Chilean Fjords

I had seen photographs of the Chilean Fjords for years—those impossibly narrow channels flanked by vertical granite walls, the waterfalls disappearing into mist, glaciers tumbling directly into steel-gray water. But nothing prepared me for what it felt like to wake at 5 AM, pull back the cabin curtain, and find my ship threading through a passage so narrow I could have thrown a stone to either cliffside. The silence was absolute. No engines from other vessels, no sounds of civilization—just the soft hiss of water against the hull and the distant thunder of ice calving somewhere beyond the next bend.

I dressed quickly, grabbed my camera, and climbed to the top deck. The cold hit immediately—raw Patagonian air that cut through my jacket and made my eyes water. But I stayed. I stayed for three hours that first morning, watching the landscape unfold like something from the beginning of the world. Waterfalls cascaded from heights that defied measurement, some plunging hundreds of feet only to dissolve into spray before reaching the channel. The temperate rainforest clung to every surface—bright green moss carpeting rocks, ancient trees somehow rooted in vertical cliff faces, vegetation so dense it looked painted.

The captain's voice came over the speaker occasionally, pointing out glaciers appearing through gaps in the mountains, or noting the particular channel we were navigating. I learned to recognize the Messier Channel, the Wellington Channel, the Gulf of Penas crossing. But honestly, the names didn't matter. What mattered was the overwhelming scale of it all—mountains rising directly from the water to disappear into clouds, channels that wound between islands like some giant maze, the constant presence of ice and rock and water in configurations I had never imagined.

By mid-morning I found myself standing at the rail next to an elderly woman wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. We didn't speak at first—just watched the landscape pass together. Eventually she told me she'd been waiting forty years to make this voyage. Her late husband had always wanted to see Patagonia, and she was finally here without him. We stood together in comfortable silence, two strangers bearing witness to something that felt larger than either of us could hold alone.

On the second day, we approached a tidewater glacier. The ship's engines fell nearly silent as we drifted closer, and I could hear the ice—creaking, groaning, sighing as it slowly calved into the sea. My breath caught when a massive section of the glacier face suddenly broke away, dropping into the channel with a sound like cannon fire. The resulting wave rocked our ship gently, and chunks of ice floated past—some the size of cars, impossibly blue in the gray light. I stood at the rail with tears streaming down my face, though I couldn't have explained exactly why. Something about the immensity of time represented by that ice, the millennia compressed into those frozen layers, the absolute indifference of nature to my presence there.

For the first time in years, I felt the proper scale of my own life. Standing on that deck, watching ice that had formed when my great-grandparents were children finally returning to the sea, I understood something about impermanence that I had read about but never felt. The Patagonian wind whipped through my hair and I didn't move, didn't want the moment to end, wanted to hold onto that feeling of being simultaneously insignificant and completely present.

The wildlife appeared like gifts throughout those days—a pod of dolphins racing our bow wave just after dawn, sea lions lounging on rocky outcrops, an Andean condor circling so close I could see its red eye. But it was the landscape itself that held me captive. Mile after mile of pristine wilderness, channels that had known indigenous people for thousands of years but remained essentially unchanged, forests that would never be logged because no road would ever reach them. The smell of clean rain on ancient rock, the taste of salt spray mixing with glacier-cold air, the sound of nothing but water and wind and the occasional bird call echoing off granite walls.

I found myself thinking about the Kawésqar people who navigated these waters in canoes, keeping fires burning constantly on board, reading the channels and currents in ways I couldn't fathom. They understood something about living alongside this landscape rather than trying to conquer it—a wisdom that felt increasingly relevant as I watched glaciers retreat year over year, the ice fields visibly smaller than they appeared in snapshots taken decades ago.

The moment that stays with me: standing alone on the aft deck at sunset, watching the fjord walls turn gold and then purple as the light failed. A glacier ahead caught the last rays of sun, glowing impossibly pink against the darkening water. My heart swelled with gratitude—gratitude for being present in that exact moment, for having eyes to see it, for the privilege of witnessing something so ancient and so fragile. I had come to the Chilean Fjords expecting beautiful scenery. I left with something closer to reverence—and a quiet resolve to live more lightly, to tread more gently, to honor the wild places that remain.

Reflections are my own; I'm charting soundings in another's wake. Southern Hemisphere summer, 2024.