Expedition Results

Turning Mistakes Into Gold...

Our expedition, The World's End Trek 2010, was a total success. We were able to accomplish most of our goals and missions throughout our three-week human-powered journey. Our Surly bikes became instrumental to this success, together with the committed support of other high quality brands and their products like The North Face's gear and Pacific Outdoor Equipment's panniers.

Riding the southernmost roads in the planet was one thing, but facing the most unpredictable weather on Earth just made the whole experience even more radical and unique: in Torres del Paine National Park one of our fully loaded Surly LHT’s was blown off the ground by a wind gust and flew 10 feet in the air during an 80mph windstorm; we rode rough and desolated gravel roads with crossing Guanacos, hovering Condors and fragile electric pink Flamingos, through 1,000Km of the most incredible landscapes, gradually fading from vast and deserted steppes into millenary Lenga forests; waded wide rivers along what Wildlife Conservation Society has called the Last Great Wilderness of its Kind, as a consequence of the “human footprint”.

We witnessed too the regrettable and eerie absolute absence of the original tribes from their ancient lands and, in contrast, we saw vestiges of their decimation in abandoned post-european rusty and obsolete mining machinery and buildings that were left there when the local gold, oil, and logging enterprises of the mid 19^th century met crisis by the 1950's. Same entrepreneurial initiatives that brought settlers to conquer North America—the gold rush, cattle and sheep breeding, among others--led to the transculturization and later extinction of the primary peoples of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego through guns, germs and steel.

The environmental portion of this project was widely achieved by being able to find fresh and concrete evidence of the rapid retraction (melting) of the glaciers of the Southern Patagonian Ice Fields, the fastest area of glacial retreat on Earth (Curiously, one of the 2010 issues of National Geographic magazine features this plight) as a consequence of our urban lifestyles throughout the globe.

We also collected quantitative and qualitative atmospheric data (temperature, wind speed & direction) twice a day, information that is being processed by the department of geophysics at the University of Chile to contrast with—and potentially adjust—global weather models used to forecast local scenarios of climate change, in an area with very few meteorologic stations to assess this change.

The confluence of an unusually rainy summer and the rugged geography of Tierra del Fuego precluded us from accomplishing an environmental survey and assessment of an abandoned post-european settlement at Karukinka Natural Park, Puerto Arturo, part of our expedition's objective. In order to reach Puerto Arturo, we would need to wade three major streams, of which the last one, an overgrown River Condor, was unwadable at the moment. However, a long term committment with this prestiged organization was born and we will continue to work with them, helping them with planning the future of their Natural Park.

We consider ourselves truly fortunate of having been able to witness, first hand, the beauty of the great wilderness in Southern Patagonia & Tierra del Fuego, the last of its kind. Our aim was to become the connecting thread between the environmental, cultural and ethnohistorical aspects of this vulnerable land, and help expand the knowledge about its heritage, while helping to preserve it and support those who have become stewards of its conservation. We hope that when we return to this land, and repeat this expedition on 2015, we will find more initiatives and less effects of Climate Change on the environment, as a result of a consolidation of our global conscience and the arrival to consensus on world environmental policies.

Thank you for reading this blog and please: Let's not repeat on the Environment what we did to our Original Peoples. Let's "turn our Mistakes into Gold". 'Till 2015.

Abrazos,



-The Expedition Team

PS: Please follow us on our next venture; Raising awareness on the importance of access to Drinkable Water and the Growing Peril of Desertification through Climate Change, When we Cross Atacama Desert--the driest desert on Earth and 1,200Km long--next Spring. More soon!