This Ultra-remote Destination in Chile Has Stunning Vistas—With Snow-covered Peaks, Fjords, and Lush Forests

Travel + Leisure

14-06-2025

After Germán Genskowski and his family decided to set up a homestead on the island of Tierra del Fuego in 1985, it took him four years to build a cabin using hand-sawn timber from the surrounding mountains. He brought tools and appliances into the area bit by bit, traveling two days by boat from the port city of Punta Arenas, on the mainland, to the jetty at Caleta María, where his father, an immigrant from Poland, had worked as a logger in the 1940s. From there, Genskowski would lug materials another full day east along the Azopardo River, nearly to the border with Argentina. From the cabin, the nearest settlement was a three-day horseback ride away.
His wife and children would return to Punta Arenas each winter, but Genskowski would remain at the cabin, often cut off from the world by several feet of snow. Today, he is considered one of the last settlers on the sparsely inhabited Chilean side of the island, part of the rain-lashed archipelago where the South American continent ends.
I met Genskowski, now 80, on a weeklong trip across Tierra del Fuego led by Explora, a company that leads expeditions throughout South America. He told me how, when a gravel road finally reached his property in 2004, he met the change with a shrug. 'I didn't like it much,' he said. 'I was happy with things as they were.' From left: Germán Genskowski at his home in Tierra del Fuego; the port city of Punta Arenas.
From left: Explora; Matthew Williams-Ellis/Alamy
Things have gotten easier in this isolated part of the island, certainly—a welcome development for Genskowski since a riding accident a decade ago left him unable to mount a horse—but ease was never the point. Our expedition leader, Nicolás Vigil, summed it up when he recited an old Chilean saying before we embarked on our journey: Quien se apura en la Patagonia, pierde su tiempo —'who rushes in Patagonia, wastes their time.'
On the first night in Punta Arenas, at Hotel La Yegua Loca, our group of four travelers gathered around a map of the area while the Explora team discussed what the upcoming days would hold: crossing the Strait of Magellan (which separates Tierra del Fuego from the rest of the continent) on a small ferry, a long drive through open pampas, a ride on a fishing boat into the fjords off Admiralty Sound, and hikes up snow-covered peaks and through sprawling forests in Karukinka Natural Park. The latter is a 735,000-acre conservation area that receives just 900 visitors each year. Each excursion would take us deeper into the scarcely touched landscapes in this part of the world.
Explora opened its first lodge 30 years ago in Torres del Paine National Park, in Chilean Patagonia, and has since expanded into northern Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Rapa Nui, often called Easter Island. The company quickly gained a reputation for nature-forward design and a commitment to ecological conservation. In 2023, it launched Explora Expeditions, which aims to take small groups into some of the world's least-populated environments. The Tierra del Fuego itinerary was the first of this kind to launch; Sebastián Navarro, an expedition manager with the brand, worked on it for more than a year. Gnarled trees above Lake Fagnano, near Germán Genskowski's home.
Early the next morning, we took a ferry two hours east to the fishing town of Porvenir, the principal settlement on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego (the other half is part of Argentina). We then drove south through austere countryside, where llama-like guanacos grazed in grassland beside the slate-gray water. I saw tortured ñires, a native shrub, bent over sideways, as if pushed into place by the wind. Before long, colors bloomed across the landscape; it felt like stepping out of a dark room into obliterating sun. Forests of lenga beeches blazed in auburn and ocher—it was autumn in the Southern Hemisphere—and wisps of lichen, draped over their branches like gauze, glowed celadon green. Just below one rocky summit, Roberto de la Cerda, one of Explora's guides, showed us how to read the mountainsides as open ledgers of geologic time. Twilight lasted hours. Even the grayscale of distant fog seemed luminous.
As the landscape came into focus, so too did its contrasts—between the ageless and the ephemeral, an ancient topography and a changeable climate. The green clover, purple lupine, and bone-white yarrow that grew along the roadside, Vigil explained, had been introduced by sheep farmers in the 19th century. Within decades, the settlers' brutal expansionism had decimated the Indigenous Selk'nam, who'd arrived some 10,000 years before. Guanacos grazing in Karukinka Natural Park.
We arrived at Genskowski's property and settled into one of the three cozy timber cabins he had built by hand, which Explora staffer Ariel Ramirez had spruced up with sheets, towels, and toiletries from one of the brand's lodges. Over the course of three nights, Emanuel Mellado, chef at Explora's lodge in the Atacama Desert, prepared decadent meals of seared guanaco steaks and snow-crab pasta.
The next morning, in the slow inky hours before dawn, we boarded a repurposed fishing boat, the Alakush, and sailed west against the wind into Admiralty Sound and down into Parry Bay, both lined with snowcapped peaks that looked as if they had been thrust up from the water's edge. The sky, miraculously clear all morning, clouded over as we veered into a narrow fjord where frigid winds gusted off the barricade glaciers at its southern end.
Stepping ashore, we followed the banks of a rushing river, opaque with minerals and sediment, until we reached its glacial source; I could see the ice calving into a metal-gray lagoon.
Back on the Alakush, I stood on deck with Danilo Bahamonde, who assists on chartered excursions from spring through fall. When he first came to this area as a teenager some 40 years ago, the glacier extended as far as the fjord, about half a mile away. 'This place changes every year,' he said, stoic about the obvious impact of climate change but still unmistakably awed by a landscape he's known most of his life. 'You get used to seeing things disappear.' That evening back at the cabin, Genskowski told us about a time, not so long ago, when it wasn't uncommon for heavy winter snows to begin in April; that April, autumn foliage had just started to emerge. An autumn landscape in Karukinka Natural Park.
Not all change means loss. In recent years, new national parks have opened in the archipelago. In September 2023, the remaining descendants of the Selk'nam finally won formal recognition as one of Chile's 11 First Peoples, a profound reversal of the narrative. That gravel road near the Genskowskis' property is still advancing, albeit at barely 3,000 feet per year. He fears the influx of tourism it might eventually bring. Still, on our final night, gathered around the fire where he had spent the better of the day spit-roasting a lamb culled from his flock, that future seemed mercifully remote.
The next morning, we headed back north, crossing the winding mountain passes that separate the Genskowskis from the rest of the world, past the rocky summit where, the day before, we'd climbed through fresh, ankle-deep snow under a blazing sun and bright blue sky. Back down in the pampas, we boarded a turboprop to return to Punta Arenas.
During our brief 40 minutes in the air, I kept my forehead pressed to the window, watching the mountains as they dissolved into grassland. The hours and days that had dilated so spectacularly on the ground snapped into metronomic order—too fast, too rushed, each second a lost opportunity to look more closely. Below, rivers so blue they were almost black meandered across the pampas: a reminder, perhaps, that the long way is always more beautiful.
A version of this story first appeared in the July 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Living on the Edge."