Chile’s Rio Futaleufú: Saving an Endangered River

For the moment—and hope­fully well into the future—the river is being pre­served through the efforts of white­wa­ter experts Eric Hertz and Robert Currie, who have facil­i­tated the pri­vate pur­chases of key prop­er­ties along the river that pro­vide solid polit­i­cal resis­tance to its damming. Through their com­pany Earth River Expeditions, these pur­chases have also allowed Hertz and Currie to cre­ate a totally unique expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors from all over the world.

In an effort to pro­mote the river and its expe­ri­ence, Hertz recently hired vet­eran nature pho­tog­ra­pher Carr Clifton to spend two months along the river in order to pho­to­graph it. The results, like the river itself, are spectacular.

The Futaleufú

“There’s just some­thing about this river,” Eric Hertz tells Organic Connections. “It’s very inti­mate and very dra­matic in the same view. You become mes­mer­ized by things like the moss on the rock and the amaz­ingly smooth-carved boul­ders that the river has made around a par­tic­u­lar rapid. And of course the water goes any­where from turquoise to teal, depend­ing upon the depth, the cloud cover, the sun, and the amount of white in the rapids that mixes in with it; the water is a mes­mer­iz­ing color and very clear, very deep. It’s a big river, like the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, but it’s crys­tal clear and a beau­ti­ful color.”

“The color of the water is phe­nom­e­nal,” agrees Carr Clifton. “If that river were muddy water you’d be scared to death of it—it would look so mean. But it’s so beau­ti­ful with its glacial turquoise waters that it catches you off guard. Your guard isn’t as high as it would be if it were muddy like Grand Canyon flood-type water. This river just looks so gor­geous that it dis­arms you.”

But it wasn’t only the color of the water that attracted Hertz: the white­wa­ter chal­lenge of the place is quite sig­nif­i­cant. “I was on a road trip in Patagonia in 1990 and we drove along the bot­tom part of this river,” Hertz recounts. “I said to my part­ner, ‘This thing is raftable; peo­ple could go down it. It would be an amaz­ing river.’ The next year we planned to come back and we did. It had been attempted in 1986 but they had prob­lems halfway down in a rapid called Terminador. They flipped the boat, lost it, and they aban­doned the trip, which is how it got the name Terminador—it means ‘Terminator.’ Then we came back and used lighter boats. On the orig­i­nal trip they pretty much had full bag­gage boats with peo­ple hold­ing on, so their boats were fairly unwieldy. We came back with two oar-paddle com­bi­na­tion boats with very lit­tle gear, so they were extremely light and agile and we were able to do it.”

For some­one like Hertz, who has been a river guide since his teenage years, nav­i­gat­ing this river has a par­tic­u­lar appeal. “It’s very dif­fer­ent from other rivers because every time you turn a bend it looks like you’re on a dif­fer­ent river,” Hertz says. “It changes a lot that way, and I’m not used to see­ing that. You’re float­ing down and you go around a bend and there’s a rapid and it doesn’t look like the rapid before. The rapids have quite dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tics, and there are dif­fer­ent kinds: there are tech­ni­cal rapids* and there are big­ger water rapids with waves, and then there are rapids that involve walls, and some are tech­ni­cal with giant boul­ders. The scenery changes dra­mat­i­cally as you go downriver.”

Photographing the River

For Carr Clifton, who was charged with cap­tur­ing the river in pic­tures, the stress was a bit dif­fer­ent than it might have been for a pas­sen­ger or even a guide—although Clifton was no stranger to run­ning rivers. “I was appre­hen­sive,” he recalls. “You’ve got $20,000 worth of cam­era gear in a Pelican water­proof box, and you’ve tested it to be water­proof, but there’s always that chance it could leak. I also wor­ried about hav­ing to swim any of those rapids—you really don’t want to do that if you can help it. But by the sec­ond trip I was a lot calmer. I knew how safe the guides were and I knew their capa­bil­i­ties to row these rapids, so I was far less appre­hen­sive. No one swam. In two trips nobody went in the river—nothing. Totally smooth ride.”

Yet there were still tense moments. “Every day was just a rush going down the river,” Clifton says. “We’d go ahead of the group to pho­to­graph the white­wa­ter action. Simply hold­ing a $10,000 cam­era above the water or climb­ing on boul­ders hold­ing the cam­eras was quite nerve-racking for me.”

Clifton found the beauty of the place well worth the anx­i­ety. “It’s got to be one of the more beau­ti­ful rivers in the world,” he con­tin­ues. “Especially if you’re con­sid­er­ing white­wa­ter rivers, it’s prob­a­bly the most beau­ti­ful white­wa­ter river in the world to raft down. The color of the water and the boulders—it’s all unbe­liev­able. There is also incred­i­ble for­est, with huge trees two to three feet in diameter—kind of a cross between a jun­gle and a big decid­u­ous forest.”

For Everyone

Since Hertz and his part­ner have fig­ured out how to make it safely down the Futaleufú, it has become a prime white­wa­ter des­ti­na­tion. But due to the unique nature of the sur­round­ing val­ley, it has also become a des­ti­na­tion for just about any­one else as well.

“There are cer­tain peo­ple who want to run very hard rapids, but that is quite a lim­ited num­ber,” Hertz says. “There are a tremen­dous num­ber of peo­ple who want to go hik­ing and trekking and don’t want to be run­ning rapids. This place lends itself to that. For most river des­ti­na­tions like the Rogue River, the Grand Canyon or Middle Fork of the Salmon River, they’re mainly raft trips.

“This par­tic­u­lar river has a beau­ti­ful trail that fol­lows it, and that opens it up to a whole host of activ­i­ties, includ­ing any level of river raft­ing, from begin­ner to expert. We’ve taken peo­ple from 6 years old right up to 86 years old down the river—there are really no lim­its. And the canyon­ing, horse­back rid­ing, inflat­able kayak­ing, rock climb­ing, repelling, fly fish­ing, moun­tain bik­ing, and trekking are all first-rate. I don’t know of a loca­tion any­where in the world that comes close to rival­ing the Futaleufú for its qual­ity and abun­dance of multi-activities, and in our case these activ­i­ties are actu­ally in our pri­vate camps as you’re going down the river.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

This series of camps means that the craft used to nav­i­gate the river do not have to be loaded up with sup­plies, and vis­i­tors don’t need to return to the same loca­tion every night. “Normally with multi-sport loca­tions, you come back to the same place every night after trav­el­ing by vehi­cle every day,” Hertz explains. “Once you put in at the top of this river with us and come down, you don’t see roads and vehi­cles the entire time. You just go from camp to camp.”

Like the river itself, the camps that Hertz has installed are quite var­ied. “The camps are so diverse and unique that you will think you’re on a dif­fer­ent river at every camp,” he says. “If you look at Carr’s pic­tures, you’ll see that the Terminador Camp looks noth­ing like the Mapu Leufu Camp; and that looks noth­ing like the Cave Camp, which is all white gran­ite, or the Tree House Camp.”

The camps also have numer­ous ameni­ties, includ­ing hand­made hot tubs, wood stoves where meals are cooked by staff, and even flush toi­lets and hot showers.

Saving the River

Providing a world-class tourist des­ti­na­tion was but part of what prompted Hertz and Currie to pur­chase the land. “Earth River Expeditions is not a non­profit,” Hertz points out. “We have vol­un­teered our time and resources over the years by donat­ing a per­cent­age of our prof­its and, when nec­es­sary, even run­ning com­mer­cial trips to sub­si­dize our con­ser­va­tion work.”

 The Chilean gov­ern­ment, along with a Spanish power com­pany called Endesa, has been eye­ing the Futaleufú as a source of hydro­elec­tric power for a num­ber of years. Another river—the Biobío, fur­ther north—was dammed up for this pur­pose before Hertz and his team could stop them. He wasn’t going to let that hap­pen again. “We orig­i­nally pur­chased a bunch of prop­er­ties along the Futaleufú to stop the dam,” Hertz says. “We bought them in dif­fer­ent areas of the river where the dams were planned. We wanted to make sure they couldn’t destroy this river like they did the Biobío, one of the great rivers of the world. The only way you can do that is by own­ing the land.

“We’re not out of dan­ger; they could still try and do it, but they’re going to meet some stiff resis­tance. They now know this river is gain­ing a pretty big rep­u­ta­tion around the world. It keeps mak­ing these lists, such as the most beau­ti­ful white­wa­ter river; I’ve never seen a list of top white­wa­ter rivers that this river was not included on. We’re now using those lists against con­struct­ing the dam; we’re build­ing our case, if and when it comes to that.”

“Basically there are other rivers down there, and Chile is going full steam ahead to dam every­thing,” says Clifton. “With com­pa­nies from other coun­tries, includ­ing Spain, there are inter­ests com­ing in from every­where. They want to string huge power lines to, I believe, some of the min­ing indus­try there. So it’s really crazy. They dammed the Biobío with­out any idea of what they had, and so Eric just keeps fight­ing to try to make sure every­body knows what kind of a resource they have.

“If those guys weren’t down there, nobody would know about this river,” Clifton con­cludes. “It would prob­a­bly be dammed already. The crazy part is there are other places like that right now that are dis­ap­pear­ing, and nobody knows about them. So you’ve got to find those jew­els and you have to bring peo­ple down there and show them what there is to lose; oth­er­wise these places are going to be lost, and nobody will know what they were.”

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the Futaleufú expe­ri­ence, visit Eric Hertz’s Earth River Expeditions web­site at www.earthriver.com.

To view more of Carr Clifton’s amaz­ing pho­tographs of the river, visit www.carrcliftonstock.com/index/gallery/Futuleufu.

*tech­ni­cal rapids: The International Scale of River Difficulty clas­si­fies white­wa­ter rapids into six cat­e­gories, from class I to class VI, reflect­ing both the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­culty and the dan­ger asso­ci­ated with a rapid. Technical rapids, typ­i­cally graded class IV–VI, require higher nav­i­ga­tional skill, as they force the pad­dler to read the water and often move back and forth across the rapid.