Journal

Route 285, which runs near our home south of Santa Fe, is a big part of my life. I bike south on it through the high-desert beauty of the Galisteo Basin. I drive north to Colorado ski areas and the Arkansas River Valley. It is the major thoroughfare through New Mexico’s capital, and we shop in stores along its route.

Last week, my wife and I looked forward to traveling home on it from its southernmost point, a small Texas town called Sanderson, 20 miles from the Mexican border. We’d be heading northwest towards Fort Stockton and Pecos, two undistinguished West Texas towns, and across the New Mexico line to Carlsbad, then Roswell. We expected a beautiful drive through sparse cattle country. Instead, we found ourselves in a Western version of Mad Max meets Dante’s Inferno meets L.A. freeway at rush hour. The culprit: our oil and gas industry run amok.

Ironically, we were returning from a 4,300-mile road trip through a long slice of Mexico, depicted in recent years as a perilous hellhole. During our month long trip, in a country once known for its bad roads, no where we drove approached the miserable condition and dangerous truck traffic we encountered along the 140 miles between Fort Stockton and Carlsbad.

We faced four-inch deep potholes the size of manhole covers, a surface that rolled like a wind-driven sea, the painted center line long ago worn away, and a steady 80-mph river of water tankers, semi trucks, and oversize pickups hauling huge compressors. The highway, made for lighter traffic, could hardly withstand the heavy load.

You need to be in good shape to get the most out of Torres del Paine National Park. It is a hikers’ world. Backpackers extract the most out of the experience because they get into and around and through the extraordinary beauty of this craggy massif of granite and sedimentary rock. Limited in time and youth, I did not do the seven-day circuit of the massif, but I hiked two challenging day routes, including what is generally considered the most difficult, the trail to the foot of the torres, or towers in English. It’s a nine-mile trek with a total 4,000-foot gain. The last kilometer is steep and hard, but the payoff is worth it:

Like everything that pokes above ground level in these parts, a couple of hairs north of the fearsome Roaring Forties in latitude, the massif is blasted by gale-strength winds. It is so impressive that experiencing the gusts that can knock you over is worth a visit in itself, and far better than a roller coaster because its nature in its

joy. I was there in December, the southern hemisphere’s June, and gusts of 50 to 60 mph pummeled us. Guides and hotel staffers told me it was nothing compared to the winds a little later in their summer. “You get lifted right off your feet and blown over,” one guide told me. “Sometimes we can’t even go outside.”

Torres del Paine is a dance of light and shadow, of rainbows and glaciers, of guanacos and pumas, of soaring buzzards and eagles that surf the storm. It is erosion and change and elemental forces. A human feels small on this stage. Where it’s flat, the pampas feels like an ocean, as U.S. pioneers in stagecoaches described the Great Plains. Beret-topped gauchos in heavy parkas come and go on horseback, providing color. But they don’t ride like our cowboys nor do they look like them. More like Andalusian horsemen I know from Spain, a riding style that seems more a part of the horse rather than a rider on the horse. Like mythical centaurs. I wondered if they ever dismounted. Whenever I saw one, wind whipped his clothing. Dressed in so many layers, he was shaped like an egg. Or maybe the gauchos just eat and drank a lot, which is understandable in this climate.

Dark rain clouds threatened all morning as we hiked over lush green hills, through forests of wind sculpted trees, and past exotic ferns and flora that reminded me of Tasmania. As my guide, Carlos Toledo, and I crested the summit, clouds parted, the sun shined through the last hint of mist, and the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean arced around us. To the north and south, long windswept beaches and rocky bays stretched to the horizon and, from a craggy islet several hundred feet below, rose the barking of sunbathing sea lions.

As I discovered over the next several days of exploring Chiloé, Chile’s largest island, and some of the surrounding archipelago’s waterways, this spot is about as dramatic as the island gets. Compared to the rugged peaks and glaciers of Patagonia, the lunar landscapes of the Atacama Desert, or the steep ski slopes of the Andes, Chiloé is subtle and soothing, with rolling hills and meadows where sheep graze and wildflowers bloom. It has echoes of Ireland or Nova Scotia, and of Oregon’s coastline.

The island feels anchored in another, more bucolic era, a place apart. The Spanish first populated it in 1567, but isolated from both the capital and the mainland, the Spanish and indigenous people intermarried and developed into hardy, independent-minded seafarers and sheep farmers. They developed a unique way of speaking, a distinct cuisine, a credo of self-reliance, and a religious mix of myths, fanciful tales and Catholicism.

Route US 285 shoots straight north from Santa Fe, where I live, to where it intersects with I-70 near Vail at the core of Colorado ski country. It’s a moving panorama of beauty all along the two-lane highway, from the broad plateau that looks east towards Taos’ magic mountains to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. After a low pass, it skirts the upper reaches of the Arkansas River for about 60 miles until it climbs past Leadville at 10,000 feet. Along the way, 24 of Colorado’s 53 14,000 foot-peaks punctuate the scenery. With the greatest density of high peaks in the lower 48 states, it’s stunning.

Since I usually drive the road in winter, I decided to explore the Arkansas River valley from Salida to Buena Vista, its two main towns, with my wife and two friends at the height of summer. Until recently, they were ranching towns with some recreational tourism based on running the river’s rapids and scaling the high peaks. Salida’s outdoor cred has been soaring for some time — a friend likened it to Aspen back in the 60s — but lately its more northern sister, commonly shortened to BV, has jumped into Colorado’s outdoor recreation industry in a big way. Now the two vie to outdo each other in river-running / mountain-biking / mountain-climbing / beer-brewing bona fides.

On the drive back to Anchorage, I stop in Seward for the night. Long a fishing town on the eastern shore of the Kenai Peninsula, it was named for William Seward, Secretary of State under President Lincoln and dealmaker for the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Seward is popular with tourists as a departure point for boat trips into Kenai Fjords National Park.

I sign on with a group promising an all-day adventure that takes us to the tongue of a glacier. A large motorboat ferrys campers and trekkers to various beaches along the Fjords’ many inlets. It drops us several miles from Holgate Glacier, where we unload the kayaks.

“I never get tired of this dynamic, ever-changing landscape,” says a Kenai Fjords National Park ranger who paddles over to check us out. Just as we’re talking, a big section of ice calves into the inlet with an explosive percussion. It sends waves toward us that quickly dissipate in the deep fjord. “As I was saying, this landscape is dynamic, living, unpredictable and wild.”

Next stop: Soldotna, on the Kanai Peninsula. But skirting the north shore of Turnagain Arm on the drive from Anchorage, I turn into the funky ski town of Girdwood for a lunch break. I often ate in a restaurant during winter visits to Alyeska resort, which I like for the backcountry cat-skiing and heliskiing operations, and I wanted to see what it’s like on a sunny summer day. The resort’s lift-served mountain, a 3,000-foot peak that rises directly above Cook Inlet, offers the weird feeling of skiing down to a beach. Alyeska also offers some of the steepest in-bounds ski slopes I’ve ever seen,steep enough to turn my stomach as I picture jumping in off the edge.

From Soldotna, a bush plane flies me west across the Cook Inlet to remote Lake Clark National Park, passing on the way the snow-laden cone of Mount Redoubt, a 10,197-foot volcano that rises like royalty from the sea. As we buzz past a volcanic black-sand beach, then swing back around to land on it — the flight is timed to coincide with low tide — I spot three brown bears grazing on meadows no more than 200 yards away. Brown bears are grizzlies that live on the coast. They tend to be fatter and healthier-looking than their inland brethren due to their protein-rich diet of salmon once the fish start running upstream in August.