The Land of Fire

Waiting at the Strait of Magellan

By Alli Sinclair

I come from one of the world’s largest islands, so it’s only natural I’m a sucker for land poking out of vast oceans. Fortunately, near Australia, we have a fabulous selection of islands with palm trees, pristine beaches, and turquoise waters -- Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Vanuatu... the list goes on! But one of my favourite islands in the world doesn’t have a palm tree in sight but it does have penguins and is known as the Land of Fire – it’s Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina.

My first visit to Tierra del Fuego was after I’d cycled and ridden buses for thousands of kilometres through Patagonia. I’d been on a roll, enjoying the life of a traveller, only to end up stranded at the southern tip of Argentina, staring across the Strait of Magellen. Due to unpredictable wind and ever-changing currents, ferry crossings are commonly stopped until weather improves and my ferry was no different. Six hours later we crossed by boat, where humpback whales swam in the channel that flows between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Once on the other side, I jumped on a bus and travelled through windswept plains where crops of mountains jutted skyward. Arriving at Ushuaia, the stepping off point for ships sailing to Antarctica, I found a hostel on the hillside with views across the Beagle Channel. Not bad for US$10 a night.

The western region of Tierra del Fuego and most surrounding islands are owned by Chile while the remainder of the island is owned by Argentina. Now, depending on who you’re speaking to, you’ll get different stories about the most southern city in the world. Argentines will swear it’s Ushuaia, and Chileans will argue it’s Puerto Williams.

Tierra del Fuego National Park lies only 11 kilometres from Ushuaia, is the first shoreline national park established in Argentina, and it is the world’s most southern national park. It’s easy to access by bike, car, or, probably the most popular option, by train.

The Train to the End of the World is a narrow gauge railway that was originally established in 1910 after the prison in Ushuaia began operating. The steam train travelled along along the waterfront in Ushuaia, then across the eastern slope of Mount Susana and into what we now call Tierra de Fuego National Park. The railway originally connected the prison to the forestry camp within the park, and was known as the Prison Train until the prison closed in 1947. (The original railway closed in 1952 after an earthquake damaged the tracks. Luckily, some train lovers reconstructed and renovated the tracks in 1994. After purchasing a steam locomotive from England, building one in Argentina, and assembling three diesel locomotives, they opened the line to tourism). Now it’s possible to take the train from the outskirts of Ushuaia and travel for 50 minutes along the heritage railway to the Tierra del Fuego National Park.

Once there, you can visit waterfalls, thick forests, pristine lakes, and towering mountains that all combine to make a visit to this park an unforgettable experience. For those who love to hike, it’s easy to spend a few days traipsing the trails, enjoying the wildlife both on and above the ground. If you have a keen eye, you’re likely to spot an Andean Fox, North American Beaver, European Rabbit, muskrat, and guanacos. Looking above, you may spot an Austral Parakeet, Magellanic and Blackish Oystercatchers, as well as the elusive Andean Condor.

As for time of year, from personal experience, I’d say Autumn (Fall) is the most spectacular season to go. Crisp, sunny days, bright blue skies, and fewer tourists means you almost have the park to yourself. And as for scenery, nothing can beat the magnificent orange, red, and yellow leaves of trees clinging to the rolling hills and jutting mountains.

Enjoying champagne and Oreos at the end of the world

And if visiting the southernmost national park in the world then you can add standing at the end of the Pan-American Highway, an impressive roads that stretches for 29,800 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina.

Tierra del Fuego is shrouded in mystery, has a colourful history, and breathtaking scenery and nature. It’s easy to spend a week, even two, exploring the surrounds and if you’ve been saving your pennies, sail to Antarctica. For me, the Land of Fire burns brightly in my heart and I can’t wait to take my young family there and share the wonderful experiences waiting for us to embrace.

If you want to learn more about Ushuaia, you can visit another post I wrote here.

Off the Beaten Track: Diary from Antarctica

Our guest today is Adam Lutchansky. Adam lived in Juneau, Alaska, from birth until age 17, when he traded rifles and skiffs for palm trees and a NASA project at Harvey Mudd College in California.  After graduating with an engineering degree, Adam did research for a startup in Anchorage, turned wrenches on small cruise ships in Baja, helped construct a marine research lab in Juneau, and supervised maintenance of part of the oil spill response fleet in Valdez.  His willingness to work with his hands and take project-duration employment allowed him by the age of 25 to have visited all seven continents and to have lived and worked on four of them.  He'll be returning to Antarctica this austral summer for a four-month contract. The following is excerpted from his blog of his first experiences on the southernmost continent, Adam Down South.

Flight to the South Pole

30 Aug., 2007
Ten days on the ice so far. Already I've lost a linear conception of time - some of the days have slid by without interest; some were so intense as to warrant memorization. The best measure of time passed is the length of the days. The last time I checked, we were gaining half an hour of visible light every day. McMurdo Station is at about 78 degrees latitude, and at such extreme positions the winters and summers are exaggerated and the spring and fall are abbreviated. This is because the poles are usually either constantly exposed to the sun or constantly exposed to darkness. Each season is a study in a particular part of the day: summers, with the sun circling constantly overhead, are daytime. Winters, night. It is coming into spring now, and although the sun spends a minority of time above the horizon, every minute of daylight is a sunrise or sunset. The sun moves low, horizontally, heavily. The effect is ridiculously beautiful…

Work buildings at the South Pole station, which Adam visited

12 Sep., 2007

Nine hours, 46 minutes of sunlight. We're gaining only 15 minutes a day now, but the sky is clear and the sun is slanting through the shutters of the power plant and lighting the generator motors with a wide-spectrum glow, vibrant under the large sodium lights that otherwise illuminate the generator room with a tranquilizing orange.

Despite my temperature gauge hitting -20F, the sun is inescapable this afternoon, and for the first time the impossible legend of continuous summer sunlight hammering UV-saturated rays on the dry snow has gained some feasibility. It is piercingly dry here, and the sterility of the surroundings often feels absurd for such an exotic place. There won't be above-ground life anywhere near McMurdo Station for a couple of months, and never will there be the huddled lichens, gnarled trees, and anemic, short-lived flowers one associates with summer in a desolate place. There is nothing now but ice and sky, rocks and wind, and the Station.

The weather has been hit-and-miss here. When I arrived on August 20, we stepped out of the cargo plane, windowless but for a couple iced-up portholes, onto grainy, plastic snow, and choked on air measuring -33F. The sky was clear though, and with the sun only a couple degrees above the horizon we had a moment to take in the vivid majesty around us - the surrounding plain of snow that covers the sea, and the pink and purple mountain ranges that circled the distant horizon, clearly visible to 50 miles. The next day visibility was only a few hundred feet as a small blizzard moved in, and the day after that was once again clear. There is nothing here to impede the weather, and it changes fast. When we landed, our plane never shut down its engines, anxious to regain the security of altitude.
August and September are considered the coldest parts of the year at McMurdo…

Adam at the South Pole

…with 350 people now at McMurdo Station, the population seems slightly higher than the perfect amount. The dining hall is just slightly too crowded for a quiet meal, the video selection is often thinned out, and I've met far more people than I can recall having met. I spent my first couple weeks just smiling and saying hello to everyone I saw, abandoning any effort to figure out who I was supposed to know.

Despite living with 350 people now and preparing to live with 1000+, the people living here want to be here, and everyone makes sacrifices for the opportunity, so the social atmosphere is very friendly. Mainbody [busy season] takes a bit of getting used to I'm told, but once one gets into the proactive mood, it's supposed to be a damn good time. For now, however, the idea of more people arriving inspires in most of us WinFly personnel [workers who came earlier] feelings of apprehension and xenophobia.

Even before I secured a job at McMurdo, I'd heard a lot about the place, mostly people who had passed through the station. The few people I'd met who actually lived at McMurdo described it as a bustling, interesting, and crowded outpost, whereas the people who were here as transients painted a grim picture of dust storms, decrepit buildings, alcoholic inhabitants, and a lack of activities. The fact of the matter however, is that this is not a place to be a visitor. To minimize the environmental impact, there's a limited amount of turf at McMurdo, so rooms are fairly small, the gyms and bars are crowded during peak hours, and the recreational resources are hidden away in whatever space could be spared. During the summer season (a.k.a. mainbody), this place gets crowded, and the male to female ratio is about 2:1, causing all the men to develop an instinctual frustration with the arrival of any additional men. So when any people at all show up at McMurdo for a few days complaining about conditions which are further aggravated by their own arrival, I can understand that no residents are keen to share with transients the best hours for certain activities, the word-of-mouth opportunities, and the hidden gems that make this a great place to live. Transients are left with nothing to do but to mull over reasons to leave town…

Transport between stations

22 Dec., 2007

The tilt of the earth's axis has reached a fully reclined position, summer has swept south to McMurdo, and life is easy. Today is the austral summer solstice, and for the past few days the sun has been rotating around us at a nearly constant angle, never dipping or rising, just spinning around us at a lazy glancing angle, while all the shadows pace around in circles. Daytime temperatures were recently staying above 40F and people were walking and working outside in t-shirts. Anyone showing bare skin outside must regularly baste themselves in suntan lotion to avoid frying their skin under the rotisserie of the infinite daylight, burning raw with UV rays spilling through the ozone hole above.

Activity at McMurdo is at its peak, and the station is fulfilling its role as the continent's premium logistical, scientific, and transport center. We host 20 or so airplane flights a day but our runway on the sea ice immediately adjacent to the station has melted away, the ice too thin to handle any traffic, and all airplane operations have moved to our two more distant fields. Fifteen or so miles out of town, Pegasus Field has reopened and hosts heavy wheeled aircraft such as the C-17 turbofan transports, each C-17 being almost the exact size of Scott's ship HMS Discovery, arriving now three times weekly from New Zealand…

Penguins

…The weather for weeks has been warm enough to enjoy a beer outside and to go running with bare arms, but yesterday we got our first snow and cloud cover in weeks, and it was a beautiful relief from the oppressive regularity of blue skies. The temperature of the air and snow was too high for the snow to stick to the ground, but the thick assault of flakes came down as large wet wads, falling white but smashing transparent against the earth. I wandered into this assault with several friends and a haphazard nonchalance, catching the flakes on our tongues and giving refuge to the flakes on our shoulders.