The Natives and Nature of Tierra del Fuego

February 1-3, 2019, Ushuaia & Cape Horn, Argentina & Chilean Fjords — Earlier I mentioned the Yamana name ‘Ushuaia,’ meaning ‘the way west.’ The Yamana were the original inhabitants, who probably crossed the ‘land bridge’ from Asia into what is today northern North America then trekked all the way down to the southern tip of South America.

Other than the occasional animal skin, the Yamana seldom wore clothing. (Yesterday it was in the 40s during the day, and this is summer!) They smeared their bodies with animal fat (think sea lion) to keep warm, and set large fires on land and small fires on rocks in their canoes for warmth.They used harpoons to hunt from their canoes and only the women could swim! Hundreds of archeological sites have been studied and carbon dated, but how they know who could swim and who couldn’t, I have no idea. Tierra del Fuego gets its name from the natives’ fires that early 16th-century European explorers saw along the coast as they navigated up the spectacularly beautiful channels.

The sun’s almost up, 5:30 a.m. In winter, it gets up around 10 a.m.

This time of year, the sun sets late. I took this view of Ushuaia at 10:27 p.m.

View from the pier in Ushuaia...

Spent 4 hours on an excursion to Tierra del Fuego National Park, in the Argentinian half of the island. Modest (but expensive) housing along the route...

The 155,000-acre park was created in 1960. Its interior is accessed by a very long, very steep, very narrow dirt road with barely enough room for two buses to pass. And no guardrails.

Both low and high deciduous Beech trees cover the mountains. Peat that’s been forming for thousands of years is harvested and ground into peat moss. In my earlier gardener life, using peat moss was frowned on since it was depleting a natural resource that had taken millennia to form. Peat bog:

This topography was created 16,00-10,000 years ago when glaciers retreated. We were surrounded by snow-capped mountains...

Looking east towards the Beagle Channel and, beyond that, the Atlantic...

Looking west... Chile is on the other side of Condor Mountain.

In 1946, some brilliant person (probably the same one who thought gypsy moths would be a great way to make cheap silk) brought 25 beaver couples from Canada and let them loose in the park. Cheap way to make a fortune selling beaver pelts, right? Except Canada is colder thanTierra del Fuego. So the beavers didn’t have to hibernate all winter and therefore fed off the vegetation all year long. And they had no predators. And, due to the milder climate, their fur was not as thick as that of their Canadian brethren, so no one wanted their pelts. And their meat tasted awful, so no one wanted to eat them. (Fishermen use beaver meat for bait.) Today there are 200,000 beavers in the park, and, as beavers are wont to do, they chomp and fell and build and change the natural waterways, never for the better.

We saw and heard a few birds, but missed the park’s population of red fox, gray fox, sea otters, condors, albatross, and guanaco, a South American camelid related to the llama. Since I did not get a picture of a camelid, here’s a shot of my Alpaca poncho:

Saturday was ‘Cruising the Horn’ day and the decks were swarming from 8-10 a.m. as we wended our way back down the Beagle Channel, out into the Atlantic briefly, touching on Drake’s Passage, rounding the Horn, briefly touching the Pacific off Chile and chugging back the way we had come. All this so we could check ‘Rounding the Horn’ off our bucket lists.

It was foggy but that meant that the seas were calm and, though I wore my anti-mal-de-mer bracelets, it was very smooth sailing. The trick is to sail around the Horn from west to east and not the other way, as so many ancient mariners tried to do. We sailed past a memorial to the ten thousand sailors estimated to have died over the centuries trying to round this point of land in rough seas. This is the Horn, folks, at the southern end of Hornos Island, at the southern tip of the continent:

Once we’d tagged the Horn, we turned back and re-entered the Beagle Channel under a few clouds... by afternoon, the fog had lifted.

This morning ‘Captain Lars’ treated us to what he called ‘a little deviation’ so we could sail up into a Chilean fjord, replete with glaciers, waterfalls and a rainbow.

Because there were blocks of ice floating off the shore (the white flecks above), the Sun sent several senior officers out in one of the tenders. They came back with a huge chunk of glacier ice that was displayed on the Pool Deck during our ‘Soup Bar’ luncheon buffet.

This waterfall poured out from under a retreating glacier.