I love the story of the Alerce Mountain Lodge. It’s just such a uniquely Chilean place and the story behind it is so improbable that it could only really be in South America.
The lodge itself stands in the middle of a vast expanse of Alerce, also known as the Andean birch, amongst the oldest trees on earth.
Puerto Montt is the nearest town, from where you drive 35km or so along the coast road before heading up into the thick forest along an almost unbelievably bumpy and rutted logging road.
You get a little breather near the top to stop and see ‘el Tata’ (the grand-daddy). At 3,800 years old, he’s assumed to be the oldest of the trees in the forest.
At the top you hop out, walk a ways through the forest on wooden walkways until you come to a small lake.
Assuming the weather’s OK (it rains a lot here) you step onto a floating platform which is pulled across to the far shore. Follow another path through the dense, ancient forest and you get to the Alerce Mountain Lodge.
The lodge has six rooms and three small cabins though in reality, it is hardly ever anywhere near full.
The place is comfortable but rustic. Pretty much everything is hewn from wood. The decking is carefully built around a 2,000 year old tree.
There’s an old British steam locomotive in the living room acting as a stove. Outside is a fairly Heath Robinson looking hot tub.
There’s no telly. No telephones. No internet.
There’s no noise. No light pollution. No sign of the outside world.
It is a profound place and quite unique.
And here’s how it came to be here:
Nelson is a large, imposing man in his 50s. He’s known all over Puerto Montt - put it this way, the local police salute him.
He owns several successful local businesses. The largest and best know is his rodeo venue – rodeo is a big deal in Chile. His son is one of the most accomplished rodeo riders in Chile. He also owns the Alerce Mountain Lodge.
Some years back, Nelson didn’t have so many fingers in so many pies. Instead, he concentrated on being head of a wealthy logging family and running the family logging business. Generations of his family had logged the lands around the southern end of the Chilean Lake District before him.
When the opportunity arose to buy a huge expanse of Alerce forest, Nelson seized it with both hands. Alerce wood grows at just 1mm a year so is incredibly hard and therefore valuable. Really valuable. $5,000 per cubic metre valuable.
Having completed the purchase, Nelson went into the forest to survey their purchase and plan the gradual clearance of the land.
Now this bit’s going to sound a bit too Disney to be believable. But every word of this is true.
As Nelson stood in the forest surrounded by trees two, three and four thousand years old, he had an epiphany. A Damascene conversion.
He found that he just wasn’t able to supervise the destruction of the forest. Instead, he knew he had to preserve it.
He brought the other members of the family to see the forest and, by consensus, they shut the logging business.
An old house they found buried deep in the forest near a lake was turned into a small hotel. And not a single tree has been harmed since.
The Alerce Mountain Lodge really is run not as a business but as a passion, as a means of letting other people experience this forest. It’s subsidised by Nelson in the hope that people take better care of all of our forests.
So we take our hats off to Nelson – he’s always wearing his Huaso hat as you’ll see here. This is him with Sarah from Pura Aventura in late 2009.
Nelson and Sarah at the Alerce Mountain Lodge
It isn’t easy to take great photos in the Alerce Forest. As I say, it rains a lot and even when it isn’t, forests are often hard to capture well.
However, you can see some absolutely first rate photos taken recently by a client, Caroline Fraser, on her holiday to the Alerce Forest.
If you are interested in visiting the lodge, we stay there on our small group Patagonia Adventure holiday or we can arrange a tailor made holiday to Chile.