With teams including adidasTERREX/Prunesco, Vaucluse Adventure Evasions and Ad Natura Kailash arriving at PC10, race director Stjepan Pavicic reveals what they will be facing as they head across the mountains towards PC12…
”From PC10 down it is very easy. After they go down into the valley they have to climb up and there are three openings, like doors, but they are for two valleys, and only one is the correct one – that is the north valley. If you go up the other one, that is a bad valley and you have much cliff and forest. You can go through, you can always go forward, but it’s not easy.
If you get the right valley it’s quite easy but even then you can easily end up getting back in the wrong valley. Out of here, it is general forest, not thick. There is a small lake and you can take the shoreline.
After the lake, the PC is not on the line of the route because to go directly there you get to a very steep cliff and cannot get down. Carry on a bit and you get to Paseo de Indio, named because the native people used to cross from one sea to the other with these passes. This brings you to PC11.
The racers will have food here, and will probably rest, but once they leave they will find they have problems from the start, because it is very dense forest. I prefer not to go down the treeline, I prefer to go up over the treeline and on the mountain section, you can run. Here we went very fast, 4-5km/hr, but you have one problem. When you need to get down, all the way down is cliff, cliff, cliff.
It is complicated. When we went down, we chose the route we recommended, so we know it is quite easy – but it took a while to find. Once you are back in the trees after this, some parts are open. We searched for open parts but often you want to go one direction and the forest goes the other direction, so you take the easy way then search for the other way.
Eventually, you reach a beach and there are many huemul trails on the beach. We followed the huemul trails, and they are very good. We used them to cross to the next lake, and this follows quite open forest. After the lake, it is a great view of the sea and the lake, and Seno Skyring.
You cannot go straight up after the lake, it is steep, but the suggested route is shallower. After that, up high on the mountain, we went up steeply rather than low climb. All here is grass, so it is really very quick, and it is also a home for huemuls, we saw many droppings and footprints. They like eating the vegetation here.
I think that when you arrive in this area, the mountain area, you have really finished. It is really fast, just go, go, go. There is a small part of forest, and it is a complicated forest, you have to go up one tree, across another, over a small river, and you cannot see the sky, ever, but it is only two hours or so.
The area after this is very different to what we have had before. It has lots of dwarf cypress plants, which are just like grass, and you can really smell it. You can walk over this for kilometre after kilometre after kilometre.
On the way through this section we found bones of a huemul, and we think it was eaten by a puma. In Patagonia we have a lot of pumas, relatively, and in my life I think I have seen three in this area. I have only seen three huemuls here too, though, which shows how rare and endangered they are and why we are trying to help save them through our race fundraising campaign.
This section seems like it is a very long way, and like it will never finish. When you turn north you have lots and lots and lots of small lakes and some problems with forests and it is not so fast, but once you get up onto the plateau it is really, really fast.
You have to take a very winding path around all the tiny lakes but you can easily travel at five and a half or six kilometres, even running a little bit if you still have energy. This long fast section will then take the racers right into PC12.
