Trail work with AMA

The Agrupación Medio Ambiental Torres Del Paine is a non-profit organization that is linked to the owners of the estancia Las Torres, a private landholding within the park. I decided to volunteer for them because a lot of the things I had been doing before felt overly touristy and artificial. I didn’t save the world or anything, but this was really a fun experience and I got to practice my Spanish a whole lot more than before. Oh, and it was free, too. We were provided with a place to camp and three meals a day. Besides a little bit of work on an interpretative trail, almost all of our work was in the Valle del Asencio:



All the work we did during the month of December was trail work. We built most of a new trail, improved a planned detour, and tried to get the section of trail downhill from the Paso De Los Vientos under control by filling in the side trails with debris and improving the main trail. This was not the funnest part of the work, but probably the most urgent one. In the photo below, we are taking rocks out of the main trail so that pack horses don’t have to be driven through side trails:




Here Elias from Spain and his wife Bridget from the US are emplacing pieces of wood in the side trails that were opened by horses and people that were frustrated by the main trail. We used a lot of dead Nothofagus wood, which is left over from when the early settlers burned the native forest to make pastures.

This is our supervisor, Daniel, a very nice guy from Punta Arenas, and a good “jefe”. He is cutting a fallen tree on the trail that we built:

Three of the volunteers were from Spain, two from the United States, and two from France. Besides one girl from the United States who didn’t work with us very long, we all spoke Spanish. This is Rodrigo, a botanist from Madrid, and the skull of a skunk Conepatus humboldtii that I found while looking for austral pigmy-owl pellets:

And this is Séverine, a French volunteer, digging rocks and islands of vegetation out of the main trail to put them into the secondary trails and facilitate regrowth:

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