Río Pascua: El Secreto Ya No Es Un Secreto

For more of my photos try this slide show at Picasa.

El Secreto Ya No Es Un Secreto.

The Secret Is Out.

The company was betting that the world would not discover what they were up to in the hidden recesses of Patagonia. Yet we beat the odds and pulled off a great adventure, with plenty of adversity and uncertainty included. We made the Río Pascua trip in good style, though it turned out to be a bigger landscape than even I had thought it would be. We pushed hard to get our people into this area of conservation concern. I was thorough in the preparations and intentional in the leadership, everyone came together as a great team, and we had a safe and successful wilderness journey. And now we know what the company did not want us to know. We now know intimately a landscape that is a marvelous ejemplo del alma de la Patagonia Rebelde, y ahora vamos a gritar al mundo la noticia!

The Río Pascua is a jewel! The entire upper stretch of the watershed that we explored is pristine, wild, and incredibly intact—a rare example of native Patagonian mountain and river ecosystem that has not been subject to heavy grazing pressure or other extensive human activity. The landscape and the elements have conspired to protect and to isolate this watershed from cattle and human settlement, even on the basis of seasonal use. The ecological value of this watershed is high, due to what is present, and due to what is not present. There are very few, if any, invasive species throughout the stretch of the watershed that we explored. This roadless and wild watershed is a seed for restoring life—es una semilla en forma de ecosistema, necesario para restaurar la vida; to industrialize it is to further sentence Patagonia, and perhaps all of the Andes, to a future of steady degradation.

I speak of a river, but I also speak of a mountain river. I speak of an Andes mountain river that is born of a mammoth lake and that pours rapidly, steeply, and strongly to the ocean. Las aguas del Río Pascua llevan con su fuerza el nacimiento de la tierra y el alimento del cielo, y hasta el cielo fuimos. We were forced high. The topography is rough and steep. The vegetation near the water level was always thick and thorny, with sudden cliffs and overhung forest of mosses and groundcover. Crossing the Río Quiróz was the most athletic step of the trip, sin René Millacura quizá no lo hubieramos cruzado. Yet we crossed, we worked hard and we continued traveling and marveling at this wild jewel of a river pouring from the glaciers of the Patagonia Continental Ice Field.

The weather was with us, though the sun burned and was unforgiving. We were fortunate in some ways, the dryness of the conditions being one of them. The marshy soils, and especially the one extensive mallín that we were forced to cross, were easily managed and hardly as challenging as they might be to a group of our mixed strength and experience. Certainly a real Patagonia rain may have stopped our group in its tracks, especially above the tree line—but we were not destined to experience such misery. Instead we stepped high in stable conditions and skirted the depths of the tight canyon through which this voluminous and majestic Río Pascua roars.

The high country treated us well, it was physical but we had a stellar night of alpine camping and finished the next morning with a panoramic summit with stunning close up views of the Southern Patagonia Ice Cap. We could sense the Pascua pulsing below us, we could literally feel the power of the ages that had passed in the carving of that deep valley, carved drop by icy drop of glacier fed water. To attempt to dam such a river would be to knife the heart of the extensive wildland that stretched out around us in a 360-degree view.

Proposing the construction of three big dams on the Pascua was not supposed to draw the attention of anyone, but it certainly caught the attention of our diverse crew of wilderness loving souls. Were we just supposed to stand by with our eyes squeezed shut, pretending this was not happening? La cuenca del Pascua aún tiene la essencia de lo que es la Patagonia Silvestre. Es un refugio nativo y antiguo, de los huemules, de la vegetación, de los agues dulces de los hielos sureños. To destroy this remaining jewel of Patagonia is to reduce the human endeavor to one of brute ignorance. Only one who is completely unable to sense the strain that our native ecosystems are experiencing would be barbaric enough to consider destroying this watershed.

Quiere usted que yo lo diga en el castellano? Entiende usted que es una estupidez anti-intelectual pensar que ustedes van a resolver la crisis ambiental-energético con una intervención grave en el corazón de la tierra que nos sostiene?

A sincere mountain traveler has ecological literacy and environmental sensibility in their bag of tricks. Anyone who calls him or herself a montañista will be able to recognize special qualities in a place, and will be able to tune into to the state of conservation of the flora and the fauna. The Río Pascua flows out of a giant ice field and a very important national park, and borders a new Biosphere Reserve area. Without even questioning why this jewel has been left out of previous protected areas strategies, on the pure basis of essential biological connectivity and native habitat quality it violates all sense of conservation science (and corporate responsibility) to propose violating this nucleus of untrammeled nature with a massive industrial hydroelectric project. A hippy, a montañista, a responsible business man knows full well that they have no environmental justification for dynamiting canyon walls and pouring concrete into this free flowing river in order to continue wasting energy more than 2000 kilometers away. It boggles the imagination that a man who claims to be close to nature would propose such sacrilege.

No Matte a La Patagonia! Absurd, yet the slogan is quite hilarious, and very much to the point. Esta es una oportunidad única en la historia, usted puede mostrar un liderázgo que es maduro como el instinto de un montañista verdadero. Stand down old man, your plan to represar los ríos libres de la Patagonia es mal pensado, ya es hora que admita usted su error y cambie de trayectoria!