Parque Nacional Los Alerces

We spent six days in the Parque Nacional de Los Alerces; three chilling out and three fishing the Rio Rivadavia. The park is verdant, windy, and chilly (it snowed above tree level on our second night there). Cyprus, coihue, arrayán, monkey puzzle, and pine trees cover steep mountains that plunge into a series of interconnected lakes.

The Old Man obliges at a punto panorámico:

 

When driving around the dirt rim road of the park, we rarely encountered other cars. I couldn't believe it! If this were Rainier or Crater Lake, there'd have been bumper to bumper traffic. Also, dust + sunbeams = awesome.

Local artisans make the abundant, wild rosehips into tea and jam.

The predominant groundcover is not fern but colihue, a tall, bushy, bamboo-like grass that looks like the tail of a Dr. Seuss creature. Or, I suppose, of a wolf.

I guess some things are universal:

We hadn't reserved lodging, and were delighted to stumble upon some cute cabañas within the park, on the Lago Verde. Our cabaña was quite rustic: no doors on the bedrooms, and no electricity until 8:30pm. The dueña's grandparents had settled that piece of land (settled for real, not kicked-out-the-indígenos-settled) long before the area was a national park. Back when there were no roads or cars and the only way in and out was by horseback or boat. Her grandparents would take a boat across the lake(s) once a year and stock up on flour, sugar, oil, etc. Can you imagine? That is some serious frontier shit. We were significantly less hardy.

Fishing the Rio Rivadavia

I have never seen water so clear as the Rio Rivadavia. Pebbles 25 feet down were as visible as though I were looking through glass; there was no algae. This made the trout completely visible, which made fishing kind of infuriorating, because we could see our flies float over twenty fish, and watch them all calmly ignore our perfectly cast offerings. The water clarity caused us to preemptively set the hook (read: yank the fly out of reach), because we could see the fish approaching. Fishing was also difficult because we were trying to pull up 20-inch 'bows on a 1/4-inch nymph. With a 7x tippet. If we were lucky enough to get a fish on, we had to gently guide it into the shallows to tire it out before it broke off the fly. All of the factors conspired so that I never landed a fish, but Mom and Dad landed some beauties.

Mom and Dad are adorable:

We had the river almost all to ourselves. By law only eight fishing boats are allowed down the river per day, so typically we'd see maybe one other raft, two kayakers, and perhaps five people wading. In six hours. Dad and I agreed that sections of the float appeared at times primeval, like a jungle out of Jurassic Park or Anaconda. Where we disagreed is when Dad tried to claim that Anaconda was a good movie.

For the nights we were fishing, we camped at the lake's edge. The view from our campsite:

We awoke to mate, naturally.

Our trip in this area ended with a delicious dinner at a little restaurant in Esquel that, randomly, featured Rothko placemats.