rodrigo. ‘‘The cold, the snow, the winter.’’ But alas, no pumas.
Big cat alert
This morning brings a different view of the Paine massif, with a boat trip to the glaciers at the foot of the mountains. From the decks of Lago III, we spy the three faces of the Grey Glacier.
‘‘That’s too many faces,’’ says Rodrigo, whose been doing this cruise for years.
The boat runs three times a day in summer,
dropping down to just two sailings a week in winter, on a three-hour cruise.
The Grey Glacier has receded so dramatically, hikers along the W route now need to detour to see its 25-metre high walls of blue ice.
Listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1979, the glacier stands 45 metres above sea level in Grey Lake. Sediment from the ancient icefield gives the lake its name and its colour, murky against the fresh, powder-blue glacier and icebergs that float by like defeated battleships.
Ten years ago, I was at this same glacier. Then, we pulled our boat up to the ice and chipped chunks of thousand-year-old ice to toss into our glasses of scotch. But not this time for our pisco sours, tinged purple by the local calafate berry.
The glacier is rapidly retreating into the Southern Patagonia Ice Field, the world’s largest glacier out of the polar regions, and the third largest reserve of fresh water on the planet.
A few years ago, says Rodrigo, the lakes froze for up to three months in winter. Now their frozen state lasts just a few weeks before the February floods of snowmelt.
Condors play over the peaks of the Paine Grande, whose icy needles pierce the cloud that cloaks its glory. The glaciers on their peaks carve the mountains, sculpting their faces into new horns. It will be impossible to spot pumas here.
‘‘You need at least three days to see a puma,’’ says Rodrigo. We’re on day three, and we’re developing the twitch of the frustrated hunter. I send my prayer up to the icy towers above, my wish carried on the steam of exhaled breath: ‘‘Just one puma. Just one puma.’’
Then we meet the Dutch cat tragics. Janco and Lennart are cat hunters who spend their holidays tracking felines all over the world, from the palace cats of Beijing to snow leopards in Ladakh.
Janco shows us some magnificent photos then watches as our collective jaw drops as he tells us how, yesterday, he walked alongside a young puma on the edge of the road. The video is incredible. Even Rodrigo is impressed.
Inspired, we head out for one more drive this evening, as pumas usually hunt at dawn and dusk.
A half-moon is reflected in the section of the lakes that are not ice glazed, and the mood in the jeep is tense. We are on high alert with every rock surely a puma.
Carcass clue
There’s a golden triangle to the east of the national park, past the haunt of the black-headed swans, beyond the lake where the pink flamingos hang.
Here, guanaco herds roam in their hundreds, guarded by their watchful outriders. Ever alert for danger, we spy their tensed profiles on the ridges. The hills are alive with three-course meals.
Surely, there will be pumas here. Rodrigo tells how he found the carcass of a shot puma last week.
Killing pumas was outlawed in 1972 and, while the estancias see a new source of income in allowing puma-spotting on their land, South America’s most elusive big cats are still a threat to the cattle that graze on the fringe of the national park.
We do know that pumas eat part of the prey then hide it, returning for the next two or three nights for midnight feasts before abandoning the carcass to the condors, caracaras, eagles, grey foxes, and even the hairy Patagonian armadillos to snuffle over. So carcass spotting becomes our second concern.
The whole national park is a guanaco graveyard, with bones scattered along the roadsides, preserved by the frost and chill air.
Some have been there for years, forming unofficial landmarks for the guides, and the region is famous for the discovery of a 10,000-year-old sloth, perfectly preserved. People get lost here and aren’t found until next summer.
‘‘And though I walk through the valley of death . . . ’’ I mutter, as we edge slowly through the frosted countryside.
Then he sees her. The twitch of a tail gives her away. Slowly, our eyes adjust to see two dove-grey cubs and their copper-coloured mama emerge into the winter sunlight, on the edge of Sarmiento Lake.
Her youngsters are joyous, one cub pouncing on his sibling, the two rolling like kittens – albeit huge, muscular kittens – before racing each other along the lake’s shore.
They know we are here, but we are far away. Relaxed, the mother basks in the sun and we watch her cavorting cubs for about 40 minutes, until the clouds roll over the sun and sends them on their way. Then it snows: a fresh snow falling soft and powdery, silencing the landscape and throwing a white veil over the mountains. It’s only 10.40am, we have three puma sightings under our belt and, with snowflakes on our tongues, we’re elated.