The guanacos are on the hills before the sun reaches them, loose herds standing into the wind, and what is wrong with the picture takes a moment to place. There are no fences. In a valley this size, in this part of Patagonia, that is close to unnatural. For most of a century Valle Chacabuco was one of the largest sheep ranches in the region, its grassland cut into paddocks by hundreds of kilometres of wire. Somebody took all of it down on purpose.
That somebody was Douglas Tompkins, who made his money in clothing, first as the founder of a mountain-gear label and then in fashion, and spent the last decades of his life buying Patagonian land in order to leave it alone. He bought this estancia in 2004. Then he did the thing that made Chileans suspicious of him for years, a foreigner accused at various times of running a spy base and of trying to seize the country's fresh water: he sold off the twenty-five thousand sheep, pulled up six hundred kilometres of fence, and waited to see what the land would do without them.
What it did was fill back up. The guanacos came first, in the numbers the ranch had spent a century keeping down, and people who know the valley took to calling it the Serengeti of Patagonia. Where the guanacos went the pumas came after them, and this is now one of the better places to watch a wild puma outside Torres del Paine, though nobody here will promise you one. The cat keeps its own hours. You watch the guanacos instead, and when a whole hillside of them turns to face the same patch of empty ground and begins to call, you know they have seen something you have not.
The trail to the high lagoons, Lagunas Altas, is the valley's marquee walk, a long climb off the valley floor to a shelf of tarns held under the peaks. A condor comes over the ridge and hangs there without seeming to move. The lagoons hold the light without a ripple, and for most of a morning the only sounds are the wind in the grass and boots on the path. The trail runs empty. In a national park, at the height of summer, it can be walked most of the way without meeting another person.
The weather does not hold still the way the water does. A clear hour turns to hail and then clears again, and the wind is a constant the way it is at sea. People who camp in the valley talk about waking to snow in December. It is beautiful in the plain, unshowy way that cold open country is beautiful, and it asks a certain patience of you before it gives anything back.
He spent a fortune to buy this valley, and another to give it away, on the plain faith that the wild would know what to do with it once the fences were down.
Tompkins did not live to finish the park. In December 2015 his kayak went over on Lago General Carrera, the great lake to the north, in high wind and near-freezing water, and he died of hypothermia at seventy-two. His wife, Kristine, who had herself run an outdoor company, completed the work he had begun. In 2018 she and the Chilean president signed the land over: a donation of roughly a million acres from the Tompkins foundation, matched with millions more of federal ground, that created a chain of new national parks down the length of the country. This valley is the heart of it. Tompkins is buried a short walk from the visitor centre, in the ground he spent a fortune giving away.
The grave makes an honest place to end a visit. It is a plain marker on a rise above the valley, easy to walk past. From it the eye runs over the grassland the sheep once cropped bare, greened over now, a guanaco herd strung along the far ridge where a fence used to run. The rangers here say the emptiness was the hardest thing they ever built, and in the cold early light it is easy to believe them.
