West from Puerto Williams — History and Nature

Remains of the Beagle Conflict, Omora Ethnobotanical Park, a Waterfall, and Vintage Aircraft

On my first full day on Isla Navarino, my innkeeper Arturo and I had driven all the way to the end of the gravel road running east from Puerto Williams, and then walked a kilometer or two beyond that to find a whale skeleton and retrieve a rib.

On my second full day there, Michel, the missing German, had arrived, and we went on a shorter but interesting expedition in the other direction.

We started at an area for whale and bird watching, at a former military installation remaining from the peak of the Chile–Argentina tension in the late 1970s.

Then we walked through an ethnobotanical park where the local university studies and explains the tiny forest plants — lichen and mosses, plus the relatively large ferns.

Then we continued on to see a nice waterfall supplied by melting snow.

A couple of days after that, my South American adventure was coming to an end. It was time to fly back to Punta Arenas for a night there, then on to Santiago for two nights there. But the flight out, like everything else about Isla Navarino, was fascinating and a bit of an adventure.

The Beagle Conflict

Europeans weren't initially interested in these remote and harsh islands and water at far southern latitudes. In the late 1800s into the 1910s, English sheep ranching companies were among the first outsiders to want land here. That set off a genocide of the indigenous people. There had also been a brief gold rush around 1890, with over 800 mostly Croatian miners on the nearby Isla Lennox.

There was gold, but it wasn't economically sensible to try to extract it. Then the U.S. backed a coup in 1973 that deposed and killed the democratically elected President of Chile, putting the bloodthirsty dictator Augusto Pinochet and his military junta in power. Pinochet found the abandoned gold mines useful as a place to banish political opponents for a short period of slave labor before dying from the inhumane conditions. The Soviet Union had its Gulag system, and Pinochet said "Here, hold my maté and watch this."

For some time, Argentina, also ruled by a military junta, this one run by the bloodthirsty dictator Juan Perón, had coveted the uninhabited Lennox, Picton, and Nueva islands just off the east coast of Isla Navarino. A little for the gold, probably more for the efficient killing of politically inconvenient slave laborers. But most of all for purported justification to redraw vast areas of territorial fishing rights, and then use that to claim possession of a huge sector of Antarctica. More centolla and more frozen continent.

It all built up to the Beagle Conflict of 1977–1978. Argentina seems to have come within a few hours of an attack on multiple Chilean territories on 22 December 1978, although they have kept almost all information secret and it remains unclear precisely what did and didn't happen.

Bateria Róbalo

Róbalo Battery was established just to the east of military airstrip that became the Puerto Williams airport. It seems that the Chilean military quit maintaining it and never got around to removing the equipment, eventually turning it into a park.

Here's an artillery fire control station.

An LVTP 511 amphibious vehicle like this one could carry thirty soldiers. This model was in service from 1974 to 1984. There's one restored to better condition on the Navy base back in town.

Several 120mm guns are still in place.

The view from this 120mm artillery piece shows that this installation covered the Beagle Channel to the west of Puerto Williams, in the direction of the Argentine city of Ushuaia.

The Pope sent an envoy, Argentina backed down while insisting that it hadn't, and the Beagle Conflict calmed down. Now it's a park that's a nice vantage point to watch migrating whales and birds, none of which were migrating during my October visit.

Omora Ethnobotanical Park

The Puerto Williams campus of UMAG or University of Magallanes in Punta Arenas is in a unique position to study ecosystems of the far south. They maintain the Omora Ethnobotanical Park which is a nice place to visit and learn, and which also operates as a teaching and research field laboratory.

Charles Darwin had observed the large parasitic fungus growths called llaullao or pan de indio during the 1831–1836 second voyage of the HMS Beagle. They grow on the southern beech trees, blocking the tree's sap ducts.

The tree develops defensive galls to bypass the blockages, and the fungus then expands outward from that. This fungus is known to science as Cyttaria, a genus of ascomycete or sac fungi with about 10 species, all of them found in South America, New Zealand, and Australia, and growing on southern beech trees of the genus Nothofagus.

The indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego ate it uncooked, and it was about their only vegetable food. Other sac fungi familiar in northern latitudes are sources of antibiotics and are used to ferment bread, alcoholic beverages, and cheese.

Darwin recognized that this was the only known example of a fungus being the primary vegetable food for an indigenous people. He described it in his popular book based on his journal from the five-year voyage.

Other fungi, lichens, and moss are prominent species here, and the park provides explanations. You look through metal rings to see carefully analyzed and labeled examples. Above is yellow-green Chrysothrix lichen on a tree's bark, and below are two views of Leptostomum menziessii, a moss.

Here are two views of the moss Dicranoloma robustum.

Above is an example of one of the roughly 170 species of the lichen genus Pseudocyphellaria.

And, as throughout the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, the explosion of Canadian beavers continues rampaging through the area.

Cascada Los Bronces

We continued a little further out the Y-905 road, then parked the car and started up the slope. We were headed for Cascada Los Bronces, a waterfall that carries snowmelt. You can see the fan-shaped area here where the stream it feeds empties into the Beagle Channel.

Climbing higher changed the appearance of the fan.

We entered the forest and were soon at the stream.

Above are Michel and Arturo, I'm below.

Arturo pointed the way, and Michel and I continued to the waterfall.

Headed back down the slope, we could see that we weren't very far out of town. The Puerto Williams airport tower was visible in the distance.

Flying Back to Punta Arenas

After two more nights in Puerto Williams, this South American adventure was coming to an end. It had started by flying out to Rapa Nui. Then I had flown back to Santiago, and then on south to Patagonia and beyond, visiting Torres del Paine National Park, Puerto Natales, and Punta Arenas, before taking an overnight ferry through the Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel to Isla Navarino.

My multi-stage return would have me fly on Aerovías DAP from Puerto Williams to Punta Arenas and spend one night there. Given the weather in this region, it's best to only attempt one late morning to mid-day flight leg and stay overnight before attempting the next leg.

From Punta Arenas I would fly a LATAM jet to Santiago and spend two nights there, before an overnight Delta flight to Atlanta and a connection from there toward home.

Arturo had left for Punta Arenas two days before. I had almost forgotten about the ozone hole that research in Antarctica had found to be causing a sharp and spreading exposure to dangerous ultraviolet radiation.

Restrictions on chlorofluorocarbons used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants had, over the course of several years, reduced and reversed the problem. However, this far south, ultraviolet radiation was still dangerously high for residents. Arturo needed to visit his specialist in Punta Arenas for follow-up checks on the skin cancer that he had mostly recovered from.

So, he couldn't give me a ride to the airport. No problem, he said, Michel and I could use his car. But it had an automatic transmission an Michel had never operated such a vehicle. There is no formal taxi or Uber driver in Puerto Williams. I had asked at the Aerovías DAP office in "the big square downtown", open for an hour or two daily, but they provided no shuttle service. Would I have a 5 km trek to the airport terminal?

No, the airline knew of someone in town that you could contact via WhatsApp, a sort-of-Uber solution.

So, here I was at the airport. Unsurprisingly, this is the world's southernmost airport with regularly scheduled service. The steeply sloping green roofs of the Navy base church, the landmark building of Puerto Williams, was clearly visible.

De Havilland DHC-8 aircraft operate some of the flights in and out of Puerto William. This specific one had been grounded here for quite a while, waiting for the airline to fly in the needed mechanics, tools, and parts.

I had arrived an hour before my flight's schedule departure, which is quite early for this airport. The terminal was open, but I seemed to be the only person there. Three other passengers arrived after a while, and immediately stretched out for naps on the benches near the one check-in counter.

The Dientes de Navarino mountains rising inland of the town were visible.

The airport has HF dipole antennas for communication with planes well beyond VHF range.

Speaking of radio, it was getting close to departure time, and maybe I could see where the inbound aircraft for my flight was. No, the only three aircraft appearing in the region were two Argentine airliners approaching Ushuaia, and a DC-3C flying south out of Punta Arenas to an unspecified destination. Coming to pick me up? That would be interesting, but no.

After a while, a woman arrived at the check-in counter. There was no ID check, we told her our names and she checked us off on a sheet on her clipboard. We handed our checked bags over, and since she could lift each one, there was no need to weigh them.

Our plane appeared, a small twin turboprop. She pointed us through the door to the departure area. There was some X-ray gear on pallets and wrapped in plastic, to be installed before too long, but in October, 2024, there was no imaging of baggage or people. All of this was a very refreshing flashback to air travel before paranoia arrived in 2001.

Once the inbound passengers, luggage, and cargo were unloaded, we were sent out onto the tarmac. It was a Beechcraft King Air, an overall design from the 1960s. This was a T-tail model, a design that entered service in 1974.

Walk out, climb on board, find an empty seat. A space behind the doorway holds the baggage, kept in place with a heavy net.

Given that day's typically strong wind blowing west to east down the Beagle Channel, we didn't need much of the 1,440-meter runway to get airborne. It was a bumpy flight west and then north to Punta Arenas, but it worked. On arrival, I saw a DC-3 parked at the side of the tarmac. I saw multiple DC-3s at the Punta Arenas airport every time I passed through it.

After one last afternoon and night in Punta Arenas, I returned to the airport the next morning for my LATAM flight to Santiago. I got a better view of this DC-3. It had been converted from rotary piston engines to turboprop engines, as usual. It also had skis for landing on packed snow runways. Registration number C-GVKB, so it was not C-FGCX which had appeared on the flight tracker the day before. But "Borek" on the nose radome, so the same operator.