POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE
Braving the world’s southernmost trails
Dan Milner crosses the Beagle Channel, south of Argentina, to reach untamed Navarino Island – beyond the reaches of tourism – and brave the Dientes de Navarino, the world’s southernmost trails
Postcards haven’t arrived here yet – something that’s more a reflection of the absence of tourists rather than of the efficiency of Chile’s postal service. Yet just across the water, in Argentina, Ushuaia’s main street is stuffed with colourful card stands. They spin in the wind, jostling to compete with cuddly penguins for the tourists’ money. Lured here by the romance of Patagonia’s Tierra del Fuego, a place popularly tagged ‘The end of the world’, eager adventurers queue for bus tours or to board vessels bound for Antarctica. Few cross the four-mile-wide Beagle Channel to reach Navarino Island, a Chilean outpost that sits off the southern tip of South America. It’s a wild, remote place and on the wrong side of tourism’s southernmost frontier; the island’s inhabitants don’t need postcards to remind themselves that they’re living on the edge of civilisation.
On a day like today, as the sun burns my bare forearms and dust hangs over each turn, it’s easy to wonder why Navarino is so unloved by the tourist trade. I haul up another steep incline and muscle my wheels over a tangle of dry roots as wild horses scatter into a thicket of lenga trees. Tailing Claudio Osorio – the island’s sole mountain biker and, by default, my adhoc guide – we finally break from the treeline into the welcome embrace of a cool breeze. Far below us, the Beagle Channel stretches from east to west – 230km of glistening quicksilver flowing past a piecrust shoreline. For the moment life seems idyllic, but Navarino, I’m soon to discover, is a fickle companion.
HEAVY WEATHER
Three days later, the debate isn’t about the severity of the weather but its details – is this hail or graupel that’s needling our skin and frosting our brake levers? We’ve launched ourselves into the Dientes de Navarino circuit – a waymarked trail that, while rudimentary, happens to be the world’s most southern trekking route – and are halfway through a three-day ride among its jagged namesake mountains. Now, after a morning spent brewing tea as rain drummed on our tent, we’ve seized the first break in the storm to scale a slippery hillside, our sights set on the 760m-high Paso Australia.
With our bikes slung across our backs, we snatch glimpses of our base camp through the swirling mist. It may be pitched only a quarter of the way into this 53km loop, but distances mean nothing here. On this uncompromising lump of sub-Antarctic rock sitting 55 degrees south, it’s the weather – not kilometres pedalled or trekked – that dictates success or failure. It takes us an hour to near the barren, rock-strewn Paso Australia, by which time the storm has returned with a vengeance. The swirl of hail around us would blanket the ground if given the opportunity, but a fierce westerly wind has other ideas; it whips the ice pellets across our reddened faces before sentencing them to a fate within the cold embrace of the Atlantic. It’s not bad weather that’s stopped us in our tracks though, but the sight of our trail cutting a crude and exposed diagonal across a glistening cliff face
“It’s a wild, remote place on the wrong side of tourism’s most southern frontier”
ahead. I see the first glimmers of real doubt creep across the team’s faces.
There’s probably a good reason – or perhaps many – why nobody has mountain biked the Dientes de Navarino before. An absence of infrastructure aside from sporadic trail markers dictates that you be self-sufficient once you enter the trail, and it can snow on any day of the year here. Even the mountain range’s name – meaning ‘Teeth of Navarino’ – is foreboding. But I’m willing to brave the island’s meteorological mood swings to ride trails that no one has ridden before, and I’m not alone. At the foot of a slippery cliff, lost in spindrift, I glance around at my co-adventurers, their spirits emboldened by the bemusing novelty of the situation. In this little-known place, our only aim is to explore – which leaves few expectations and avoids disappointment. While the rewards prove to be hard-gained, they’re uniquely life-affirming too.
When I first scoured the internet for information on Navarino, I found a dozen hikers’ blogs describing days spent sitting out blizzards or wading across waist-deep, icy saltwater estuaries. I shelved the idea of riding bikes here as being either naïve or masochistic, but the lure
“nature has sculpted the singletrack into off-camber tests of resolve”
of experiencing the world’s southernmost trails stayed with me, and a plan was hatched through an exchange of emails with a friend and Chilean bike guide, Javier Aguilar. Word got out, and by the time Daniel Franco, Dennis Beare and Ryan Stimac signed up, I star/ted to feel the weight of responsibility. As I stepped off the boat from Ushuaia, I felt a tinge of anxiety, which spread to the others a couple of days later as we began our ride into the Dientes circuit.
We pedalled out through the weatherboard-clad and corrugated tin facades of Puerto Williams’ houses, and between rusting cars propped up on blocks of wood, their transmissions having long been lost to neglect. Dogs bounded in packs past piles of chopped firewood and wild horses wandered between picket-fenced gardens. The feeling of life on the edge was almost overwhelming. Tax-free earnings might lure some to settle in Puerto Williams – the island’s sole town, with 2,800 inhabitants – but it shares the same social challenges as many other frontier towns – obesity, alcoholism and teen pregnancies are rife. “I hate it,” said Lorena Vargas, who runs the small hostel we stayed in. “There’s nothing to do here. Nothing.”
WILD THINGS
Lorena may live on the edge of a hiker’s heaven of unspoilt wilderness, but I guess there are only so many times you can summon the enthusiasm for the 600m climb up to the Cerro Bandera, the dome-like peak that looms over town. Bandera is the first summit on the Dientes circuit, and we end up riding it twice, once as an out-and-back reconnaissance mission, and again two days later with backpacks bulging with the camping gear needed for our three-day ride to the Paso Australia. Both times, the twisting, butter-smooth descent back to Puerto Williams is as good a flow trail as you could find anywhere.
Further inland it’s a different story. With around five hikers per day on the trail, nature has sculpted the singletrack into off-camber tests of resolve. We tiptoe along it, high above a swamp-filled valley, before descending to our planned camp spot at Lago Salto. As we ride what we can and push what overly scares us, we’re thankful for the clear blue sky above and to be immersed in such dramatic mountains without having to puff and pant – the Dientes’ peaks top out at 1,195m.
We camp two nights on boggy ground, feet sheathed in plastic bags against the penetrating damp, and watch a trickle of hikers pass through. Many have eschewed the overly-Instagrammed Torres del Paine – the shining jewel in Chile’s National Park crown – in favour of the unknowns of the Dientes de Navarino. It’s clear that word of Navarino’s emptiness is getting out – and that’s the way Patricio Fernandez, the island’s mayor, prefers it.
We meet Fernandez as we exit our three-day foray into the mountains, and after shaking our hands enthusiastically, he explains how he’s keen to build tourism and how mountain biking is part of that vision.