La Junta

September 13, 2008

Tatiana soft brown eyes moisten and tear as she talks about her son. Only seven years old, he has been sent away to live with a friends family to go to school.
“Es muy importante”, she says remorsefully, but she wants him with her. She wants her son to learn and kept him as long as she could, until she had taught him all that she knew. Tatiana and her husband live in La Junta, five hours by horse from the nearest town of Cochamo in the desolation of the mountains.
La junta lies at the base of a ring of snow capped granite domes of staggering beauty. Some have likened them to the grandeur of Yosemite and many climbers come as well to scale their heights. Last year an Argentine man fell thirty feet and hit his head twice. Luckily, he was wearing a helmet and survived.
To get to La Junta one must walk a muddy 15 km track or ride an arduous five hours. This mountain route was used over 100 years ago to bring fish and seafood from Chile over El Paso Frontelizo to Argentina. Meat from Argentina was sent back over the pass into Chile. The likes of Butch Cassidy and the sundance kid are even rumored to have traveled these ancient tracks.
It taqkes 2-3 days on horseback in good weather to cross from the town of Cochamo in Chile to Argentina. In the winter mud and snow and swollen rivers of glacial water descend on the trail making it impassable at times. Thousands of a type of sequoia called Alerce were cut to line the trail and raise the horses and riders above the level of the mud. Some have even quoted the figure as 8 million trees cut for this purpose. Originally laid horizontally, they now lay in haphazard confusion, and the horses slip and slide over the trunks picking their way through maze when it seems like they will break through the weathered wood at any moment.
The alerce tree is famed for its surable hard wood which resists infection. It has been recorded to live up to 4,300 years of age. The Alerce planks we crossed over en route to La Junta did not even look worn in the one hundred years they had laid there.
We made our way slowly through the frigid forests of winter to the meadow and refuge of La Junta with its peaks challenging the sky. Tatiana and Horacio are the caretakers and live in this mountain valley isolated from the rest of chile year round. In the winter when the rains and cold come and the light is only present from 11am to 1:30pm Tatiana spins and dyes her own wool and knits and weaves slippers, ponchos, blankets, and saddle bags for the horses. She has just made her son a new grey woolen poncho and is looking forward to seeing him for a few days. Horacio will leave in a couple days to collect him in town and bring him back to La Junta.