A Trout Fisherman Finds Nirvana in Southern Chile

In our second night at Cinco Rios Lodge in Southern Chile, Sebastian Galilea, the lodge’s enthusiastic majority owner, tells us the story of the “lost grape of Bordeaux.”

The Carmenère, the forty-seven-year-old explains, originally grew in Bordeaux as one of the French region’s foundational grapes. Winemakers used it to produce a coveted varietal, a medium-bodied red with a certain zest that, to many oenophiles, elevated it above similar wines, like merlot.

Around 1867, though, catastrophe struck. A plague of phylloxera—a grape-destroying insect—decimated the Carmenère grape in Bordeaux. Attempts to replant it failed. Carmenère wine, it was believed, had gone extinct.

Then, in 1994, a noted French expert in cultivated grapes, Jean-Michel Boursiquot, came to Chile to take part in a wine symposium. In his free time, he visited a local vineyard. There he spotted a small triangular plot of vines, labeled as merlot. He took a closer look—the shape of the leaves and the flower stamens reminded him of something else, a grape he’d seen only in a university collection of extinct varieties…

And here, Galilea pauses his story. He grabs a bottle of red, uncorks it, and pours a glass.

“And guess what?” he says, taking a sip. “It was the Carmenère!”

The grapes had apparently arrived in Chile sometime in the mid-nineteenth century and been sold there for more than a century as merlot. Now the country is the world’s largest producer of Carmenère.

As I would come to find out, this wasn’t the only time a foreign import has thrived in this land of second chances.

We are here, the twelve of us—nine guests, whose occupations range from judge to microbiologist, along with the photographer William Hereford, me, and our host, Orvis’s Tom Rosenbauer—on a weeklong trip split between two lodges, both owned by Galilea and his partner, the Welshman Greg Vincent: Cinco Rios, located in a temperate rainforest on the banks of the Simpson River, near the charming town of Coyhaique; and Estancia del Zorro, some twenty-five miles to the northeast, up in the mountainous pampas grasslands close to the border of Argentina.

Galilea and Vincent used to operate the two lodges as separate entities. But thanks to a suggestion from a client fifteen years ago, they now divide the week between them, which gives guests access to nineteen freestone rivers, six spring creeks, more than a dozen lakes and lagoons, and countless small streams. The idea is that you, the angler, can experience the full breadth of trout fishing in Patagonia. And the movable fishing feast delivers.

During the week at Cinco Rios and Zorro, you can fish a hatch, chuck a streamer from a raft, fish a hopper, fish a hopper with a dropper nymph, fish a technical spring creek, fish an untechnical spring creek, fish riffles or pastoral pools, fish a lake, cast into a creek no wider than the length of your boot, cast into a river as broad as the Yellowstone, and even fish on the other side of the Continental Divide in Argentina. The only frustration: It’s impossible to do it all.

The trip is a slice of trout-fishing nirvana. The lodges treat the resource with care: They spread out and rotate anglers among the vast offerings, and much of the water gets “rested” for days, ensuring un-hassled fish. And if you, like me, have become a bit disheartened by the state of trout fishing in North America—with its maddening crowds, ruthlessly efficient methods (e.g., the vacuum-like practice of Euro-nymphing), hook-scarred fish, and constant stream of Instagram grip-and-grin posts, all of which diminish rather than enhance the sport—this is a place you can go to rediscover the soul of something that seems to have been lost. Thanks to fish, that is, that didn’t even exist here until 150 years ago.

On our first day at Cinco Rios, Hereford and I pair up with the guide Carlos Andrade, an irrepressible forty-six-year-old ball of joy with a long black beard that he braids and that, on occasion, serves as a repository for used flies. We fish the middle section of the Simpson, a medium-sized waterway with big, slow, willow-lined pools tinted green. Andrade attaches a large yellow-bodied, white-winged stone fly to the end of our lines, with a small nymph dropped off, and we cast as close as we dare to the overhanging willows that serve as trout cover. While little fish prefer the nymph, the dry fly attracts big browns and rainbows, which average around eighteen inches long. It is a day on which every blind cast, as Hereford points out, happens with the hope—almost the expectation—that a big trout will rise for the fly. And if one doesn’t, well, there’s always the next one.

At midday, Andrade lays out a checked tablecloth for lunch in a field of purple lupine and slipper-like yellow capachito flowers, producing a charcuterie plate and chicken paella, which we wash down with sips of Carmenère. The sun is high, the breeze light. It’s as easygoing a fishing day as I can remember.

The next day, again with Andrade, we move farther up the Simpson, this time accompanied by Tom Larsen, a retired lawyer from San Francisco whose mind is a fecund storehouse of ideas, for everything from education reform to potential movie scripts. A dirt road takes us through the rolling green valley, by small farms guarded by tall rows of fast-growing, wind-breaking alamo trees. We pass a few gauchos, all on horseback and trailed by herding dogs. They stop to watch us bounce by.

The Simpson in this upper section would look familiar to anyone who has fished the freestone rivers of the western United States—gone are the slow green pools, replaced by knee-deep riffles and runs and the occasional bend pool, backdropped by dramatic mountain peaks. We fish a brief but exciting mayfly hatch, and then throw hoppers and droppers in the runs and riffles, again catching more than our fill of substantial trout.

At some point in the morning, a commotion occurs near my legs, as if someone tossed a few fist-sized rocks into the river, kicking up a wall of water. I look down and see, slowly swimming away, a three-foot-long fish I had spooked.

“King salmon,” Andrade tells me.

King salmon? “Do you guys ever fish for them?” I ask, suddenly feeling the familiar rush of fixation taking root.

Andrade explains that the salmon appear frequently, fresh from the sea, on the lower stretches of the Simpson and in the Aysén River, which is formed by the confluence of the Simpson and the Mañihuales River. The fish, the progeny of aquaculture escapees, established themselves as a wild spawning population decades ago. A guide at Cinco Rios knows how to catch them, he tells me. Would I want to try?

The next morning, Hereford and I find ourselves in a white, Chinese-made pickup truck towing a jet boat with our guide, Max Segura, a thirty-nine-year-old santiaguino who spends four months of the year away from his job as an artist in the capital city to guide for Cinco Rios. As we wind through the lower Simpson River canyon, Segura sings along to the 1990s hip-hop playing through the truck’s speakers, songs, he says, that have helped him refine his English. (The guides at Cinco Rios and Zorro like to curate their drive-time Spotify playlists, and try to pair them, like wines, with their anglers for the day. Hereford and I later decide that we must be tough to pin down: During various rides, along with hip-hop, we’re treated to classic rock, old-school honky-tonk, and Justin Bieber.)

We arrive at the Aysén, a wide and deep river the color of a Heineken bottle, and launch the boat a mere twenty miles from the Pacific. Segura says he loves salmon and would like to take guests out for them, but he doesn’t have many takers. Indeed, salmon angling is not a sport for everyone. The rods and lines are heavy (I am using a 350-grain sink tip that has all the delicacy of a wet mop), and one needs the right disposition—i.e., being okay with not getting a nibble for hours, days, or sometimes weeks. (The salmon don’t eat much on their spawning journeys up the river; they hit flies out of instinct or annoyance.) Fishing for salmon here also means voluntarily sacrificing a day away from some of the world’s best trout fishing. But for those who love it—or for natural-born gamblers—the payoff, if it comes, makes it all worthwhile.

Segura eventually holds the boat in the current, and I begin to fish. Not more than twenty casts in, there’s a flash of bright silver and my line comes tight. Fifteen minutes later, Segura has in his grip what he says is a twenty-pound king, or Chinook, salmon. After a quick photo session, she kicks off, returning to her river journey. I cast nonstop for the rest of the day, as dozens upon dozens of salmon leap and cavort about the pools, but never get another touch. Still, I leave the river feeling happy and lucky.

That evening, we load into a van and embark on the hour-long trip to Estancia del Zorro (Ranch of the Fox), which has been in Galilea’s family as a sheep farm for decades. Part of the charmingly rustic lodge has been fashioned out of the original bloodred ranch house, built in 1917. The beds get made with clothesline-dried sheets. A woodstove heats the main room, which also offers a well-stocked bar, comfortable couches for postfishing tales and pisco sours, and a huge main table for a continuation of the excellent dinners we’ve had at Cinco Rios, which feature fresh fish, wild morels, and local chicken, lamb, and beef, as well as, on two nights, morsels of Rosenbauer’s homemade dark chocolate, which he brought down from Vermont.

Zorro itself encompasses 15,000 acres, but through lease agreements with his neighbors, Galilea has secured a total of 290,000 acres through which flow six world-class spring creeks filled with giant brown trout, two freestone rivers, a handful of lakes, and some water in nearby Argentina. (To fish in that country, you hand over your passport at the border and then retrieve it on the way back to the lodge.) I ask Galilea if he knows how the trout got into these high-plains creeks. He doesn’t, but documentation indicates that as far back as the 1930s, shepherds on the ranch would sometimes snare a trout for a meal in the field.

If geography is indeed destiny, Chile was fated to be an oddball. The country borders Peru and Bolivia to the north, and then Argentina all the way down to the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in the far south, a thin slice of land nearly three thousand miles long, but on average only a hundred miles wide, hemmed in by the still-growing and occasionally volcanic Andes to the east and the cold blue Pacific to the west. “We think we are a country,” the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra once wrote. “But, actually, we are a landscape at best.” The arid Atacama Desert dominates the country in the north, but starting roughly in Santiago and extending all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, Chile abounds in cold and clear rivers, streams, and lakes.

Though gaps exist in the record, the first real planting of trout in Chile, it’s believed, took place at the turn of the twentieth century, an effort spearheaded by a German immigrant named Federico Albert Taupp, a conservationist who recognized the country for what it was (it is said of Chile that God created the perfect habitat for trout…but just forgot the trout). Taupp had four hundred thousand eggs of brown and rainbow trout and Atlantic salmon, along with some fingerlings, shipped from Hamburg to Chile’s Valparaíso Region by way of Cape Horn. Only the trout eggs survived, but with that initial stocking—done by rail and by donkey—along with some later help from the Chilean government, Man accomplished what God had not. Now, in certain parts of the country, trout represent 80 percent of the biomass in some rivers, and the non-native species have become wild. (Their effect on Chile’s native fish species, according to many studies, is inconclusive.)

For a long while, the white heat of Chilean trout fishing was concentrated in what is, roughly speaking, the middle of the country, from Santiago down to Puerto Montt, mostly because of accessibility. But with the opening of the Carretera Austral—a 770-mile-long road built under the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the late 1980s that connects the north to the south—some of the best fishing in the country now centers four hundred miles south of Puerto Montt, in the Aysén Region, which has as its hub the town of Coyhaique.

Hereford and I are leaving a day earlier than the rest of the group, so we make the most of our two days at Zorro. On day one, we join Rosenbauer and Hector Cuell, a mellow thirty-five-year-old guide, and drive through the vast Valley of the Moon, with its crater-like mounds surrounded by rising hills that look like wrinkled brown elephant hides. We pass spring ponds filled with floating birds: torrent ducks, black-necked and white-bodied swans, Andean geese, and Technicolor pink flamingos. Darwin’s rheas—flightless birds that look like small ostriches—scoot through the pampas grass, spooked by our presence.

Photo: WILLIAM HEREFORD

A gaucho at Estancia del Zorro.

We first stop at one of the most remarkable trout streams I’ve ever seen—a creek, if you could call it that, no more than a foot and a half wide in some spots. “Oh, yeah,” Rosenbauer says.

White whiskered, with big hazel eyes often widened in wonderment, Rosenbauer is a forty-eight-year Orvis veteran who, through his popular podcast, his twenty-plus books, and his general advocacy, has become, arguably, the most prominent face in the sport of fly fishing. His title at Orvis is, fittingly, Chief Enthusiast. There is an entire subgenre of Instagram and Reddit posts dedicated to memes about him. He has a Sparkle Dun fly—his favorite for trout—tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, paired with a bonefish fly on his right one. I know no one who is more into fly fishing and, in particular, fly fishing for trout. At age seventy, he shows no signs of slowing down.

A big part of his enthusiasm manifests through the teaching of a sport that can seem, at first, a bit intimidating. Within hours of first arriving on the trip, Rosenbauer had held an impromptu casting lesson for the group in a field in front of Cinco Rios. “You don’t want to do all of that rigid A River Runs through It stuff,” he had told us as he demonstrated a cast. “You wanna be loose.”

Rosenbauer is the first out of the car when we reach the tiny spring creek—if he were a dog, his tail would be wagging—and he quickly rigs up his rod, the fourth generation of Orvis’s Helios model, which he and I are gleefully testing out this week. Cuell tells us that the stream is named Truchón (big trout) Creek, and we quickly find out why. The fishing consists of casting just your stout, ten-pound leader and a few feet of line, and then plopping down a big foam beetle in little pockets of the slower water, trying to avoid the pampas grass that guards it on both sides. Within a few casts, Rosenbauer lands an eighteen-inch brown, darkly colored, no doubt from spending its days hidden under the creek’s cut banks. Just before he releases the fish, he turns it sideways. Its nose and tail pretty much reach the opposite banks.

Later in the day, we move on to the Ñirehuao, a proper spring creek that curves prettily through the Valley of the Moon. As we walk to the bank to take a closer look at the water, grasshoppers scatter in every direction. A few end up in the creek, and some of those disappear in the swirls of a rising trout.

After a quick lunch of rare roast beef and couscous, we begin to prowl the banks of the Ñirehuao, casting foam grasshopper imitations into likely holding spots. The fish we catch get bigger as the day progresses and warms, with the largest topping out at around twenty inches.

Back at the lodge, the evening flows with wine and stories. The general sense is that the week has been perfectly weighted—a taste of the awe-inspiring rivers of Cinco Rios, followed by the magical and intimate isolation of Zorro.

The next morning—the last day for Hereford and me—we wake before sunrise for an early breakfast by the woodstove. Hereford, Rosenbauer, Galilea, Larsen, and I, along with Dan Dunn, a retired investor, and Jay Vinsel, a judge from Zanesville, Ohio, meet up with Galilea’s cousin Alejandro, a compact and dapper man who speaks little English but has no trouble communicating his passion. We drive to the heights above the Valley of the Moon, on a mission to find some Andean condors, one of the largest flying birds on the planet, with wingspans that can approach almost eleven feet. We arrive at a spot above a nauseatingly high river canyon and wander in the biting wind until Alejandro spies a condor sitting on a cliffside nook. It’s a juvenile—only one or two years old, Alejandro says—but it is nonetheless enormous and magnificent. We wait patiently as the sun emerges and warms the rocks of the cliff. The giant bird begins to pluck at its neck feathers, releasing them into the air as if testing the flying conditions. (One member of our party, who will remain nameless, begins to gather some of the neck feathers caught in the pampas grass for fly-tying material.)

The bird teases us some more, craning its neck, and then stretching its wings, before finally taking flight, a sight and scene that are…breathtaking. It immediately heads high in the sky, riding the thermals, with nary a flap of its wings. Other condors join in. And then, suddenly, as we watch, our bird comes toward us and does a flyby, which feels like, in anthropomorphic terms, a gesture of curiosity about this bundled-up gathering of bipeds who have been staring at it all morning.

That afternoon, for our last fishing session, Hereford and I head out with guide Sebastián Letelier to fish Zorro’s home spring creek, which starts near the Argentina border and wends its way through the property, sheltering browns of up to twenty-six inches. Letelier is forty-four and rake thin, with wild strands of hair that sprout from under his hat and a dark beard that trails down to his chest. He is a painter, a fly tier known the world over for his classic Atlantic salmon patterns, and a lover of bamboo rods, vintage Hardy reels, and custom canvas jackets. He guides with reverence for place and time and the quarry, moving slowly, weighing and considering each fly in his hand before tying it on. He has been through things, he says, and at one point years ago, he nearly gave up painting, fly tying, and fishing, only to eventually recover and regain his footing.

“Eso…eso,” he says, over and again, in barely more than a whisper as I cast, a Spanish word that literally means “that” but is used by Letelier as an affirmation. It feels monastic in its repetition.

The fishing is technical, and we cast into small windows among the weed beds, through an unceasing twenty-mile-per-hour wind that ripples both the pampas grasses and Letelier’s beard. Despite the weather, we catch fish, including two of the creek’s giants, landed by Hereford.

As the day nears its end, Letelier talks a bit about growing up fishing in Chile, and about how some of the rivers of his youth to the north are now mere shadows of their former selves, thanks to dams, crowds, and a changing climate. He says that here, though, one can still bear witness to the almost unfathomable beauty of nature, in these unscathed landscapes and these pristine waters and their second-chance trout. Given the inevitability of human nature, it probably won’t last forever. His advice? Get your ass down here.