We visited Rosales national park today, only a 50 minute drive from Puerto Varas, where we’re living for a couple weeks. The park is easily accessible from many towns in the region, which we learned once we arrived. There were busses full of American and other foreign tourists in the park and at the well-traveled […]

Printouts of maps and other information can be hard to come by at many Chilean national parks. At Puyehue, the CONAF ranger handed us three aged but informative pamphlets about the birds, animals, and flowers we’ve been seeing on our hikes. He dug these out of a drawer in the park office when I asked […]

We drove a couple hours north around Lago Llanquihue to Puyehue national park. The drive held as much beauty as the park. Morning sunlight glimmered on the blue lakes of the Los Lagos region. The sharp peaks of snow-capped volcanoes towered over low clouds. And the roads were empty. We arrived at the park and […]

We arrived yesterday afternoon in Puerto Varas. Upon arriving at our AirBnB at an apartment building, we quickly found ourselves in a situation. Since we have the cargo carrier on the roof of the car, we had to carefully navigate the covered parking deck under the building to find our marked parking space. We weren’t […]

On our last night in Pucon, we stayed up late (for us) and drove into Villarrica national park for a nighttime viewing of the volcano. The orange glow of the lava-filled caldera and the Milky Way clouds overhead made for a magical sight. The iPhone managed to capture some of the scenery, but hardly the […]

Our last stop in Huilo Huilo, a hike along a trail that passes behind a waterfall and to a mini hydroelectric dam. By the end of our day in Huilo Huilo, we had hike eight miles on six or seven different trails.

Another short hike at Huilo Huilo to yet another stunning waterfall. The twist on this hike is that Katie and I became separated from the kids. We’ve gotten into the habit of letting them hike ahead of us, often times out of site. Katie and I arrived at the parking lot thinking the kids would […]

On the north side of the reserve is a museum capturing Chilean history, geology, and archaeology. We stopped in for a visit. The most interesting object to me was the carved mammoth tusk.