Opening the Road to the Lodge Each Season

Every spring, before the first group of guests arrives, we make the first trip of the season to the lodge to get everything ready. It is one of the most demanding, and most rewarding, weeks in our calendar. Here is what that trip usually looks like.

The route starts where Ruta 40 meets the road to the lodge, out in the open Patagonian steppe. In a good year the road is mostly clear by the time we head in. In a heavy snow year, and the heavy snow years are the ones that promise the best fishing, we can spend two or three days working through voladeros and stretches of iced over road with shovels, chains and the crew that signs up eagerly, year after year, to open the lodge.

A typical opening run goes something like this. Five 4WD vehicles meet at the crossing early in the morning and start driving in convoy. The steppe fills up with guanacos and the sky can go from clear to whiteout in minutes. When the road gets impassable we stop, walk the section ahead to check conditions, and if we cannot get through we back out and try again the next day. We spend nights in Gobernador Gregores or Bajo Caracoles, we eat what the roadside restaurants can put together for a big hungry crew, and we sleep early to be back at it before sunrise.

The tough parts are the voladeros, the drifts formed by wind that build up in the same complicated stretches every year, and the layers of ice that break under a wheel and leave you sitting in a pool of meltwater. We shovel snow, we break ice by hand, we push and we winch, and we get through.

Once we reach the lodge the character of the trip changes. The crew opens the buildings, checks every system, tests the vehicles that stay at the lodge all season, and starts putting the place together for the guests who will arrive a few weeks later. It is quiet work, and it is what makes the rest of the season possible.

The upside of a hard winter is easy to see once you are on the water. More snow on the meseta means more meltwater into Lago Strobel and the Barrancoso, and that translates directly into a stronger fishing season. So while the road can be brutal in a heavy year, it usually means the fishing will be exceptional.

If you want to follow the season as it unfolds, our Behind the Scenes series covers the opening from a different angle each year.