Voz Silvestre Blog Launch--Pascua Expedition Project

I have hardly had a free moment with my computer since I left my Northern California home. It has been all about working on my latest consultancy with International Rivers. The Bay Area was non-stop, and the trip to the Aysén Region is well on its way to becoming a reality. A crazy wild improvised reality, but a reality none-the-less.

This is definitely one of those situations where one wonders if they have bitten off more than they can chew. I know I feel like I am making a lot of this up as I go. Thank goodness for the help of friends and new colleagues. Otherwise I would feel like I was hiking straight into a hailstorm without knowing where I was going. At least this way I feel more like I know where I am going, though I am not yet sure I can tell when the hailstorm will hit. There is a big difference between those two feelings. Thanks to everybody helping make this trip happen.

What trip you might say? At the end of November I was approached by Aaron Sanger, now the Patagonia Campaign Coordinator at International Rivers, to lead a trip to the Pascua River drainage in the south of the Aysén Region of Chile. What started out as a consultancy to organize a low profile backpacking trip has turned into a major media production. It is increasingly obvious, though, that making a splash with our trip to remote Aysén is a key element to a rapidly emerging international strategy to prevent the industrial development of a remote stronghold of wilderness lore.

As one of the initial expressions of International Rivers’ new Patagonia Campaign, The Pascua Expedition Project is an effort to put an international light on the threats of mega hydroelectric development to Patagonia’s wild rivers. It is an urgent backcountry and environmental delegation to a practically unknown place that has been slated for industrial conversion. We aspire to backpack down the length of the main body of the Río Pascua, from its headwaters at the outlet of Lago O’Higgins, down to the road that is being punched into this remote area bordering the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. On this hike we should be able to get a first hand view of the landscapes in question and help answer the question of what exactly is at stake.

The Pascua itself is a short, steep, and high volume river. As seen is this map, the plan of HidroAysén is to build three dams on this river.

The damming of this river is definitely impressive to contemplate. We want to hike it and get to know it and document, as I have said, exactly what is at stake.

Getting this trip together is definitely turning into a big deal, We have had lots of help from folks in Patagonia, in Coyhaique and Villa O’Higgins, even considering the pressures of high season tourism on everyone’s time and resources. My goals are to have a safe trip, to be as low impact as such a campaign device might be, and to contribute to a growing chorus of people demanding that the HidroAysén Project be abandoned.

Take a look at some of the previous blogs I put up here, the videos and article that I posted are great background material on the HidroAysén project. This is a huge project, one that previously I was watching with concern from a distance, but that now I am awash in, as intensely and more rapidly than the campaign to stop the Alumysa project. Back to Patagonia, can you believe it? It really is like coming in off the bench. I am certainly not going to be a substitute for anyone, but the situation is serious enough that all the second stringers need to get on the field now too.