Visiting Tierra del Fuego - forests at the end of the Americas

Tierra del Fuego, Argentina

Everyone has different places on their “must see” lists. One of mine was the Southern Hemisphere. I wanted to see strange constellations in the night sky and have the water in the toilet turn clockwise. So one of my first trips in retirement was a National Geographic trip to southernmost Argentina and Chile. 

My husband and I left snow in Colorado and flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires was sunny and hot. After two days we flew to  Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina. (We pronounced it oo schy a, which is not too far off.) November is spring in Tierra del Fuego, but when we arrived it was just above freezing and a mix of rain and snow was falling. Shivering, I dug in my hand luggage for every layer I could put on.

     

Rain mixed with snow,
spring in Ushuaia

The next morning  featured a hike at Tierra del Fuego National Park. The park is slightly north of the city of Ushuaia. The international borders snake around, so sections of Chile, including the town of Porto Williams, are south of southern Argentina. The seaways are equally serpentine, the channels used by ships to avoid sailing around Cape Horn form an complex maze. (see Google Map)

It was cool but the sun came out and stayed out: a lovely day. Tierra del Fuego National Park was very pretty. Nice weather is rare. Mostly it is a cloudy rainy place. Because of all the ocean, it rarely freezes hard, but the temperatures often hover around freezing.

Tierra del Fuego National Park, Argentina

Tierra del Fuego refers to the southernmost part of Patagonia, which is the southern part of South America. It is called Tierra del Fuego because at the time of European contact, the natives burned a lot of fires, using the plentiful wood for warmth, cooking and communication. That made it recognizable from the sea as the “land of smoke.” The King of Spain, who had to approve the official name, decided fire was more impressive, so it became “land of fire” Tierra del Fuego. 

box-leaved barberry, Berberis buxifolia

The plants were very interesting. It’s a severe enough climate that not many species grow there. It is cool to cold, and damp or wet, with 15 or so hours of darkness in winter.  

Some of the plants were related to plants of similar extreme environments around the world. One example of that was box-leafed barberry, Berberis buxifolia (in the photo) one of the most common shrubs. It is indeed closely related to the barberry used in hedges all over Europe and North America.

Other plants were unknown to me because they were related mainly to Southern Hemisphere plants. Not having been to South Africa or Australia, I was unfamiliar with them. Flowering plants evolved during the Age of Dinosaurs, and during that time the earth was one united continent. The southern continents (Australia, South America, Africa, Antarctica and India) broke off from the northern continents (North America, Europe, Asia) some 150 million years ago (video). In the long period in which oceans have separated the northern and southern continents, many plant groups diversified, both north and south. I have seen many typically Southern Hemisphere plants as cultivated plants and in botanic gardens, but this was my chance to find them under natural conditions. When I could identify them, I was excited to see them.

forest, Tierra del Fuego

The forest was a dense, dark place,  The trees were not tall but they grew close together. Almost all of them were one of two species of Nothofagus. Nothofagus is called the southern beech. It’s a group of species related to the beech, Fagus, but confined to the Southern Hemisphere.  This was a famous Southern Hemisphere group I had only read about and I was delighted to see for myself. (Full story, Distribution map)

In sheltered spots grew small trees called Winter’s bark in English (Drimys winteri  in the plant family Winteraceae, another mainly Southern Hemisphere family: distribution map from the Missouri Botanic Garden). Of course I thought Winter's bark referred to the season, but in fact, one of Sir Francis Drake’s expedition, Captain Winter, used the bark to treat scurvy in his sailors, successfully. 

forest, Tierra del Fuego

In 1831 England sent the HMS Beagle to map the coast of South America. It mapped and named one of the major waterways here, the Beagle Channel. Charles Darwin was aboard as the ship's naturalist. He was young, perhaps 2 years after graduating from college by the time they got to Tierra del Fuego. He went ashore and climbed about on the hills, finding the forest tangled and hard to walk through.

I read Darwin's book about the trip, The Voyage of the Beagle, long ago but images such as that one stuck with me.  I had no opportunity to track out through the dense and unfriendly Patagonian forest, but I did enjoy seeing it. The Voyage of the Beagle is online: Here is the description that I remembered, of Tierra del Fuego in December, 1832 (Ch. 10, 11th paragraph): 

Finding it nearly hopeless to push my way through the wood, I followed the course of a mountain torrent. At first, from the waterfalls and number of dead trees, I could hardly crawl along; but the bed of the stream soon became a little more open, from the floods having swept the sides. I continued slowly to advance for an hour along the broken and rocky banks, and was amply repaid by the grandeur of the scene. The gloomy depth of the ravine well accorded with the universal signs of violence. On every side were lying irregular masses of rock and torn-up trees; other trees, though still erect, were decayed to the heart and ready to fall. The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen reminded me of the forests within the tropics -- yet there was a difference: for in these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit. I followed the watercourse till I came to a spot where a great slip had cleared a straight space down the mountain side. By this road I ascended to a considerable elevation, and obtained a good view of the surrounding woods. The trees all belong to one kind, the Fagus betuloides; for the number of the other species of Fagus and of the Winter's Bark, is quite inconsiderable. This beech keeps its leaves throughout the year; but its foliage is of a peculiar brownish-green colour, with a tinge of yellow. As the whole landscape is thus coloured, it has a sombre, dull appearance; nor is it often enlivened by the rays of the sun. 

I didn't find it bleak, in fact, it was endlessly fascinating. Simple, chilly forests of exotic southern beeches.

Tierra del Fuego in the sunshine

On this trip I failed either to see strange stars or clockwise drains. It was cloudy every night I went out to look and the conditions to see water rotate the "wrong way" are tricky (see Huffington Post article). I had a grand time, but those simple goals went unmet.

Comments and corrections welcome.

References
Plant identifications: 
Devereaux, Evelyn. Flora del Archeielago Fueguino. Buenos Aires: Grafica LAF. 2004.

Kathy Keeler

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