A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  After Kris bought the ValChac ranch, rumors ricocheted through the valley—“the environmentalists are coming to shut the place down!” Locals had heard and read about the battles in Pumalín, a few hundred miles to the north. The same gringo couple “who cut Chile in two” were taking over the crown jewel of ranching in the very heart of Patagonia. Would they eliminate an entire lifestyle?

  Their fears were not unfounded. Colonia Dignidad, the same German enclave that Doug had driven by during his epic 1968 road trip, then again with the colleagues from Esprit to raft the Biobío, was now being exposed as a clandestine torture center utilized by the Chilean military. On the surface Colonia Dignidad had promised free education and medical care; in reality it was a house of horrors run by a cadre of reclusive Germans. For many powerful politicians in Chile, Colonia Dignidad felt like a nation inside their nation. Protected by the German government, it seemed to be an appendage of the Cold War, and the Chilean government was unable to control these powerful foreigners or dismantle their strange customs and violent traditions. More than a few Chileans now suspected that Tompkins might also be hiding a secret agenda.

  As she prepared to take possession of ValChac, Kris built a transition team. She gathered a three-person, all-female crew to set up the rules. “We go down to ValChac and we have to formally accept the estancia from the owner, and meet with all the employees, twenty-six gauchos, and two cooks,” said Kris with a laugh. “And these are gunslinging, knife-in-their-belt gauchos. And here we are! Carolina has prepped her employee handbook. And it said, ‘No weapons allowed,’ and as she reads it aloud everybody looks down at their feet because they’re all packing pistols, rifles, and have knives down their pants. And then she said, ‘No pets!’ And they had seven to twelve dogs apiece. It was a funny way to get started.”

  Just months after they bought the ranch, Kris and Doug faced a crisis. Thousands of lambs were about to be born. They had to nurse the ill, euthanize the dying, and vaccinate all the bleating lambs. Now they understand why De Smet had fought so hard to leave the sheep behind.

  Kris took charge. Before she was Kris Tompkins she was Kristine McDivitt, a descendant of Scottish sheep ranchers. As Doug poured millions of dollars into the 18,000-acre organic farm in Argentina known as Laguna Blanca and spent his days engrossed in the biochemistry of organic agriculture, Kris organized studies of the fauna of ValChac. Malinda and Yvon Chouinard were also deeply moved by the rewilding and restoration opportunities in Valley Chacabuco. They held a deep loyalty to Kris and knew firsthand how valuable she had been at Patagonia Inc. Investing their time and resources, they played a key role in purchasing adjacent lands. As they collectively studied the fauna, debated the best conservation techniques, and bought land, a series of questions arose. Which animals had been hunted to extinction? Did surviving ecosystems for these same animals even exist? Could she reintroduce the endemic species to the ravaged land? The valley served as a biological corridor for species migrating through the heart of Patagonia, making the land an ideal project for her and Doug’s growing interest in rewilding.

  After purchasing the ranch, Kris led the negotiations. She and Doug offered the lands to the Chilean government for free. The Chilean National Parks service could administer the land, similar to the process in Argentina with Monte León. The Chileans rejected the offering. They wouldn’t take a free national park. Daunted by the upkeep and infrastructure needed, they feared the Chilean government couldn’t afford to accept the donation.

  Doug and Kris turned the surprise rejection into a challenge. Could they restore an overgrazed ranch and in the process rebuild an ecosystem? “The project had a certain romanticism, because starting a project from zero like that meant a lot of field work for Doug and Kris,” explained Ingrid Espinoza, who worked with them both and lived, along with her husband, at Reñihue. “We wanted to turn the land back to its natural state, but at the start we had a problem because we had thousands of sheep to manage.”

  Initially, the only habitable buildings in ValChac were a run-down sheepfold and a shack that had once been used by the Chilean herdsmen. Doug and his team of builders remodeled the sheepfold into a basic shelter, and soon Kris and Doug were sleeping there several days a week as they sketched out the infrastructure for their new national park project.

  At dusk, sunbeams sliced through purple clouds as the sky scrolled through a dozen blues. Moonlit skies allowed locals to navigate on horseback. Nights were a jumble of wild animal cries. The guanacos gave a piercing whinny when threatened. “Then there was the chaos of the chase and the screams by whatever animal got eaten,” said Kris. Despite frequent puma attacks on livestock, Doug and Kris preferred to sleep in a tent by a lake. Phone connections were nonexistent, so they used CB radio and gave each other call names. He was Aguila (meaning Eagle) or Lolo (which was slang for young guy). She was Picaflor (meaning hummingbird).

  Kris felt more alive than ever. “When I go out early in the morning, it’s still not quite light and I start to get paranoid,” said Kris, describing her dawn walks inside Chacabuco Valley. “But it feels good to be aware. I love that. You’re not top predator. . . . I was in the grasslands, which are very up and down, and I thought, Wow, this is how the ancients felt.”

  Now that her foundation Conservación Patagónica owned the vast valley, it was time to explore. What exactly had she purchased? Leaving the house, Doug and Kris liked to walk hand in hand: no phones, no digital devices, and, weather permitting, no clothes.

  Doug no longer dropped acid or used hallucinogens. On these naked trips, he needed no psychedelic shortcut to appreciate the beauty of the Patagonian landscape. “Get the humans out of the way,” he repeated, “and nature will flourish.” Kris and Doug often stopped on their walks to pinpoint the orbit of condors circling above a dead or rotting carcass. When they searched for the object of the condors’ attention, at times they found an unnatural sight: dozens of mangled lambs. Mother pumas teach their offspring to bite the jugular, killing the prey at once. But the puma cubs were less efficient, often maiming or wounding the lambs, without killing them right away. The toll from a single evening could reach twenty or thirty lambs, as the mother puma’s hunting class left behind a bloody mess. Condors glided overhead, waiting their turn at the carcasses.

  When Doug needed to escape South America for wild adventures abroad, he took up an offer from his friend Mike Fay, who needed an experienced pilot to help with an aerial survey he was organizing in Chad, in central Africa. The assignment was about as boring as flying could be—fly straight lines across the desert, estimating animal populations throughout 3,000 square kilometers. The flight path of the survey required hundreds of flights in each direction, like a huge piece of graph paper. Tompkins flew line of sight, deliberately ignoring the instruments. He rarely drifted more than ten feet off course. “It was phenomenal,” said Fay. “You can always tell a good pilot from a bad pilot by how straight their lines are—and his lines were perfectly straight.

  “He enjoyed the challenge of being able to do that and obviously flying around in wild places and participating in the conservation actions,” said Fay. “But at the same time, he found Africa very irksome because he couldn’t stand the disorder, the chaos, and his meticulous mind didn’t gibe with the African scene.”

  While circling above Chad with Tompkins piloting, Fay spotted poachers gathered in a camp, armed and on the hunt for elephant tusks. Fay asked Tompkins to dive-bomb the camp, then pull up at the last moment. The maneuver would allow Fay to photograph individual poachers. Tompkins asked if they would get shot and Fay assured him that poachers “always miss with an AK.”

  Tompkins circled the camp four times at low altitude while Fay snapped away. “I can see the guy pointing his gun at us. And I can see his shoulder jerking and jerking, and I said, ‘Hey, Doug, he’s shooting at us!’ He just responded, ‘Oh, wow, really?’ He kept flying around. Danger didn’t even come into his brain. And we’re only two or three hundred feet from
this guy. We’re not up at a thousand feet. Kris was all upset. She said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t! You’re going to get him killed!’ And I said, ‘I’m not going to get him killed.’”

  Doug and Kris now ping-ponged from their homes in the sodden Pumalín rain forest and the Iberá wetlands to their new project on the prairies of Patagonia. Sloping above the aquamarine Baker River and nestled in a picturesque valley some fifty miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, ValChac offered a sunny, blue-sky alternative to the gray and somber weather in Pumalín.

  Every time he piloted his Cessna south, Doug flew a different route as he gathered 7,000 hours of flight time, often without the use of instruments. Flying by sight, Doug lectured his bedazzled passengers, was essential in order to avoid mishaps should the instruments fail, or as happened more than a few times to the overly enthusiastic pilot, when his plane ran out of gasoline in flight.

  Among the most threatened by the arrival of environmental activists were the puma hunters, the men who embodied the noble pioneer at the heart of Patagonia cowboy culture. Known as leoneros or “the lion men,” they were brave hunters who mounted horses on expeditions high into the Andes Mountains, sometimes even into neighboring Argentina. These hunters carried knives, pistols, and shotguns. Their most effective weapon was a pack of dogs, a motley crew of assorted colors, sizes, and species that looked assembled from a dozen random street corners. More clever than purebreds, these streetwise dogs were not only hunters. For the nomadic gaucho who often spent months in the field, they were company.

  Doug became obsessed with protecting the pumas. Allowing the pumas free range to hunt and kill was a key part of his strategy to allow the area’s apex predator to regain its role, regulating the populations of native wild animals. The Tompkins team re-trained the ranch’s lion hunters as park rangers. Instead of killing pumas, they shot them with tranquilizer darts, then hoisted the 100-pound animal atop a gurney while the veterinary team affixed a radio-signal tracking collar. Given the shoddy reception for many of the radio collars inside the creviced valley, the hunters were asked to do what they knew best—track pumas. The former hunters led the field biologists on day-long treks to identify key areas of puma habitat. Forced from the valley floor by a century of bullets, the puma population was scattered and rarely spotted. No one had any idea how many of these mountain lions lived in ValChac.

  Doug assembled a multidisciplinary conservation team to study the habitat, health, and remaining population of pumas in Chacabuco Valley. He convinced a Santiago zoo to collect the puma piss from their caged felines. Hauling barrels of puma urine to remote Patagonia, Doug realized, was the first step to helping native mountain lion populations recover. Placing the puma urine in a spray bottle, Doug had his team mark territory with the scent of an unknown puma. He figured that encroaching pumas would roam elsewhere and avoid the easy to capture sheep in the valley floor.

  With Kris at the helm of the Chacabuco Valley project, the couple split their time between the stalled Pumalín Park further north and their new operation that they branded as Patagonia National Park. Work usually began at dawn and continued well past dusk. Doug often worked twelve-hour days. Kris felt as if she was CEO again, but this time instead of running the Patagonia company, she was rebuilding an ecosystem in Patagonia itself. Doug stashed love notes in her pockets, shoes, and drawers of clothes. He even taped notes to the back of his pilot’s seat. When she sat down in the plane, the note was at eye level. “I mean, it was like Easter eggs,” Kris said with a laugh. “Having that kind of love changes every cell in your body. Your face changes. The way you answer the phone. Everything relates to that other person. And we were a little obsessed with one another. Our happy times were just the two of us.”

  At night by candlelight, Doug studied maps of the region, known as Aysén. Placing photographs side by side by side, he stitched together landscapes. He took these photos while flying with one hand and photographing with the other, often just fifty feet above the land. When he needed to focus the camera, he steered with his knees. Quilting the individual images together, Tompkins was able to peer into hidden pockets of the valley. The Aysén region was poorly mapped, and much of what was known came from the 1912 journey of a mountain-climbing Salesian priest named Alberto De Agostini who spent a decade hauling a 6 × 6 medium-format camera into the mountains. Like Ansel Adams, De Agostini’s photographs stirred a broader conservation movement.

  Impressed by the discoveries of De Agostini, Salesian leaders relieved him of priestly duties as they allowed him to wander, wonder, and photograph. He was their nomadic emissary into the wilds. Doug understood De Agostini’s wanderlust and pored over his accounts. He read the brazen tales of explorers who were so often racked by storms off the coast that they named the area “The Gulf of Pain.”

  In Patagonia, the wind made travel difficult. In the air, the gusts sent his small plane bouncing through the clouds, and on the road, the wind shoved the car from one lane to another. On the lakes, the wild winds were particularly dangerous. Given the maze of inlets, bays, rivers, and mountains, small ferries were still used to portage cars and trucks, sometimes just two or three at a time. Water temperature in the region was often barely above freezing, and six-foot waves made even these short ferry trips dangerous. When early pioneers found a safe harbor on Lake General Carrera, they named it “Puerto Tranquilo”—the Port of Tranquility.

  But it was the blank areas on the map that seized Doug’s curiosity. What was out there? Could he discover areas that no human had ever walked, seen, or smelled? As he explored, Doug kept his favorite areas secret—after he spotted them from the air, he quietly purchased the lands if he could. If there were no roads, no access, all the better. Nature, he insisted, needed insulation from global capital and a chance to evolve, unencumbered by the short-term demands of modern industrial society. He followed closely the work of Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, who was proclaiming the need to save half the planet. In order to ensure a base for species to survive and reproduce, Wilson suggested it might be necessary to set aside a full 50 percent of the planet for nature reserves or refuges. Hearing the plan for “Half Earth” conservation, Doug chuckled and called it “a good start.”

  * * *

  If you fly like Doug and myself, most of the time you’re only a couple of hundred feet off the ground. You’re almost close enough to touch it. And if you want, you can go five feet off the ground. So if you really want to look at something you can go down to that level. It’s this three-dimensional space, and you can explore and get any perspective, any scale that you want, pretty much by flying high or low. You can go up every river valley, you can look at every forest, you can see the wildlife population.

  Doug had been flying for almost fifty years and he had thousands of hours, so the perceived danger when you’re a pilot like that seems very small, and so you can do spectacular things in an airplane that no one else would do. And that’s the way Doug was. He was basically like a bird. He is part of the airplane, or the airplane is part of him. And he is constantly moving his body with the plane because it’s just one unit. It was an extension of his body rather than his airplane. It’s like you put it on and you start flying, so it gives you this incredible freedom that I think birds feel, too. It totally amplifies your humanity because you can do things that a very, very small percentage of people do. It makes you almost superhuman.

  —J. MICHAEL FAY, ecologist, defender of wildlife, explorer

  * * *

  As they mapped the Chacabuco Valley, Doug and Kris understood how it was formed in part by a glacier some 10,000 years earlier, which ground up the bedrock and scooped out indentations that later filled with water. Dozens of lakes and ponds speckled the valley and formed wetlands that attracted pink flamingos, black-necked swans, and bronze-winged ducks. Gray and red fox thrived off the abundant supply of rabbits, birds, and armadillo.

  Centuries before the Spanish conquistadores arrived, a native culture known as Oanikenk r
oamed the valley hunting the guanaco. The Oanikenk diet was rich in protein and calories, and at a time when the typical Spanish conquistador was 5′4″ the Oanikenk averaged 5′11″. Stunned by the stature and muscle mass of these native peoples, the explorer Magellan called them the “Patagones,” which in Spanish meant “Big Feet,” and thus the region was christened Patagonia—Land of the Big Feet.

  After Spanish colonization, the entire ecosystem was upended by sheep. A 1908 concession from the Chilean government and the dreams of an English explorer, Lucas Bridges, led enterprise after enterprise to seek its fortune in Patagonia. The dream was to turn the flowing grasslands of Valley Chacabuco into healthy herds of sheep that would, in theory, produce hordes of cash. It never worked. The fragile ecosystem had evolved in balance with the grazing and migrations of guanaco, which lived in herds of thirty to sixty members. When tens of thousands of sheep began grazing, the grasslands disappeared and were replaced by rock-studded scrublands where few plants reached knee high. Year after year the operation was unable to make a profit. The riches of the land were ransacked as sheep gnawed away. The lack of roots and vegetation left topsoil exposed, and after heavy rains, the increased erosion led to the eventual death of streams and rivers. Fish populations plummeted as the silty waters diminished oxygen supplies.

  The Chilean government further subsidized the destruction of the region’s hardwood forests. Settlers were offered title to the land if they cleared away the woods. As German, English, and Chilean ranching operations moved into the area in search of an economic foothold, the Chilean government required that 50 percent of the lands be cleared for animal grazing or crops. The easiest way to eliminate the hardwoods was fire. “They said to the colonists, ‘You want 300 hectares of land? You have to burn 150 hectares.’ And then the winds would push the fires. They burnt seven million acres of forest in Aysén,” said the environmentalist Juan Pablo Orrego. “There were fires burning for over ten years. It even melted the permafrost.”