Into Patagonia with Dakota Jones | Salomon TV

My name is Dakota Jones. I'm from Colorado. I'm in South America. This is a movie. I'm narrating this movie. Should I start over? What am I doing here? That's a question I ask myself a lot. But what am I doing here? Patagonia spans a massive area of over a million square kilometers. Yet it's home to less than two million people. It stretches in an unbroken sweep of agitated geology from the storm-washed shores of Tierra del Fuego to the bucolic lake lands of central Chile and Argentina, a span of nearly 20 degrees of latitude. I've actually been here before. Look at that! That! Shit! Look at that! That is Lago Nahuelhuapi. There's 100% certainty that I'm pronouncing that wrong. In 2014, I tried to come see it for myself. I wanted to come down and spend like two months just traveling through the mountains and climbing the volcanoes. And the reality, what happened is I ended up encountering a lot of rules that didn't sit well with me. I didn't really make any attempts at all to engage with the culture. You know, I just came down and saw that they were doing things weird and I got pissed off. In the two months that I spent here on that first trip, I hardly climbed anything. My attempts were thwarted by red tape and rules and the landscapes that I looked to for escape. I was in a bad mood for two months while traveling through one of the most beautiful places on the planet. That's just a really ignorant way to live your life. Meanwhile, we just want to hang out. I was stopped by a foreign culture I did not understand. Or so I thought. Do you have a name? Hey! That was the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. My true failure had not been the lack of peaks checked off a list, but rather my total disconnect from the landscapes and people around me. And I returned home the same person as I had been when I left. So I resolved to go back. This time with a focus on connecting with the people and culture of Patagonia and hopefully to share some good moments along the way. In the style of any sequel, I'm starting where I left off last time in Bariloche, Argentina. The town has a sense of being on the edge of something. It feels tenuous, as if at any moment the wind may blow the whole city away. You stand on the summits above the city and look south into the wind and wonder where it's coming from. But here I am, Patagonia. I need to find a map. I don't get lost, but I'm already lost. Up until this point, you probably thought this is a romantic, solitary quest through the heart of the mythical Patagonia. But I had some company, obviously. This is Dean. And this is Jared. You won't see them much, but they were there with me, and this is as much their journey as it is mine. A large part of connecting with people is being able to speak their language. I don't know what that means, really. I think it's just haircut or something. So I spent several months prior to this trip taking Spanish classes. Which turned out to have almost no effect whatsoever. Fortunately, Mauri Pagliacci joined us for the first week to help us get adjusted. The first idea was to reach out to Mauri because he lives in northern Patagonia, up in Neuquén. Plus, he's my buddy, and I'm coming all the way down here. I want to hang out with him. We spent some days running and hanging out in the mountains above Bariloche. Mountains that are as dramatic and exciting as any range in the world. On my last trip, I ran and won a race through here. This time, I wanted no record, no fan. I wanted my friend Mauri, a guy who grew up here, to show me his backyard. It's the Alpine start. It's the Argentinian Alpine start. It's not quite eight o'clock, and neither of us are happy about half of the week done. Mauri has spent more than half his life running in the mountains of Patagonia. His connection is deep with both the people and the land. Being able to show that to Dakota, that has been all around the world, and say, OK, dude, this is what we have. Find him excited about it and enjoying the trails. And to show that Patagonia is not only what you see in pictures. It's real. So you can stay, like, try to go down straight, do a long trip. Do you think this is the place to go instead of staying in Argentina? Yeah, don't go this way. All too quickly, it was time to leave the comfort of Mauri's translation and head south. But before we did, he put us in touch with a friend. OK, so I guess we'll just show up sometime tomorrow and come in. All right, thanks a lot. Virgilio Trejkaman has lived his whole life in Patagonia. Though he hardly knew us, he took us in as family. And before I knew it, I was part of the Esquel running community. Running is really amazing like that. It serves as a common bond, creating communities of people from all walks of life who share a simple love for moving in the mountains. It's cheesy as hell, I know. It's something you've heard a million times before. But it's true and it happened. And I think that's cool. If for no other reason, I'm happy to be a runner because it allows me to talk to people. You know, it allows me to meet people and have something in common with people I've never met before. It's through running I met Maury. And through Maury I met everybody we hung out with in Argentina. And that's, I mean, that's the stuff that I'm going to remember. Turns out they weren't content with just showing us their playground. Before we knew it, we were bundled into a van and driven onward to our next destination. All the way into Chile. Some heartfelt goodbyes were had. And then, once again, we were on our own. I think that as an introvert, I'm very aware of what it's like to be alone. And so I really highly value being with other people. That was so cool. I'm not even saying that for the film. Like, that was awesome. This was our chosen path south. It's the Southern Highway, or locally known as the Carretera Austral, which has been under construction for nearly three decades. Patagonia is, as Bruce Chatwin wrote, the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origin. People often don't realize how large Patagonia really is. It is a landscape difficult to comprehend. There are mountains and glaciers that exist on a scale that seems impossible to most people. And a way of life that has disappeared from many other countries. After many hours of bumpy, rutted dirt roads, we ended up in Cerro Castillo. Cerro Castillo is, as its name implies, a giant rampart. Oh god, that's so ******* stupid. Do you know anything about Cerro Castillo? Because we didn't. This is why I like writing. Because when I write, I say things and I'm like, God, that was dumb. And then I don't write it down. Or I backspace. We just went south into the unknown just to see what it's like. That's the reason you do anything. When you get down anywhere, you find details that make a place different. Villa Cerro Castillo is a small farming settlement in southern Chile and is home to some of the largest mountains in the Patagonian Andes. This trip was never about having a destination. But as far as destinations go, this was a pretty good one. I was a tiny person in a huge place a long, long way from home. My dad always told me that I could do anything I set my mind to. I believed him. My dad was really into the mountains. And so he had a really big impact in just giving me this idea that mountains are worth going to, that landscapes are worth paying attention to. He inculcated that in me in a way that is probably deeper than I understand. I was 22 when my dad died, and so I was really fortunate in that regard because I was an adult. Him and my mom, they were both incredible. They allowed us to be ourselves and they supported us in the things that we wanted to do. So the real tragedy here is that I can't share with him the things that he gave me. I quit school five years ago and now do the whole pro running thing. I've never been comfortable with calling myself a pro runner. I don't know, I just feel like I've always felt a little uncomfortable saying that I'm a runner because it's not like a normal job. I feel like I'm kind of embarrassed about it because I haven't quite figured it out for myself, I guess. But I have a tendency to overthink things. I feel a sense of responsibility to make the most of my opportunities which are as vast and varied as Patagonia. If you open one door and go through it, you're automatically not going through all the other doors that are available. And I think the loss of that potential is terrifying. A big part of growing up for me has been learning to open doors and to walk through them and not look back. But yeah, I mean, I'm just like the victim of having too much fortune in a weird way to put that because I have all the opportunity in the world. I came from a white upper middle class family in the United States, you know, my parents always provided for me. So I have all these things going for me and it just seems like the height of arrogance to not use that. Because I think that the best way to be grateful for something is to make use of it in order to say thank you to whatever force has put me into this position. It's beautiful up here. I think that's an important thing to note is that we've been asking ourselves why we're here. What am I doing here? I don't need to explain that because this is enough. Because I get to be here, because I get to practice my Spanish, because I get to talk with people that I've never talked to before. I don't know, because I get to have experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise if I had just stayed home. It's enough just to try. I've been given a lot of really good things and I guess that the whole thing now is that I want to be able to make it worth it. And so coming down here, we're gonna, like tomorrow, I'm gonna go try to set this FKT in the Cerro Castillo route and whether I do or not is honestly of no import to me. All right, I'm about to start the 50... No, wait, what is it? The FKT, it's not 50k. I'm about to start the FKT attempt on the route that I have no idea how long it is. Running is often quantitative. We seek numbers to authenticate our experience. You can show a number to somebody and prove that you had an experience, but that doesn't tell them anything about the experience. I think the quest to quantify our lives is missing the point. Experiences are whatever you make of them. Recording! Look at those mountains! Look guys, I know it's a record attempt, but I gotta pause just for a second to take it in because it's not often that you get to come to such a beautiful place. Can you even hear me over all that river noise? I don't know. Doesn't matter. The experience is the same. And this one? This one was pretty good. So I'm trying to learn to see the future as potential avenues of opportunity and to just try them. Do the best with the knowledge I have in hand. Even then, there is no way to tell. That's a glacier. The beauty is in being part of something. And this can take many forms. For me, it has always been the landscapes that have given me this. But as I get a bit older, I find that more often it is people. You meet someone, someone kind, who lets you into their life for a brief moment in time and helps you to penetrate the cultural fabric of the place. It's those little moments of magic, those brief connections with strangers, they characterize experiences. That's what it's all about. I think.