La Junta

La Junta sits at the confluence of the Río Palena and the Río Rosselot, in a valley so green and enclosed by forested ridges that arriving feels like descending into somewhere rather than passing through it. The village has perhaps eight hundred people and exists at the junction where travelers either continue south on the Carretera or branch east toward Futaleufú. This geographic role — the crossroads — has given La Junta a practicality that the single-road towns further south lack. There is a fuel station, a hospedaje with real beds, a general store with fresh eggs, and a restaurant with proper tablecloths and a kitchen that takes the work seriously.

I’d planned to stop only long enough to fill the tank and buy supplies. I ended up staying two nights, which required no persuasion whatsoever once I sat down to eat. The restaurant — run by a woman named Doña Carmen, or at least that’s the name that appeared on the handwritten sign near the door — served a cazuela de vacuno that arrived in a clay pot with steam rising off it in visible waves. Potato, carrot, corn, beef that had been cooking for some hours, a broth that was simple and complete. Outside it was raining. This was the correct meal for this place and this weather, and I ate it with the methodical pleasure of someone who hadn’t had a hot meal in two days.

The rivers around La Junta are exceptional for fly fishing — brown and rainbow trout in the Palena and Rosselot, in water clear enough to see them holding in the current from the bank. I am a mediocre fly fisherman who has been telling himself he’ll improve for about six years, but I walked the Río Rosselot for an hour in the morning and caught enough to understand why people fly to Coyhaique from Buenos Aires with expensive gear and the quiet certainty of those pursuing something specific. The water was cold and fast and the color of clean glass, and the mountains came straight down into the valley walls on both sides so that the sky was a narrow blue channel above.

What I hadn’t expected was the birding. The wetlands at the river confluence hold black-necked swans and several species of duck, and the forest edges above the village have huet-huet and chucao — Patagonian forest birds that make sounds so strange I initially assumed I was hearing something mechanical. The chucao in particular has a call that sounds like someone clearing a blocked drain, which does not adequately prepare you for the small rufous bird that produces it.

La Junta also serves as the takeoff point for visiting the Reserva Nacional Lago Las Torres, a small park twenty kilometers east with a lake that reflects the surrounding peaks when the wind dies and turns to hammered pewter when it doesn’t. You can camp there for almost nothing and have it largely to yourself. I met a Chilean teacher from Temuco who’d been there for three nights and was visibly reluctant to leave. He described the trout as “absurd,” which struck me as the best possible description.

When to go: November through March. La Junta operates year-round but accommodation is limited and the fishing lodges that cater to fly-fishing groups book out months in advance. January and February are warmest and wettest in roughly equal measure. November offers drier conditions and the full force of spring green in the valley.