Notes describing start of trip:
In January, 1996 I went on the National Outdoor Leadership School's Patagonia Mountaineering Expedition in Chile.
I flew to Santiago and then further south to Puerto Montt where I met the instructors and my fellow students. We caught a bush flight the next day to Coyhaique where NOLS Patagonia is headquartered on a farm, or campo. For the next two days we outfitted ourselves with personal gear and prepared group gear, including food rations and fuel.
Coyhaique is a small town in a sparsely populated rural area and the logistics of bringing in supplies from outside the local economy are formidable. At the time, few buildings had private telephone service. To make phone calls we had to drive into town and use the public phones. We worked with what supplies were available. Even though we poured the fuel through filters to remove sediment, the remaining impurities would later cause problems with the stoves.
The food rations were fairly plain. We had rice, pasta, beans and flour among other things. We also had one of the more unappetizing food sources that I have come across: Texturized Vegetable Protein or TVP. This soy product is a good source of protein but the only way to consume it is to mask the flavor by combining it with liberal quantities of other foods.
We packed up our gear and flew to the town of Punta Arenas where we met the Ventisquero, the boat that would take us to the Southern end of the country. We traveled twenty-some hours through the bays and waterways on the Chilean coast. There wasn't much to do on the boat ride but sleep and hang out. It got colder as we made our way south and we passed icebergs and glaciers.
The boat anchored off of a narrow rocky beach. We used a rowboat to ferry us and all of our supplies onto the beach. This was to be an entirely self-supporting expedition. We had thirty days of food and fuel in addition to our other gear -- far too much to carry -- so we ferried loads. On our first day ashore, we hauled ten days worth of food and fuel and some gear partway into the river valley and established a cache site and returned to our camp on the rocky beach that evening. Next, we hauled another ten days of supplies and more gear to the cache site and again returned to our initial camp. Finally on the third day we took the remaining food, fuel, tents and other gear with us. The terrain varied between dense scrub brush, vine covered slopes and rain forest. Every once in a while we would cruise along a stretch of gravel bar.
The people on the trip were really cool. I was outfitted totally in black. I had a black rain parka, black rain pants, black gaiters and black shell mitts. Even my thermal underwear was black. So Hardy, who was from New Orleans, proclaimed that I looked like a character from a spy novel and fixed my nickname for the rest of the trip: the Jackal.
Because a good deal of the first day's efforts had been involved with route-finding and bushwhacking, the first cache site was not especially far inland. But on the third day, it was our third round-trip over that route and we were following a well beaten path. We established a second cache site and continued to backtrack and ferry loads. After two more cache sites involving three trips, we used up enough supplies that we could carry heavier loads and cut our ferrying down to two trips per cache site. Finally on the tenth day we shouldered our heaviest packs yet and proceeded onward carrying all our remaining supplies. By then we had left behind the dense vegetation of the river valley so having heavy unwieldy packs did not present as much of a problem.
