They finally put down their tools in 1999 at Villa O’Higgins, some 770 miles to the south, where 400 chilly inhabitants eke out a living in the mountainous wastes of Aisén Province, officially known as Region XI.
Controversy dogged construction from the start. Many Chileans fretted at spending $300 million on a project for a local population of just 80,000. For outsiders, however, the Carretera is simply an astonishing engineering feat. Passing through a corridor of backcountry cut by raging melt-water rivers, majestic glaciers, temperate rain forests, and two continental ice sheets, it is one of the most spectacular drives in South America.
With a friend, Josh Goodman, I had come to drive the most rugged southerly stretch, a 330-mile grind between Coyhaique, a hiking and climbing center, and Villa O’Higgins. There is Chilean territory even farther south, but it is separated from O’Higgins by an insuperable mass of permanent ice, towering peaks, and deep fiords.
We picked up the truck in Coyhaique and motored off beneath the striking volcanic columns of Cerro Macay. For the first hour, the highway’s paved surface undulated through a meadowland dotted with wooden cabins, sheep pens, and ox carts. Even when the road hooked abruptly west beneath Cerro Castillo’s jumble of 8,700-foot basalt spires, we were still cruising comfortably in fifth gear.
Some 55 miles from Coyhaique, however, the pavement ended abruptly. Josh engaged double traction, and the truck slid and bumped over the Carretera’s gravel surface.
Aisén’s austere geography deterred settlers for far longer than in Chile’s more pastoral regions. Only in the early 20th century did determined pioneers clear enough of the dense forests of lenga and coihue, varieties of southern beech, to support small-scale cattle and sheep farming.
