El Chalten

A story of flight and loss in the Andes

Mount Fitzroy (also known as El Chalten)

This week the editors at Hinterland were kind enough to offer me space to reflect on some of the books that have influenced my writing, as part of an occasional series on the non-fiction that shapes us. You can read the post here. To accompany it, I’m republishing a piece about Patagonia that first appeared in Hinterland in 2022, but this time with extra pictures. (The photo I use on my profile was taken on the same trip, by the way.)

It was quite possibly the best ice cream I’ve ever had, and the most unlikely. The sharp, sweet hit of frozen lemon and ginger was just what I needed to soothe my throat and bring down my temperature. I had a cold. A bad one. It had been going around the group for a week and now it was my turn. So instead of trekking to the Fitzroy base camp with the others I was going for my own gentle hike. To be honest, I was glad of the excuse. I’ve rarely felt so out of place as I did in El Chalten. It is a destination for experienced climbers in well-worn boots, grubby shorts and faded T-shirts, displaying muscular, sunburnt arms and legs. At the end of each day, they crowd the bars and cafés, drinking beer and eating pizza, swapping stories of perilous routes and lucky escapes. I had recently turned 69 years old and although I could still walk for miles on the flat, I soon became breathless going uphill. But I was happy to be here, in this remote valley, eating Italian-quality ice cream with the jagged, steel-grey peaks of Patagonia as a backdrop.

The town of El Chalten with Fitzroy (El Chalten) in the background

The Andes rise in sheer granite spikes so steep that snow settles only on the very tops. It is a landscape where you quickly run out of superlatives. The small town of El Chalten straddles the dead-end road that skirts the shore of Lago Viedma in the National Park of Los Glaciares and stops short of the Chilean border. High up in the mountains there is a lot of potential for confusion about where exactly the frontier lies, so forty years ago Argentina decided to lay visible claim to the land at the base of Mount Fitzroy and settlers moved in to stake out their territory. The main street of El Chalten feels familiar to anyone who has ever watched John Wayne swagger into town.

Mount Fitzroy is the reason people come here now. Named for the captain of the Beagle, that extraordinary naval officer who invented the weather forecast, served for a traumatic few years as governor of New Zealand, and died by his own hand in 1865 at the age of 60, it has another identity that predates the arrival of European adventurers and colonisers. The Tehuelche call it El Chalten: the smoking mountain. This is a land of smoke and mirrors, of clouds, myths and tall tales; Magellan’s tribe of giants who gave their name to Patagonia, the pioneering pilots of the early airmail service, and numerous missing climbers.

Park sign with names of the peaks

That morning I climbed the steep path to the dramatically named lookout of the condors, the Mirador de los Condores. It was December and the wildflowers were in bloom, yellow citrus-scented paramela with ruffled green leaves like lengths of braid waiting to be stitched, silvery-grey bushes of neneo that could be mistaken for a sort of mutant lavender tipped with bright scarlet, and nameless purple flowers, petals thin as tissue paper, peeping from behind tufts of rough grass. Day trippers crowded the route, giggling young people slipping and sliding in their flip flops, clutching at each other, stopping for selfies at every turn, or racing up, agile in their light sneakers. I trudged behind, leaden-footed in my walking boots. I didn’t want to turn my ankle on the uneven, pebble-strewn path. From time to time I stopped to look back at the neat grid of streets decreasing in size until the concrete buildings with their tin roofs resembled the miniature houses of a toy village. And on the horizon, the distinctive ziggurat of Fitzroy and his companions.

Paramela (left) and neneo (right)

The day trippers, oblivious to everything but the mountains, stopped at the viewing point, took more photos, and made their way back down to the coach park. I turned my back on Fitzroy and walked for another half hour till I reached the second lookout, the Mirador de las Aguilas. An eagle’s eye view of a vast, open expanse of muddy-brown earth and sparse, grey-green scrub. Far away in the distance was Lago Viedma, waves breaking on the barren shore, chunks of brilliant white ice broken off from the glacier, like scoops of sorbet drifting in the sky-blue water. I sat down on a weathered terracotta rock, completely alone except for the dark shape that floated below me, a condor circling in the updraft, its huge wingspan dwarfed by the landscape. It was an ideal spot for peaceful meditation, with only the gusting wind for company.

Lago Viedma seen from the Mirador de las Aguilas

It is hard to empty your mind. Thoughts crowd in to fill the space. You observe them moving across your consciousness. Gentle like grazing guanacos or fierce as mountain lions, they appear and, when they’re ready, take their leave again. That day, in the foggy, feverish state that accompanied my cold, I was visited by the shadows of the missing and the dead. One of the needle points that flank Cerro Fitzroy is named for the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who flew this route in the 1930s, in often treacherous conditions, carrying the first airmail for Aeroposta Argentina. I imagine him in the open cockpit of his single engine Potez, armoured against the cold in helmet, goggles, scarf and gloves, gliding like a condor over the mountains. The peak next to Saint-Exupéry bears the name of chief pilot Jean Mermoz, pioneer of the daring night flying that made the airmail service competitive. He once landed on a mountain shelf just 300 metres wide and, after effecting repairs to his plane, took off again by simply rolling over the edge of the precipice. Alongside him rises another spike, named for the legendary Henri Guillaumet, who crash-landed on a frozen lake on his ninety-second flight and walked out through the mountains to safety.

I have always felt safer as a passenger in a small plane than in a modern airliner; more connected to the wings, more conscious of the cradling atmosphere that holds me up. Except once, in a thunderstorm that reduced visibility to zero and tossed us around in the clouds, preventing us from landing for a very long half hour. The early aviators risked their lives with every flight, driven by a spirit of adventure and in pursuit of commercial advantage. Mermoz, for all his skill, vanished off the African coast in 1936. These airmen faced the constant threat of mechanical failure or bad weather, as Saint-Exupéry describes in his autobiographical novel Vol de Nuit. We follow his fictional pilot, Fabien, in constant radio communication with the airstrips along his route, hoping for a safe landing place as the storm closes in around him, leaving him with no way out. His messages become more and more fragmented until finally he disappears from the airwaves.

The outbreak of war brought new risks for those who continued to fly. Guillaumet was shot down over the Mediterranean in 1940 and four years later Saint-Exupéry himself was lost on a reconnaissance flight from Corsica, aged 44. The wreckage of his plane was eventually identified in the sea near Marseilles and his silver bracelet dredged up in a fishing net, but no one knows why he crashed. Was it enemy action, an accident, or a deliberate decision to end his own life? As a writer, he is best known for his fable of the Little Prince, an apparently simple children’s book about a boy who lives on a tiny planet with a single rose bush as his companion. Since it was first published, the year before Saint-Exupéry disappeared, adult readers have interpreted the underlying moral in myriad different ways. The author’s death created a further myth to add to the multiple layers of the story.

My copy of Le Petit Prince

Gazing out over the emptiness of the Patagonian plain, sipping cold water from my metal flask, I found myself reflecting on a painful void within my own family. Fabien fails to return from his night flight carrying the European mail to Buenos Aires. ‘Failed to return’ (FTR) is how the RAF records aircraft that never came back from more deadly missions. One of them was my uncle’s Halifax bomber. During his training he wrote letters home, cheerfully describing night flying as jolly good fun. Getting lost was a game, he declared. You just landed in a field near a fine-looking house to be in with a chance of a good meal. ‘Prang’, he explained with schoolboy humour, was a new verb. ‘I prang, thou prangest and so on,’ while in a more poetic moment he wrote of climbing up to the cool heights and peacefully gliding down. But his final landing was far from tranquil. He was still only 21 years-old when, returning from a bombing mission over the Ruhr in 1943, he was forced to ditch his plane in the North Sea. I have the telegram, a scrap of yellowing paper in a mundane brown envelope, to mark the end of a precious life.

It was an absence that haunted my childhood, although I did not fully understand the lingering distress of the grown-ups around me. ‘Missing in action’ is a kind of limbo. At first my grandparents wanted to believe that their boy had been taken prisoner and would return at the end of the war. But as the months went by that hope wore thin, until the most they could wish for was that the tide would wash his body ashore on a Dutch beach. Even that consolation was denied them and my uncle would never have a grave, although his name appears on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. Not quite the same as having a mountain named after you, but still a kind of public remembrance.

Loss is not always so dramatic. People go missing in different ways, leaving spaces for us to fill with imagination. A lover’s quarrel ends in separation, friends drift apart, families fall out. From my eyrie I watched a solitary horseman ride out from a distant cluster of buildings far below, emphasising the scale of the emptiness around him, and thought of the gaps that have appeared, like moth holes, in the fabric of my own life. One of them has now been mended, although I am still aware of it as a darn of a different texture. My cousin, who was lost, has now been found. His father chose to cut himself off from the family for reasons that no one will ever fully understand. My brother and I called him our disappearing uncle and invented all sorts of dubious life choices that might have made it necessary for him to vanish. We never imagined that he had a secret wife and a son who was just three months younger than me. I and my unknown cousin should have been playmates and friends but instead we grew up in ignorance of each other to live similar lives, both with a gift for languages and a yearning to see the world. We finally met just a year before my trip to Patagonia, a trip that my cousin was once the tour leader for. It seemed fitting that he should have been the one to tell me a story as mysterious as that of Saint-Exupéry, one that came back to haunt me as I sat on my rock, light-headed with fever, dreaming the dead back to life.

My cousin and his group were making the trek that I missed up to the Fitzroy basecamp when one member of the party decided not to continue. I know virtually nothing about her, not her physical appearance nor even her name, but I imagine her as unremarkable in every way. She agreed to sit and wait while the others went on up the mountain trail but when they came back down she was nowhere to be seen. They hunted and called for her but got no reply so eventually assumed she had decided to return to the hostel on her own; not a very sensible decision but not necessarily dangerous. When they arrived back in El Chalten they discovered she was not there either and no one had seen her. That was when my cousin started to worry that she had had an accident. Search parties were sent out to scour the mountain paths but she was never seen again.

There are so many ways you could write her story as fiction. They all exist in parallel universes, any one of them as true as the next. I shivered a little as I held my cool flask to my burning forehead and tried out various possibilities in my head. A helicopter lands on the mountainside and carries her away. A ghostly, golden puma lures her through a rent in the atmosphere to another world. A stranger pushes her over the edge of the narrow trail to an ambiguous end. Or perhaps she simply walks out of her ordinary life, not even stopping to collect her luggage, thumbing a lift with some passing motorist who, if he later hears the news of her disappearance, chooses not to get involved.

This last scenario is almost plausible but I am not writing fiction and in the end I opt for the most obvious and saddest explanation of all. Either the woman set off to walk down the mountain and fell into a hidden crevasse, as happens even to experienced climbers. Or she chose to end her own life. I see her walking, not down towards the village but up and away from the main trail. She is thinking of Fitzroy and the ‘thing of darkness’ that drove him to pick up his razor in despair, and of Saint-Exupéry, whose plane was found miles off course with no bullet holes. But she may also be remembering the story of the Little Prince, who returns to his planet and his beloved rose, taking with him the sheep that Saint-Exupéry drew for him. ‘I will look as if I’m dead,’ he says, ‘but that won’t be true’, consoling his new friend with the thought that what he will leave behind on earth is just an empty husk. The Little Prince himself will be back home on his asteroid, one of the multitude of fireflies that glow in the night sky. In my version of her story, the anonymous woman spreads her wings and launches herself into space, trusting in the forgiving air to catch her, cocoon her, and carry her spirit to the stars.

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