a rural town on the shore of General Carrera Lake that was engulfed by surging glacial flows.
A lone boat, owned by the Diazes, sits lashed to the boulders. We skim across the still surface of Leones Lake for its entire six-mile length, until we dead-end at the foot of the glacier at the eastern edge of the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. “In these last five years,” he says, “I can see the changes very easily.” Gesturing to the other side of the lake, Diaz cites the brownish morainal sediment as all that remains of a glacial surface from just a couple of years ago. Like Andrea Carretta at Exploradores, Diaz regards Leones with palpable helplessness.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
In a blue house on a steep, tree-shrouded hill I meet one of Tortel’s first inhabitants, 84-year-old Juanita Vidal Menco, among whose 13 offspring is the village’s mayor. “There was nothing here,” she says, recalling when she arrived at the age of 10 with her family on horseback from the larger, snowier town of, due north. They and other cattle-raising families lived in tents while chopping down trees to construct Tortel’s boardwalks.