Exploring Chile Patagonia From the Atacama Desert to Torres del Paine

Chile is a remarkable country. With a latitudinal span of almost 4,100 kilometres, ranging from 18 degrees south to 55 degrees south, it is a vast range of landscapes. It's a very long and narrow country with an average width of only 170 kilometres. Its major geographic feature is the Andes mountain range and that extends the entire length of the country. And in the north there are two separate ranges, the coastal ranges that rises abruptly out from the sea and then the high peaks of the main range which really run along the eastern border of Chile. In the south the ranges converge with much of the range along the coast and continues into the sea which has formed thousands of islands as the sea levels rose and the mountains were submerged. The Atacama desert covers a vast area from the ocean shores to the Andes mountains. It's not simply a desert with rolling sand dunes or rocky plains. It's what I call a transition zone where you find landscapes that are made up of features that predate the mountain building phase and this began, when I say this, the mountain building phase began over 170 million years ago. The landscapes within these transition zones are the tourist drawcard due to their contrasting formations but these landscapes are so young and they're still undergoing transformation that they're also attractive to geological researchers. It's a spectacular landscape. Life exists in many areas. It's devoid of life in others but spectacular settings about spectacular landscapes to be seen there. Standing on this ignimbrite tufa outcrop which has been a focus of human activity for over two and a half thousand years where the ancient peoples traveling through the area with caravans of yama and lama moving their resources and their products going from the valleys to the east and valleys to the north and linking up to Tiwanaku in Bolivia and later the local population of the Atacama Indians that are indigenous to this particular area. We see this focal point here and we see the weathered ignimbrite which is this rosy colored outer areas and so we have a range of what we call petroglyphs. These are pictures that have been carved into rock. Behind me here I have a monkey which is quite interesting because the nearest monkey would be hundreds of kilometers away on the eastern slopes of the Andes and they believe this is a capuchin monkey and we see these in artworks along this stretch so people did have contact. There was movement. We see dozens of yama represented. Some of them are almost life-size. Some of them are only 15 to 20 centimeters long. We also see representations of other animals. Of course we've got the monkey and around the corner here we have the puma and then there was a an Andean cat, a small cat that we'd find here and then there's also some anthropomorphic figures that are actually probably shamanic. They're probably shamans linking the spirit world through this rock. Well here we are in the Pucara de Quito. Now directly to the south of me is San Pedro de Atacama and the beginning of the Salada Atacama, the lake and behind me and over my left shoulder is the Pucara de Quito. Now the Pucara means it's a defended site or a protected site but it was also a residential area but if you can see it here it's on a headland with this canyon to the left and a sheer cliff beyond the last building on the far distance looking down on the Rio San Pedro. So this is a series of houses that is built into the side of the hill and you can see it's actually very organic and it's taking the form of the slope and the curves, the natural curves. What we're looking at here is a reconstructed area. It's not the natural because when you look up the top that's more what it was like when it was first discovered. But this was a site that was occupied from about 1000 AD. When I say probably it wouldn't have been the defended site but it would have been a little residential area above the agricultural land on the river and then it became fortified as a defensive site for fighting neighbouring groups and the Atacamanos protecting their oases from people coming in particularly from the east or maybe further to the south. And this Rio Grande was a very very important water source. This is the entrance to the canyon. The canyon is where you control the water and when the Inca arrived in the 15th century they established their way station about three or four kilometres up the stream further up the river giving them the ability to control the water. Then it was in the 16th century later part of the 16th century when the conquistadors come here and because of the value of the site because of water they actually conquered the inhabitants here. The fowl of the Inca had already been quelled in Cusco but the locals fought to maintain or retain possession of the site and they've lost it. Here we are in the prehistoric village of Tulor and we have some remains of a very very early conglomeration of buildings or houses that would have housed a pre-Incan community and you can see here the houses are made of adobe but they're round and then they're linked together with small cells so those cells would have been storage and whatever. And this is unusual because we find in Europe and other areas that sort of around the Bronze Age that people moved from round to rectangular and found they fitted together a lot better. But this is one of a number of the little prehistoric villages here that date from around 2500 years ago. As you can see it's a very very dry area but someone lived here for probably about 800 years. Six to eight hundred years this would have been a thriving little community but they had access to water then and the river Rio San Pedro flowed nearby and during siltation processes and what have you the riverbed moved away the stream moved away so the village had to be abandoned. But it's not the only one there are others throughout this area it's very flat so stream beds tend to be mobile as does the dune that is actually behind us and you might see that part of this the remains of the village is actually covered in the dune and it was exposed many decades ago and that's how it was discovered and then there was some archaeological excavation that cleared a small area and it's actually deteriorating now and it'll disappear over the next few floods which may be a decade or maybe three decades from here. This amazing water basin that is in between the Andes and the coastal range facing the Pacific we got this fantastic basin that attracts a lot of salty water. This is one of the biggest concentrations of salt that you are going to be able to find in South America not only reaching water it's also reaching lithium. Now that is one of the main purposes why the country is well known but despite all of that we got amazing birds to see. These beautiful flamingos are a unique species that can be seen just in these lakes and Altiplano lakes. James, Chilean and Puna flamingos are fantastic birds including other smaller birds like goose, geese. We've got sunpipers, plovers, coots, moorhens and this unique environment allows them to feed in here with crustaceans that can be found in these salty beautiful lakes. Here we are on the highway which is behind us you might hear some truck noise which links northern Chile to Bolivia. It's the main road from Arica to La Paz and Arica being Bolivia's port but we're in what is known as the Precordillera, the foothills of the Andes and the main range of the Andes is to my right but what's behind me is a Pucara, a defensive location that's contemporary with the Pucara we saw in San Pedro. So San Pedro is due south of here but probably 700 or 800 kilometres in a straight line and what we see behind me to my right is a valley that runs or a series of valleys that run parallel to the main range and we see every 20, 30, 40 kilometres we'll see one of these defensive sites that date from around 1000 AD. So this is post Tiwanaku and pre-Incan where you see these small groups rise up in power not in huge areas and not empires these are small chiefdoms and small regional forces and they set up these Pucara through this particular region. This is and the village it would have been defending is located at the base of these valleys and actually you can see there's agriculture is still practiced down there. Some 40 or 50 years ago these villages started to become abandoned because there's no high schools in this area so the young poke would go down to Arica or up to Putre another area where there's a local high school and very few of those kids went home and so a lot of these sites were depopulated but now with technology improving irrigation practices improving they're actually booming now and so you can see here we've got agriculture going on here in quite a productive manner and we can see the introduction of glass houses and pumps and so forth. With the highway being here they can provide their resources right through to the coast. Here we are in the Tembo Zapuila on the main highway between Arica and La Paz and this is an Incan structure that was used as a whey station and so we're in an area where agricultural processes were going on that would have had stock so they would have stockpiled grains and wool from the alpaca and any other produce they might have been bringing other produce up from the coast or distribution so this is where it all happened here and so we're at a junction of Inca trail that run north south the main royal road the Qhapaq Nan which is a couple of kilometres to the east behind me and this was on a lateral trail that would have gone through to Arica and produce coming in and out of Arica there. This is a Incan multi-room you can see there's one two three four six rooms here and then over to my left is the reconstructed whey station where people would have rested and perhaps some of the merchants would have stayed and then the produce coming in and out would have been recorded on what is known as the Kipu which is a series of strings and knots and coloured strings there. The structure behind me is reconstructed so the difference between this and the other was that had been partially excavated by the archaeologists this one's been reconstructed to show one of the structures. I would hazard a guess and say that the northern structure is the storage area and this is the admin area and may have been residents or somewhere where people could sleep or stay as they're moving up and down the trail. 500 kilometres south of Santiago marks the beginning of what is known as the Lakes District of Chile. The higher peaks are snow-capped in this region and the volcanic peaks stud the range. There are literally hundreds of glaciers flowing out of the Andes in this region. A few still show evidence of advancing due to cyclic weather events but in the main many of these larger glaciers have had their terminations marked and they clearly show the rate of retreat which in some cases is many kilometres of retreat over the past few decades. As glaciers melt, for example as temperatures increase due to climate change, they may retreat exposing the red rock that may have been covered by ice for thousands of years. The melting ice will drop the gravel and rocks that were carried downslope may be deposited along the flanks of the glacier. This is known as glacial lateral moraine or form a bank at its termination. The termination is also known as the snout of the glacier and the moraine that's formed here is called the terminal moraine. Advancing glaciers which are rare these days may bulldoze moraine deposits and leave banks of gravel to indicate where the glacier may once have terminated. Human population of Patagonia particularly in Chile is very low with vast areas devoid of any human settlement. Roads are few and far between with year-round settlements even more rare. Oil production occurs in the Argentinian Patagonia to the north and large sheep stations can still be found in some areas mainly to the east of the range. Today it is tourism that draws many to the area and generates more economic activity than does traditional farming. Grey glacier is located at the west of but adjacent to Torres del Paine National Park. It is approximately 20 kilometers long and it flows almost due south to terminate in Largo Grey which in turn flows into Rio Grey. This is a spectacular glacier as it separates into three snouts at its termination. As the glacier terminates the ice melt results in the glacier calving where icebergs ranging in size from a few meters across to chunks over 50 meters wide. These ice peaks then move southwards towards the end of the lake where they are stranded as the waters become shallow and then flow southwards until they reach the Gulf of El Marantan Monte which eventually opens into the Pacific Ocean. I doubt very much if any icebergs of any size get as far as the end of river. Torres del Paine is probably the place where most people equate with being in Patagonia. While it covers only a very small percentage of the entire region it contains some of the finest examples the region has to offer. It has spectacular mountain peaks, there are roaring waterfalls, massive rapids and beautiful dense forest and walking through this landscape provides opportunities to marvel at a range of vistas from all angles and different lights. Not to mention the opportunity to see pumas. That rarely happens but there's always a chance that that may occur. Here we are in Milodon Cave and this is the cave that features in the beginning of Bruce Chapman's famous book In Patagonia and this is where some dinosaur skin was found by a cousin or a grandmother's and it was described as brontosaurus skin and what we now know that it was the skin of an extinct megafaunal beast known as a milodon, a great diprotodon sized herbivore that roamed the plains here and so they found the remains of this animal dating to 14,000 years ago in this cave but we have occupation by humans from about 10,000 years ago. So we see this massive cave here, this is the largest in the region if not in Chile, that was formed by the action of waves coming in off the lake which is out the front of the cave and this formed maybe 20, 30, 40,000 years ago during the peak of the Pleistocene Ice Age and if you look behind me you'll see evidence of excavation, some of it with what I call detailed archaeological excavation. In the beginning in 1896 when Nergensgaard used dynamite to actually obtain his specimens we can see the damage he's caused there but from here we step into the Torres del Paine National Park. Behind me you have the Paine Massif, the Almirante Nieto, one of the major peaks, Pana Grande and the horns that's Cuenos de la Torres. It's a unique geological formation. The basement rocks are over 100 million years old and yet the signature rocks which is lenticular granite that forms inside and which the horns are actually identifiable through are only 12 million years old. What is so unique about this area is that it's new in geological terms and it is still forming. So geology students just go crazy down here because they can see what they've been learning in action. What you can see is the sedimentary rocks that are the basement rocks folding and faulting and then you see the glaciers that are still coming here today grinding those rocks down forming these perfect parabolic valleys that actually formed the valleys between the horns in that massif there. It's an amazing landscape full of lakes and the actions, the natural actions of water, wind and tectonic plate activity that's resulted in what you can see here today. No matter how many times you visit it keeps coming up with new vistas. It's just spectacular. It has evidence of human occupation dating back to the prehistoric period well before the Colombian period and then the prehistoric occupation for fauna. We have the Pleistocene fauna, the mega fauna become extinct at the end of the Pleistocene over 10,000 years ago and then we have the modern fauna living down here in this cold windy and wet environment but nonetheless it's spectacular.