A frontier is a place that’s both physical and metaphorical. Our ongoing series, Dispatches from the Frontier, shares encounters and insights from life on the ranch, where the inner and outer wilderness converge.   

 Dispatch from John Hauf, Founder and Director

At 17, I spent more time dreaming about climbing than doing it.  To remedy this my friend and I planned to travel to Patagonia the next year, once we’d graduated from high school.  I had a month-long mountaineering course in the Wind River Range of Wyoming under my belt and I thought that this, along with a picture of myself standing on Glacier Pass with an ice axe and serious countenance, qualified me for the undertaking.  To prepare, we did mock leads from the corner of the basement to the second floor of my family’s modest bungalow.  I possessed four carabiners, but no rope yet, so we used a clothesline.

The mountains and their summits seemed too far from home then, perhaps unobtainable in their distant remoteness, a smoldering ache I couldn’t shake.  All of my imagined adventures and ascents, usually accomplished mid-lecture in the midst of social studies or Spanish class, were innocently bereft of hazard and hardship.  How, I wondered, would I ever narrow that chasm between what I was doing, and what I wanted to be doing?

It’s forty years later, and while that youthful trip never came to fruition, Patagonia, Chile became home.  Several years ago, while teaching a mountaineering course on the edge of the Paulina Ice Field in the Aysén region, blue sky turned to gray, then to cloud, high winds, stinging snow and modest havoc.  Protected tent sites were scarce, and one group of students required assistance as they moved their tent to a more sheltered spot.  I grabbed my ice axe, a prescient sixteenth birthday gift from optimistic parents, leaned into the wind as I crossed a patch of icy snow, and set to work dropping their tent.

We huddled in the tempest, shouting to be heard above the mountain’s white roar.  Suddenly, the very tiniest clearing appeared below us, just for an instant, but in that moment, I had glimpsed, far, far below us along the edge of a lakeshore, my house.

WE ARE CURRENTLY BOOKING TRIPS AND ENROLLING PROGRAMS FOR THE 2020-2021 SEASON AND INVITE YOU TO GET IN TOUCH TO PLAN YOUR ADVENTURE. 

John Hauf founded Patagonia Frontiers in 1999 to connect people with wilderness through education, conservation, and adventure. From our wilderness ranch home, Patagonia Frontiers offers multi-day trekking, horseback trips, mountaineering, and education programs in the heart of Chilean Patagonia.