Missing in Patagonia
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Travel, Patagonia, Chile, Argentina, Torres Del Paine

A brief encounter with a fellow traveler turns into a wrenching What if . . . ? as a young man goes missing after setting off for a hike in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park.

Ronan

“Ronan did not board his bus home and did not collect his luggage in El Calafate. Since then, there has been no activity on Ronan’s bank accounts and he has missed his internal and international flights. The family and friends are extremely worried.”

I was at my worktable in my Buenos Aires apartment, making revisions to my book on tango, when the incoming email caught my attention. It was from a Marsha Donnelly who wrote that she was a good friend of Ronan Lawlor, who had been missing for nearly a month since he entered Torres del Paine National Park in Chile on November 18.

Of course, I remembered Ronan—the lively young man whose name I could only bring up later by thinking Conan, the Dragon. The whole eleven-day trip to Patagonia was fresh in my mind. Ronan, my traveling companion Dan, and I got off the bus together in Torres del Paine. I had assumed that the tall, slim Ronan with sandy-colored hair, wearing Ray-Ban shades was German. But at Laguna Almargo, where we alighted, I heard the distinct lilt of a brogue.

We had nearly two hours to get acquainted with gregarious Ronan who was eager to see the wild backcountry in the park, albeit on a limited time budget. He was 28 and a chemical engineer headed to Australia where he would start a new job in his field.

Marsha’s email broke my concentration for work so I went to a Web site set up to receive information about the “missing hiker” and smiled at the many photos of the familiar lad. A profile described his five-foot-ten-inch frame and his eyes as “greenie blue,” a phrase I could hear Ronan say. “Very sociable and outgoing.” Yep, yep—he was exuberant, not at all Teutonic. When I told him what I did for a living he exclaimed, “Wow, I’ve never met a real writer before!” which I found surprising—he was from Ireland, land of so many Nobel laureates in literature. But I didn’t doubt his sincerity.

Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia

He told us how he managed to hop a flight to the Galapagos and had loved Bolivia, Machu Picchu, Rio de Janeiro, and in fact, had no bad reviews about anywhere. He was a skilled mountain climber, so I asked if he had bagged Mount Aconcagua, in Argentina, the highest point in the Americas at 22,841 feet. “Nah,” he said, and told of summiting a lower, equally challenging peak, Mount Villarrica, a snow-capped volcano in Chile’s lake district.

I chuckled reading Ronan’s travel blog as he reported his snorkeling adventure off Ecuador, where he “nearly swallowed half the ocean with fright” when he spotted a white-tipped shark. There were photos of Ronan with his cousin, Grainne, a Celtic beauty; toasting with a caiparinha; playing guitar; wearing a native sombrero; sitting at a piano; deploying his kayak; posing atop a smoking crater; and standing near a blue glacier. During the two hours of our acquaintance, I felt I had seen all these sides of this seasoned traveler. And I worried about him, the way I would about any of my many nieces and nephews his age.

Rewinding memories of goodbye

I answered Marsha’s email right away with all the useful information I could muster. She called me from Ireland within an hour and we went over it all again, with her apologizing for the bother, my apologizing for not having more details. Much of what I told her she already knew: he had left most of his baggage back in El Calafate (Argentina), in the same hostel where Dan and I were staying. He had only a small backpack in Torres del Paine. We had all hopped the van ride from Almargo to the Refugio Torres del Paine where Dan and I would lodge for the next three days. But Ronan, bless his energy, set out that same afternoon to get to the Towers, the park’s namesake attraction. ( Torres means towers and Paine, Pie-ee-nay, is transliteration for the indigenous Nandu people’s word for blue.) From the Towers, Ronan would double back to Refugio Chileno and spend the night. The next morning, he would head out to complete in a few days the popular trail called “The W” for its shape.

Upscale lodging in Torres del Paine

It was near 5 pm at the Refugio when Ronan turned to bid us farewell. Since I had hiked to the Towers the previous March, he asked me “How long did it take you to get there?” I laughed and said, “A good three hours but, at your pace, you’ll be there in an hour or so.” I looked at his solid, sturdy frame, and added, “Only the last part is a bitch—a real demolition site with a nearly vertical pile of boulders. Be prepared to scramble.”

We said warm so-longs, good lucks, and here I can’t recall for certain, but I think, I hope, I gave Ronan a hug because he was readily affectionate and because living in Argentina for the past year, I had learned to embrace everyone instead of shaking hands, even if I knew them for five minutes.

When Marsha and I hung up, I forwarded her email to Dan, who was back home in San Francisco. He replied that it didn’t sound good. I didn’t like his pessimism so I sent Ronan’s photo to my Mom, who believes in miracles and prays for special intentions during her daily rosary.

I hoped Ronan’s disappearance was due to his exuberance—the way young men can get caught up in an experience and time slows down and they forget to call their girlfriends or home. Perhaps Ronan was lost somewhere in the huge backcountry of Torres del Paine—in which case, I didn’t for a moment doubt his resourcefulness. Or maybe he was off intoxicated on that famous shamanic herb, ayahuasca, that turns all your thoughts into 3-D hallucinations with which you must do battle. Of course, I had to admit that this latter possibility was not the Ronan we met.

Anyone could get lost in Patagonia

In the days following Marsha’s email, I couldn’t imagine what might have happened to the astute Ronan in the great wilds of Patagonia whose topography in my mind is, though desolate and huge, broadly open and shallow. It does not impose itself on my memory like, say, the precipitous Sierra Nevada high country. A geographic region that straddles Chile and Argentina, Patagonia, like Amazonia or Appalachia, is hard to precisely pinpoint.

In the “Land of the Big Feet”

By most accounts, it starts around the “waist” of cone-shaped South America, below Argentina’s west-east flowing Rio Colorado, and tapers down the continent to Cape Horn, near the stem-end of the earth. It encompasses Tierra del Fuego, the Andes, deep lakes, sprawling ice fields, numerous glaciers, and cloud-studded skies. Chile’s much-perforated southern portion, which looks more like a tight fleet of islands than a coherent land mass, and Argentina’s pampas, which resemble “oceans” of grassland, comprise large swaths of the region. Anyone could get lost in this Land of the Big Feet, named for apocryphal giants, patagons, that Magellan spotted during his explorations here.

The morning after the day Ronan headed off into the sunset, Dan and I set out on the same trail to the Towers. It was a spectacularly beautiful day in meteorologically moody Patagonia as we climbed the rolling pampas steppe. An hour out along the trail, we reached Refugio Chileno, where Ronan should have spent the night. I had hoped we’d run into him and learn what he thought of the Towers. But it was late, and that firebrand was probably on his next leg—through the Valle de Francia. Dan and I continued up the trail until we reached the trail’s five-mile mark and the final 1/2-mile scramble over jagged boulders. I told Dan about the courageous man on my first trip here, who appeared to be in his late sixties and who had fallen on the side of his face. He received a deep gash that would require medical attention, but his friends bandaged him with conspicuous wads of gauze, as he was determined to summit.

As I checked the Web site daily for updates on Ronan, I recalled other forbidding features of this extraordinary terrain, like the constant avalanche of snow falling off the face of Almirante Nieto. In full view through the picture window of our refugio room, the sun-hammered snow cascaded like waterfalls. And there was the fiercest wind on earth, which during our visit showed its ferocity only once, pummeling us like rag dolls. Had it sucker-punched Ronan?

On December 18, I read that additional search and rescue teams were deployed. On December 19, many volunteers, including local Chileans pitched in to find Ronan. Thinking of my beloved nieces and nephews, I quietly agonized with his family, some of whom flew to Chile and were leading the search. My eighty–five–year–old mother kept emailing me for reports, and I questioned the wisdom of having involved her. On December 21, I read that helicopters and sniffer dogs were being used. On December 22, the Chilean Army joined the effort. I shared the family’s hope that by Christmas Ronan would be home with them.

The focus of the search was mainly throughout Chile’s national park, a place about the size of Texas and California combined. But since he was staying in El Calafate, too, it seemed likely that Ronan would visit Mount Fitz Roy, a stark, soaring peak that is among Patagonian features not to be missed, along with Torres del Paine and the Perito Moreno glacier. Fitz Roy, a jagged shard of the Andes, 3,405 meters high, even now makes me feel both exhilarated and nervous. Here one could vanish without a trace.

The Towers

The day Dan and I reached the viewing area on a seven–mile trek, a dozen hikers sat quietly on natural rock benches just staring in silence. Craggy Fitz Roy capped in snow and blue glacier ice, towered several hundred feet over a lake, perhaps a half–mile distance, on the other side of a lake. The lake, protected by fiord–like walls, was strewn with chunklets of crushed ice that came flying every few minutes off the face of Fitz Roy. The thunderous rumble of a calving glacier was not new to me, but it always has this apocalyptic sound, adding to the tingle of my weak knees.

Dan stood at the edge of the cliff to look down, and I had to look away with unabating dizzy spells. I wanted to shout, Dan, get back from the precipice, please! But I didn’t. Whenever I worry aloud about Dan’s getting hurt doing risky things, he reminds me what my psychologist sister has told him, “It’s a wish and a fear.”

The end of the search

Come December 23, I was still preoccupied with Ronan and sure he’d be found bivouacked somewhere, laughing, telling great stories of survival to his rescuers, which he’d post at his blog. Heck, the park is 242,242 hectares (Cal and Tex) so, if one were determined one could find that fabled isolation. Surely, that’s where Ronan was. Lost in the emptiness somewhere, whether by design or miscalculation. Soon he’d be rescued.

One easily finds fabled isolation in Patagonia.

I thought that after the holidays, I would fly back down to Torres del Paine — easy to do from Buenos Aires — and join in the effort. I opened the topographical map I had of the park and studied its features and all the places I had seen. Gray’s Glacier at the mouth of Lake Pehoe. I had hiked alone to where there is a seam in the lake far below the trail, where it goes from translucent to smoky with glacial flour and you start seeing little baby bergs that have floated away from the big mama. I couldn’t recall any menacing parts on the trail.

Late on December 23, I checked the Web site and read the post that now seems was inevitable, “It is understood and accepted that Ronan had unfortunately fallen into a river and drowned. We also understand that it has not been possible to recover Ronan’s remains.” Not anticipating this sad ending, I wished for more details, but of course, would not badger the family. I emailed Dan the news and my mother, too.

On January 7, 2008, I was relieved to read that a body had been found in Torres del Paine National Park, and that it was probably Ronan. On January 8, surfing fruitlessly for more details on the location where he perished, all I could find was this at the Irish Taxi Homepage: “It has emerged that (Ronan) was attempting to climb a steep incline when he slipped and fell into a crevasse. Rest in peace, I guess you experienced more in your short life than I ever will. Roy, Dublin taxi Driver.”

Craggy Fitz Roy

It felt strange, Dan and I being perhaps the last people known to have spoken to Ronan, before he was swallowed up by this huge landscape. I like to think of it as a gift — that I was given the chance to know him at all — and not a what–if message: What if I had told him he couldn’t make the Towers that late afternoon? When I say Torres del Paine was mean and unforgiving toward Ronan, Dan disagrees and says Ronan would have embraced and loved whatever he saw before his fateful fall. Yeah, that was Ronan.