When life gives you lemons…make snowballs. Scratching around for something to do in the Pucon area whilst we waited for our replacement Steripen to arrive, we came across this walk, which traverses the Villarica National Park from West to East. Our original plan was to ride part of this route on bikes on our way South, but given the extra time we needed to “kill” and the amount of snow high up, 2 feet were definitely preferred over 2 wheels!
From the Palguin valley ranger post, the walk over to the highway near the Argentinian border is roughly 55km, which we figured would take use 3 ish days. We thought we’d need an extra day to walk to the start from the campsite where we left the bikes, but we hit the jackpot and managed to get a lift to within 1km of the control post. Woohoo!
To summarise it in just a few words, we had an absolute blast. The sky was nearly cloudless the whole time, the volcanoes looked resplendent in the remains of their winter coats and there was just enough snow to make it spicy without slowing us down too much. One particularly challenging chute on day 2 did have our hearts in our mouths as we had to downclimb some sketchy cliffs to get around it!
We stumbled out onto the highway after 2.5 days of classic high alpine scenery and received the amazing news that our Steripen had just arrived. Perfect timing! We hitched back to the bikes with a lovely Argentian woman and her two Israeli who were visiting and pedalled down the valley, past Pucon along the lake to Bikefit and Coffee, where the wonderful Felipe, not only received our packaged, but sorted out some camping for us in his father in laws garden, with private beach access. It felt like the universe had smiled on us after all.
Here’s a gallery of photos from our walk. Click on them to open up the lightbox, where you can view each in turn in full screen.
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