Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [77]
16: BELL MOUNTAIN
From the Pacific to the Andes
The setting of the sun was glorious, the valleys being black whilst the snowy peaks of the Andes yet retained a ruby tint. When it was dark, we made a fire beneath a little arbor of bamboos, fired our charqui (or dried strips of beef), took our matté & were quite comfortable.
—BEAGLE DIARY, AUGUST 16, 1834
DARWIN’S GREATEST OVERLAND ADVENTURE took him out of the coastal Chilean city of Valparaiso on a late-fall ride through the Andes into Argentina. His enthusiasm for the trip showed in a last-minute letter he dashed off to his sister Caroline in which he laid out his plans for beating the snow in the high mountains (leaving that very morning at 4 A.M.), offered his backup plan (begging for horses to take him to Potosí in Bolivia) and concluded, “I cannot write more, for horse clothstirrups pistols & spurs are lying on all sides of me.”
At the time, there were two passes between Chile and Mendoza, Argentina. The pass called Uspallata was more commonly used, while the Portillo pass, further south and nearer to Santiago, was “more lofty and dangerous.” Darwin, his guide Mariano Gonzales, and an accompanying mule train set out for the Portillo pass. The route took them first through the Maipo River valley, then after two days up a steep ascent of the Andes, which formed a double barrier between the two countries. Darwin climbed the western ridge most of the day, following switchbacks up through bands of snow until he reached the crest. The view from the top repaid the trouble. In a crossed-out sentence in his journal, he wrote that this view, above all others, stood out in his memory, and he penned one of his most beautiful descriptions: “The atmosphere so resplendently clear, the sky an intense blue, the profound valleys, the wild broken forms, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of ages, the bright colored rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, together produced a scene I never could have imagined.” Darwin, apparently, had wandered away from his guides for awhile—or possibly they just weren’t interested in the view—and the solitude amplified his emotion. “I felt glad I was by myself,” he wrote. “It was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in the full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah.”
The rest of the trip went off smoothly. He made it to Mendoza and then crossed back to Chile a few weeks later via the safer pass. In an April 1835 letter to his sister he wrote, “Since leaving I have never made so successful a journey.” He proceeded to summarize his geological findings, realizing that she would understand little and care less, but his enthusiasm carried him through a long paragraph before he recognized, “I am afraid you will tell me, I am prosy with my geological descriptions & theories.”
Beyond the successful geologizing, the scenery stuck with him. In a letter to his college professor J.S. Henslow, who unlike Darwin’s sister did have a strong interest in geology, Darwin emphasized how much he enjoyed the view. “It is worth coming from England once to feel such intense delight.”
Portillo is now a ski resort, the most famous ski resort in Chile, where the United States Olympic ski team goes to practice in the North American summer. But I wanted to climb one more mountain. Darwin had trekked through the cordillera near the end of his overland travels, a full three years into his Beagle journey. Rather than drag, the time flew by. The views seemed fresh and new even though he’d now gazed across South America from peaks in every conceivable condition. Darwin kept climbing regardless of what other things he had to do because to summit a mountain was to renew the joy of his journey.
Optimism may be one of the biggest benefits of travel. When you spend all your time in a small area, trekking back and forth to work, getting all your news on the Internet, it’s easy to think the world is a lot worse off than it is. Then you get out in it, even for a short bit, and you get a summit view or find a friendly