CHILE: ALMOST LIKE HOME - A CENTURY AGO.

Byline: Bill Dietrich The Seattle Times

Six thousand miles from California, my wife and I found ourselves in a clone of Yosemite Valley.

We couldn't decide which was more surprising: that we had the place to ourselves, or that we had gotten there at all.

Butch Cassidy had ridden the trail we had just negotiated into Chile's Andes. I could see little evidence it had been improved since then.

Yet we tenderfoots - make that tenderbottoms - had made it by horseback to the La Junta Valley. We were in a forested valley of lacy beech trees walled by sheer granite cliffs that climbed thousands of feet high. The snowfields above fed plunging waterfalls.

It looked surprisingly like the famous vale in California's Sierras. Except that instead of there being tens of thousands of guests, there were two. Us.

This, I thought, is what back-country travel must have been like in the American West two or three generations ago: uncrowded, magnificent, and unimproved.

Our experience is typical of what is drawing increasing numbers of Americans and Europeans to experience the outdoor beauty of Patagonia, that southern part of South America that is like a flip-flopped mirror of the scenery and geography of North America's West Coast.

The similarities are eerie. A ferry ride from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales mimics the Inside Passage trip from Bellingham to southeast Alaska. Mount Osorno looks like Mount St. Helens before the 1980s eruption. The fiords could be in British Columbia, and the big lakes copy some in the Cascades.

This terrain nourishes a fast-flourishing eco-tourism industry of guided climbs, hikes, raft trips and horseback rides. Still, why go all the way to South America for a geographic facsimile of home?

Several reasons:

When it's winter at home, it's summer in South America.

Chile is a proud, melting-pot nation of fascinating history and intriguing Spanish culture.

It is easy to have a place to yourself.

In 1992, a German adventurer named Clark Stede (who, among his other accomplishments, has navigated his sailboat entirely around the Western Hemisphere) stumbled onto this secret.

He bought a 200-acre Chilean homestead in the center of his new Yosemite, 12 miles from the nearest gravel road, for $30,000. The locals thought he was crazy.

Then Stede went to Argentina and hired on for free at a large hacienda in return for being taught everything the local gauchos knew about horses. He came away knowing how to run horse trips into rugged mountains.

He built an attractive base camp at the foot of the valley on a salt water fiord called Reloncavi and dubbed it Campo Aventura.

At La Junta, a junction of old trails 12 more miles up the Cochamo River, he built a second base camp. And he began running pack trips ranging from two days to 13 into the Andes.

Holly and I booked a two-day trip to give it a try. Getting to Stede's Campo Aventura is a bit of an adventure in itself. The road to Cochamo winds east toward the Andes along Lake Lianquihue, the third-largest natural lake in South America. At Ensenada, the road turns south through beautiful forest and farmland, finally winding down to the estuary of the Petrohue River. There it turns to potholed gravel and after 10 miles comes to Cochamo, a rural village of wooden houses stretched along the inlet.

A footbridge across a river leads to a trail to Stede's place. He uses his four-wheel drive pickup to fetch baggage across the river, water foaming over the hubs.

Once at Campo Aventura, however, there is a feeling of oasis. Guests can simply sleep or eat at Stede's attractive wood complex beside the Cochamo River for a reasonable room and board fee. Horseback trips are also available. There are hot showers, a sauna and laundry facilities.

But to get to your personal Yosemite, an overnight trip is necessary. And getting there is an experience.

Holly and I had been on short trail rides before but made no pretense of really knowing how to ride. Fortunately, the horses were incredibly sure-footed. (It also helped that Stede uses gaucho saddles that are relatively more secure and softer than Western saddles.)

The path we followed was at least 300 years old. It had been used by Indians, Jesuit missionaries crossing from Argentina, outlaw Butch Cassidy on a mission to Argentina, and, for the past century, by Andean farmers driving sheep or leading oxcarts to the lowlands.

The result was a peek at what ``roads'' probably looked like in the early decades of the United States. In many places, the centuries of use and resulting water erosion down the pathway have worn trenches as high as a rider's head that crawl steeply up and down mountainsides. We ducked under overhanging trees, squeezed our horses' bellies with our legs to keep the stirrups from catching on the embankments, and hung on.

In other places the horses forded streams, picked their way along logs thrown across boggy wallows, or plodded nonchalantly along the edge of precipitous drop-offs to canyons below.

La Junta is a spectacular refuge. Bunkhouse, cook shelter and stables crown a low hill with orchard, pasture and river below. This Eden at a junction of canyons is surrounded by soaring granite cliffs, the peaks of the Andes high overhead. In our private room, the bed was a wooden platform with pads and a sleeping bag. Water for washing came from the river. And there was an outhouse.

Our schedule prevented us from staying a day in the valley or riding deeper into the Andes, and that was too bad. We missed the chance to hike up the mountainside to a waterfall or ride up valley to a grove of spectacular Alerce trees, which live 3,000 to 4,000 years and are the second-oldest trees on Earth, after California's bristle-cone pines.

But we did get a taste of a spectacular corner of the Earth that is just beginning to be discovered by Europeans and Americans. Go now. If history is any guide, in two generations you will be sharing the scenery with an armada of motorhomes.

On Location

Clark Stede can arrange almost any length trip up to nearly two weeks for groups up to six or eight. Guides speak English, German and Spanish. Wear clothing suitable for horseback riding and be prepared to lead the horse a few times in wet, muddy areas - boots are advised. The stirrups are wooden and enclosed in the toe in the South American style.

Campo Aventura can be reached by rental car or transportation can be arranged from the airport or hotels at Puerto Montt, a two-hour flight south of Chile's capital of Santiago.

Prices, which include food, depend on the length of the trip. Our two-day journey cost $230 per person; while a 13-day trip costs about $1,900 without any transfers.

Information: Clark Stede at Valle Concha, Casilla 5, Chochamo 10. Provincia Llanquihue, Chile. Or send a fax; the number in Chile is 56-65-232747.

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Box

Photo: One of the best ways to see Chile's Patagonia area is on sure-footed horses.

Bill Dietrich/Seattle Times

Box: On Location (See text)