Pumalín Park

The Park That a Clothing Magnate Built

I will admit I arrived in Pumalín slightly suspicious of the whole premise. The short version is that Douglas Tompkins, the American who co-founded The North Face and Esprit, spent the better part of two decades quietly buying up enormous tracts of northern Patagonian rainforest, fending off accusations that he was a foreign agent carving the country in half, and then donated all of it back to Chile. The park was formally created in 2018, two years after he died in a kayaking accident on a nearby lake. You feel the weight of that story before you’ve seen a single tree.

Then you see the trees and the story recedes a little, because the alerces do not care who owns them. These are the Fitzroya cupressoides, cousins of the giant sequoia, and the oldest individuals in the park are pushing 3,000 years. Lia stood under one on the Sendero Alerces and went completely silent, which for her is the equivalent of a standing ovation. The trail is a short loop on wooden boardwalk through a stand of them, and the scale does something to your sense of proportion that photographs flatten out entirely.

Volcano, Ferry, and the Logistics of Getting Anywhere

Pumalín straddles the Carretera Austral near its northern end, and getting in requires at least one ferry and a tolerance for gravel. We came down from Hornopirén on the boat connection, which is itself a slow, beautiful piece of travel through fjords with nobody talking much. Caleta Gonzalo, where the road resumes, has a cluster of well-built cabins and a café that serves the kind of soup you want after a cold ferry.

The Chaitén volcano dominates the southern section. It erupted with almost no warning in 2008, buried the town of Chaitén in ash and mudflow, and forced an evacuation that the town has only partially recovered from. The trail up to the crater rim climbs through a ghost forest of trees killed by the eruption, bone-grey trunks standing in new green growth.

From the top you look down into a steaming dome that is very obviously still alive. I am not someone who enjoys volcanoes on principle, but standing on that rim with the wind pushing sulfur smell across the lip was one of the more genuinely unsettling hours I have spent outdoors.

Why It Stays With You

What I did not expect was how deliberate everything is. The infrastructure here is the opposite of improvised: precise wooden signage, composting toilets that actually work, trails engineered to drain in a region that receives several meters of rain a year. Tompkins was famously obsessive about design, and the park reflects it. Some people find this manicured quality slightly antiseptic. I found it moving, honestly, because it reads as care made physical.

We spent three days and barely scratched it. The Cascadas trail to a waterfall, the campground at Caleta Gonzalo, a morning watching the fjord fill with low cloud while I failed to make a fire. Pumalín is not a place you tick off. It is a place that quietly recalibrates what you think a protected landscape can be.

When to go: December through March for the most reliable ferry schedules and trail conditions. Bring genuine rain gear regardless of forecast, because the forecast here is a polite suggestion. Book the Hornopirén ferries in advance during peak summer, as they fill fast.