A winter-walk up to El Yeso? Despite the lack of color – we couldn’t say no!

There’s a good quantity of natural marvels of a high caliber dotted throughout Chile. Many I’ve already seen down the years and reported on on these here blog pages (for example, the Torres del Paine National Park and the Uspallata/Bermejo Pass/Cumbre Pass), but there are still some that I’ve yet to check out – including the Atacama Desert, and the marble caves at General Carrera Lake.

However, those two are quite far from Santiago – where we’d just finished the working portion of our trip. We needed something nearer. We asked the locals, and the answer came swiftly: the El Yeso reservoir and dam – but only in the summer when the water’s turquoise and the rocks are multicolored. Well that was no good to us here in August – the last month of winter in the southern hemisphere) ->

All the same – we went to have a look…

Now for some technical details…

To get here (to Embalse el Yeso), it’s about two-and-a-half hours in a car; actually – better make that “in a jeep”, since the last several kilometers of road are really bad (a regular car might not make it).

In the past a road hugged the shores of the whole lake, and also took you some 10-15km up into the mountains…

Alas – that road’s long been closed :( ->

Here’s where we park up the motor. From here – on foot…

…On this here track:

And here we are: to the left – dam; the right – reservoir ->

Mountains, lake, snow – all at an altitude of ~2600m ->

Nice views:

The farther we walk – the more brutal the scene:

This is the abandoned road btw; such a shame it’s closed:

No parking of vehicles? But… :) ->

Walking right to the end (another 10-15km) and then walking all the way back – that would have been too much. So we took a few final pics, about-turned, and walked back to the jeep and then drove back to Santiago. If it had been summer – maybe we’d have walked the full distance…

The following day there was more Chilean tourism – which I’ll tell you about in another post…

The rest of the photos from Chile are here.