{"id":1817,"date":"2025-02-09T17:09:11","date_gmt":"2025-02-09T17:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/?p=1817"},"modified":"2025-02-11T03:22:25","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T03:22:25","slug":"horseback-in-the-andes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/horseback-in-the-andes\/","title":{"rendered":"Horseback in the Andes"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Tomas Alarcon trotted his horse up beside mine and pointed to the vertical layer cake of limestone and shale that rose above the ugly scar of a limestone quarry across the valley.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

“I climbed those cliffs when I was a child,” said my Chilean guide. “There are millions of seashell fossils in the rock. Here, at nearly five thousand meters!”<\/p>

We rode in silence for a minute, pondering the massive tectonic forces that could lift what was once the bed of the Pacific Ocean more than 16,000 feet above sea level to create the cut-glass peaks of the Andes.<\/p>

Sixty miles southeast of the capital, Santiago, but a world away from its smog and sprawl, our shuttle vans from Cascada Expediciones (011-56-2-232 9878, www.cascada.travel; $206 for this one-day horseback ride) drove into the village of Ba\u00f1os Morales at the entrance to El Morado National Park.<\/b> The buildings had the A-line of Alpine roofs.<\/p>

“We only can make this trip from October to March,” said Tomas as we approached the horse corral. “In winter, this is all covered in three meters of snow.”<\/p>

The Andes can be harsh and unforgiving. About 70 miles south was the spot, made famous in Alive!,<\/i> where the 16 survivors of a 1972 plane crash subsisted on the bodies of the dead for more than two months until a pair hiked out and all were rescued. We later learned that, in another park valley favored by day-hikers for its easy access to glaciers, a climber had fallen to her death just yesterday.<\/p>

In short, the Andes were to be taken seriously, and Tomas’ company contracted local arrieros<\/i>\u2014Chilean cowboys in flat-topped, broad-brimmed straw hats\u2014to serve as trail guides.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

At the corral, the arrieros <\/i>matched us to small, sturdy horses with simple saddles made of piled blankets, sheepskins, hides, and carpet squares. The stirrups were curved booties of leather that resembled hooves.<\/p>

I sat atop my spirited mare name Canella (“Cinnamon”), watched tiny goats scramble across the surrounding boulders, and paid close attention to five-year-old Felipe Nu\u00f1ez, the youngest son of our main arriero.<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The kid perched atop his saddle in a straw hat and red sweatshirt, feet dangling a foot and a half above the stirrups, expertly maneuvering the horse with a series of vocal clicks and pops, light tugs on the loop of thick rope that served as reins, and the occasional zing of a switch.<\/p>

I imitated Felipe’s tongue clicks until I found the one that meant “go,” and steered my horse to join our train of 30 riders up a wide gravel path along the Volcano River.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The valley threaded between jagged mountaintops toward a low sloping dome set against a lapis sky in the distance: Volc\u00e1n San Jos\u00e9, an enormous twin stratovolcano rising to 5,856 meters (19,325 feet) and marking the border with Argentina. Tomas pointed out an Andean condor circling high above.<\/p>

After about an hour, we turned our horses off the road to clamber up the mountainside, picking our way between boulders and spooking a few rufous-tailed hawks to take wing. We forded small streams, waded across deep snowdrifts, and clambered up over a low pass to arrive at a high, snow-clad amphitheater with a sweeping panorama.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The mountains circled from the heap of the volcano to our right around to El Morado itself on our left, its jagged Matterhorn-esque pyramid of a peak making it the park’s poster child. A few riders scampered off to have a snowball fight.<\/p>

On our way back down toward the corral\u2014and an outdoor barbecue at the mountain hut of Refugio Lo Valdes (www.rifugiovaldes.com)\u2014I drew Canella up alongside Tomas to ask him where the dirt road I saw across the valley led.<\/p>

“To a mine,” he said. I expressed shock so much mineral extraction should be going on in a national park. Tomas shrugged. “This is Chile. Mining is what we have.”<\/p>

Copper is king in Chile, responsible for 45.1% of its exports (the next biggest export\u2014fresh fruit\u2014accounts for 5.3%) and pumping upwards of US$12 billion into the GDP. The world gets more than 40% of its copper (and its lithium) from Chile, and mining plays a large role in making Chile one of South America’s most prosperous nations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I asked Tomas if it made him nervous that his economy was so tied up in one industry. “Oh, it’s alright,” he said in an ironic tone. “We sell our other natural resources to foreign companies as well!”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Turns out when he’s not leading horseback, trekking, and rafting trips, Tomas is studying environmental law, and his heroes are the lawyers who have used the courts to tie up on technicalities the Pascua Lama operation\u2014a controversial project up north involving a Canadian mining company, 17.6 million ounces of gold and silver, and the Chilean glaciers they propose to move to get at it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Tomas also told me of plans by a Spanish company to dam two Chilean rivers. I asked if he would finish his studies in time to do something about it.<\/p>

“I will try.” He said. “If you cannot stop them, you annoy them with anything so that it makes it too expensive to go forward. That is the strategy.” Tomas paused, looking over the valley at the clear tumbling stream of the Volcano River and the cruel slash of the mining road on the opposite slope. “I must do something,” he said, his mouth set in a firm line.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A ride among the sheer Chilean peaks of El Morado National Park guided by a young environmental warrior-in-training<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,17],"tags":[12,100,75,99,105,101,28],"class_list":["post-1817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newspaper","category-travel","tag-article","tag-column","tag-horseback-riding","tag-newspaper","tag-south-america","tag-the-intrepid-traveler","tag-travel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1817"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1823,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817\/revisions\/1823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}