Outside Magazine

“No hay sinónimo para Dios más perfecto que la Belleza.” John Muir’s dictum, originally published 80 years ago, rolls nicely off the tongue in Spanish. (Translation: No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.) The words are carved on the back of a wooden sign hanging at the entrance to Cementerio Valle Chacabuco, a small graveyard surrounded by a stone fence and a dozen guanacos grazing the brown steppe of 764,655-acre Patagonia National Park.

This civilized plot in Chile’s wild Aysén region holds the remains of Doug Tompkins. Doug, a cofounder of The North Face and Esprit, and his wife, Kristine, former CEO of Patagonia, are legendary conservationists who began buying hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Chile and Argentina in the 1990s. In 2015, Doug died in a kayaking accident on General Carrera, a massive turquoise lake nearby. But the philanthropist’s spirit is everywhere, from his Husky bush plane on the grass runway to the black-chested buzzard eagle that swoops over the park’s headquarters. Doug’s radio handle was Águila, Spanish for eagle. It’s as if he shape-shifted into the actual bird.

I pay my respects to Doug, cross a dirt road, and hike a network of trails that climb 3,000 feet to a chain of high-alpine lakes. As I gain elevation, the stone structures and organic gardens of park headquarters disappear into the expanse of the vast Valle Chacabuco, which appears to have been folded and kneaded like bread by a giant hand. In the distance, the jagged white peaks of the Andes jut into the sky.