By Corey Sandler
In the morning we turned left from the Pacific Ocean to travel about 45 miles or 70 kilometers inland on the Aisén Fjord.
The fjord runs east-west, connecting to the Pacific Ocean via the Darwin Channel.
The entire length of the fjord is affected by a strong tidal rise and fall of as much as 8 meters or 26 feet.
At the head of the fjord is Puerto Chacabuco, the main regional trading port, and a port of call for ships sailing to the Laguna San Rafael National Park.
Until 1991, the local port had been on the other side of the fjord, at Puerto Aisén about 4 kilometers or two-and-a-half miles further up the Aisen River.
Human interference with nature—major burning of the Patagonian forests to create agricultural land caused major erosion and silting into the Aisen River and the eruption of the Mount Hudson volcano in 1991 put ash into the same river.
As a result, the port had to be moved closer to the coast where Puerto Chacabuco now stands.
Back to Hudson for a moment: when the volcano let loose in 1991, it was one of the largest eruptions in the twentieth century, a Plinian eruption that let loose 3 cubic kilometers or nearly 1 cubic mile of dense rock and other material.
Although no one died, most of the farms in the area were buried under ash and the upper reaches of the river Aisen was filled with material.
The reason you might not have heard about this particular volcanic event was that it took place not long after the massive Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines which was—in relative terms—easier for the world’s media and scientists to cover.
I went with guests today on a visit to the Rio Simpson National Reserve and then beyond to the interior of northern Patagonia.
Here is some of what we saw:
A week ago, in Arica, Chile I saw a flower unlike any I had seen before. I still don’t have a definitive answer but the consensus seems to be some sort of thistle.
Here is that flower once again:
Today I saw something that at a distance looked like a cousin. But I know its name: firebush.
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