Introducing...
our new monthly column
on national parks

Thank John Colter’s tall tales for the national park concept

The hundreds of national parks that now exist worldwide had their origins in what many once thought were the ravings of an American mountain man.

In 1872, reacting to years of legends and outlandish stories that had drifted east from the Rocky Mountains, President Ulysses S. Grant sent an expedition to the corner of Wyoming Territory known as “Colter’s Hell.” An early 19th century trapper, John Colter, had given the place its name when he wrote about a land where superheated water would suddenly chuff from the earth in great columns, and where one river fell over a precipice twice the height of Niagara Falls.

The expedition found everything Colter’s supposedly tall tales had described, as well as vast herds of game, big mountains, dense forests, a great high-altitude lake the size of Lake Tahoe, and a deep canyon whose sides were composed of yellowish rock. 

The expedition was so astounded by the natural richness and beauty of this “yellow-stone country” that it recommended to Washington that the region be spared from any sort of exploitation – mining, grazing, lumbering, farming, settlement – and set aside as a permanent preserve.

Thus, the creation of Yellowstone National Park gave birth to a movement that later spread globally as nations looked to preserve those cultural and natural masterpieces that defined them, both in the eyes of themselves and the rest of the world.

Today, 130 years after the farseeing recommendation of Grant’s Wyoming expedition, there are more than 600 national parks worldwide. Many of them are included among the 411 areas and preserves that the United Nations has designated as International Biosphere Reserves – lands so beautiful or biologically diverse that mankind is asked to concern itself with their protection and preservation.

These parks range from tiny European preserves to such vast stretches as the 20,000 square miles covered by the contiguous American and Canadian national parks of Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska and Kluane in the Yukon. Some, like most of the U.S. and Canadian parks, are served by highly developed infrastructures. Others, very remote and located in poor nations, require great efforts to visit.

Wherever and however developed they are, each park is a tangible expression of the belief that some places are too valuable, too fragile, too beautiful to be treated as anything less than special.

Most likely John Colter would have considered that a perfectly sane notion.

Four gorgeous Southern Andes Parks offer everything from soup to pine nuts

This month, we introduce a regular feature on National Parks of the World. Our regular World Heritage Site department will shift to an emphasis on manmade treasures, such as cities and regions that have great historic significance. The new department will cover great natural reserves, focusing on those places that reward travelers with beautiful landscapes and teeming wildlife.

Our first national park is really four contiguous parks: two in Chile and two in Argentina, all in the Lakes District in the southern Andes. They are Vicente Perez Rosales and Puyehe in Chile, and Lanin and Nahuel Huapi in Argentina. Among them, they cover about 5,800 square miles, an area two-thirds larger than Yellowstone National Park.

What are the attractions here? A seemingly endless list: Large, deep-blue glacial lakes at the foot of snow-capped volcanoes and peaks; huge austral forests of southern beech, “monkey puzzle” trees, cypresses and other species that remind visitors of Northern Hemisphere conifer forests while being tantalizingly different; and hot springs and waterfalls.

Beyond the scenery, the four parks offer almost any outdoor activity you can think of – skiing, hiking, river rafting and canoeing, fishing (the trout in this part of the world are legendary), horseback and bicycle riding, motor touring and camping.

Visitors can find utter solitude in the park’s further reaches or choose to be surrounded by some of South America’s most cultured travelers in the beautiful small towns inside the parks. Accommodations range from deluxe to primitive, depending on tastes, desires and pocketbooks. For example, the lakeside town of San Carlos de Bariloche in Nahuel Huapi, which looks as if it were lifted whole from the Bavarian Alps and dropped at the foot of the Andes, is a thriving resort that seamlessly accommodates everybody from Eurotrash and wealthy South Americans to family groups, students and vagabonds. 

In all of the parks, there is a heavy central European influence in architecture, accommodations and cuisine. It derives from the Germans, Swiss and Austro-Hungarians who fled Europe’s political turmoil of the late 19th and early 20th century, happily relocating to a distant landscape that reminded them of the Alps. But as the Lake District has achieved international renown, particularly among those who fancy being able to ski when it’s mid-summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it has taken on an international face. For every knockwurst or goulash a visitor can knock back in Bariloche, there’s a pizza, spring roll or sushi roll to match it.

At almost 3,000 square miles, Nahuel Huapi is the largest of the four parks. It’s named after the 60-mile-long, 250-square mile lake that is the crown jewel at its center. Ironically, nahuel huapi in local Indian dialect means “tiger island” and refers to a large island in the lake rather than the lake itself. Nahuel Huapi is about a third larger than Lake Tahoe, but unlike Tahoe is long and narrow, punctuated by peninsulas and islands. It also has considerable depth, plunging in places to as much as 900 feet (and up to 1,500 feet near the town of Puerto Blest).

Because the region’s rivers are fed by glacial streams, as well as precipitation from the frequent storms that lash this section of the Andes, abundant, rushing water is a hallmark of the parks. That water sustains the region’s moist Valdivian forests (named after the Chilean city of Valdivia) are part of the second largest temperate rainforest on earth, behind the Pacific Northwest’s. The Chilean parks shelter some of  the last stands of the alerce, a conifer that rivals the redwoods in size and age. Heights of 300 feet and more (90+ meters) and ages of up to 3,500 years are not uncommon among alerces, which remind many travelers of the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada in California..

Experienced visitors say that although the four parks are contiguous, each of them is distinct in what it offers.

The Chilean National Park Service offers an excellent English-language web site at:

Also, entering the individual names of the four parks in the Google search engine will bring up an abundance of background material and resources.

– Patrick Totty