ESCAPE TO RIO PALENA
When anglers daydream of traveling 6,000 miles to fish Chilean Patagonia, it’s unlikely they conjure images of chasing small-stream brookies with a three-weight. Yet that’s precisely how I spent one of my favorite days at Rio Palena Lodge, wading up the Rio Tigre catching brook trout no bigger than those of any American creek. Not that I didn’t have terrific fishing the other three days, it’s just that those days didn’t begin and end in a helicopter. (Pro tip: When wanting to hit various fisheries scattered among lakes and rivers of the Chilean Andes, it’s handy to have a heli.)
Flyfishing may be what brings you to Patagonia, but Southern Chile’s visual onslaught of lake-srivers-forests-mountains, and its potent mix of asado, pisco sours, Chilean wine, and Chilean people, will be what brings you back. And though the beauty of rugged mountain terrain has always been part of the attraction in trout country, Chilean Patagonia is next-level lovely, exceptionally rugged, and sometimes even dangerous.
On the morning of Dec. 16, 2017—the Saturday before Christmas—families in the hamlet of Villa Santa Lucia were gathering for breakfast when heavy rains in the headwaters of the Burrito River triggered a mile-wide mudslide that hit their town at 40 miles an hour, killing 21 people. An hour up the road sits the town
