I was having lunch at the Iceberg Lagoon when I realised just how different this trek was to what I’d anticipated. The setting was extraordinary: I was high in the mountains surrounded by a giant circle of rocky peaks, with the last patches of winter snow still tucked into their crevices. Between two of them shone a blue and white glacier, curling its way down into a turquoise lake. The weather was as perfect as the view: a bright February day without a breath of wind in the air. Patagonia was putting on its best face for me.
I was in the Cerro Castillo National Park in Aysen, a remote region of Chile two thirds of the way down the country’s long spine. It’s somewhere that until recently had always been overlooked by visitors due to poor infrastructure, which has left it as one of South America’s best kept secrets. Only now is it starting to make a quiet name as one of the great new frontiers for wilderness trekking. A quick look at the map tells the story why: a patchwork of national parks surrounded by endless crumpled mountains and dotted with glacial lakes. Through it all the famous Carretera Austral highway runs like a thread. This is what I was here to explore.
Empty trails
So what made this feel so different? The view was beautiful, but there are plenty of wonderful views in Patagonia. I worked for three years as a guide in Torres del Paine, and I could give you a list of a dozen spectacular vistas that any hiker would travel around the world to see – and rightly so.
And mountain lagoons? Well, Patagonia has plenty of those too, even if it pains me to admit as a Chilean that some of the loveliest are across the border in Argentina. Go hiking in Los Glaciares National Park and you’ll even find ones you can hike to for lunch and be back in time for a nice meal in a restaurant and a cosy hotel bed.
It was only when my guide pointed to some tiny figures on the horizon that it hit me. We had been quite alone in the landscape. This had been the great surprise of the trek. For half an hour, we watched the small group get closer and closer, picking their way through the mountain scree, stopping every so often to check their route.
Finally, they were at the lagoon, dropping their rucksacks some way away from us. One of them took off their boots and tentatively dipped a foot into the water to test just how cold the water was. I’d done exactly the same when we’d arrived. It was as freezing as you’d expect when there are blocks of ice the size of cars bobbing in the lake, but when the air is still and there’s a warm sun on your back, you still feel compelled to test it out. Just in case.
Breaking new trails
Two groups of hikers enjoying a mountain lake in an otherwise empty landscape. This is what the Cerro Castillo trek was offering that made it feel different to other places I’d hiked. It felt very companionable. In some parts of Patagonia you can hike into wildernesses that are so remote you can feel genuinely overwhelmed by the landscape. And in other places you can find yourself taking a photo from a mountain pass and waiting for others to get out of shot so you can pretend to people at home that you were the first person to conquer the trail and not the hundredth person to cross it that day.
Cerro Castillo was neither of those things. It was four days in the mountains that felt like arriving somewhere at exactly the right time, as part of the first generation of hikers. There was all the pleasure of feeling like you were breaking fresh ground and seeing sights that few hikers had ever seen before, but with enough support from guides that you were always comfortable in what you were doing.
The lagoon was on the second day of the trek. We’d set out from the trailhead at Las Horquetas just outside the boundaries of the national park. Like a lot of Patagonia, this has been prime ranching country, and the landscape was quite rural, with small estancias and distant herds of grazing cattle. After signing in at an office run by the national park authorities CONAF we headed into Cerro Castillo proper.
That first day was something of a transition zone. The trail ran in and out of forests, which would sometimes open up and tease us with a view before closing in again. We followed a valley and made several river crossings. And then, in the last half an hour, Cerro Castillo showed us just what we were there for.
An enormous rampart of mountains rose up high above us. Its crags were streaked with snow and its shoulders draped in glaciers. The air was so clear you could almost reach and touch them. I couldn’t wait.
Our home for the night was Camp Turbio. It was pretty rough and ready, with places to set up the tents between the trees and some basic washing and toilet facilities. What more did we really need?
Mountain pass views
The next day we headed high, climbing nearly 3000 feet (900 m) to the Peñon Pass. This is the morning where we stopped at the Iceberg Lagoon. The arrival of the other walkers had been no surprise of course; they had stayed at Turbio alongside us the night before and we’d swapped hiking stories.
We’d chosen an earlier start and pressed on. I hike at quite a fast pace – in truth, the second day could be walked in about five hours, even with the big changes of elevation. But the landscapes here demand an alternative approach. It was a luxury to be able to stop as much as we liked rather than having to press on to reach a destination. As a result, lunch at the lagoon was suitably long and relaxed. After all, why travel all this way and hurry on to the next place?
The next day we hiked to Lake Cerro Castillo and shared it with as many as a dozen other people before climbing up to Morro Negro Pass (5577 feet/1700 metres). Here, we spent an incredible three hours here – talking, eating, napping and just drinking in the 360 degree views. The horizon seemed to go on forever. I could see endless mountains, with their neat white glaciers and dozens of lakes tucked in between them. To the east, Argentina unfolded on the other side a frontier that would have been invisible but for its lower and drier peaks that left the mountains brown and glacier-free.
The next big thing?
There’s a lot of buzz around Aysen as Patagonia’s ‘next big thing’. It doesn’t have the connectivity of Torres del Paine, or the immediate sense of being in the middle of things as you get at El Chaltén in Los Glaciares. But I never felt like I was exactly roughing it either. After finishing the trek, I explored the famous Marble Caves on Lake General Carrera, just a (relatively) short paddle away by kayak.
But what really made the Cerro Castillo trek so special was that wonderful sense of freshness. As an ex-guide and proud Chileno it was a delight to discover that there is still so much more to explore in Patagonia. You don’t often get to find a new mountain range dotted with lakes and get to share them with just a handful of like-minded adventurers. You might even be tempted to dip a toe in their glacial waters – just to check they’re real.
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