This Patagonia Puma Tracking Trip Is a Safari Unlike Any Other

The bones are what I can’t get out of my head. Ribs, spines, skulls, femurs—picked clean and bleached white as the snow glinting on the distant peaks of the Torres del Paine. Every hour, every day here in Patagonia, in an unending cycle unfathomable to modern human life, the guanaco—a wild cousin of the llama—must graze amongst the remains of its brethren. As befits mother nature’s capricious cruelty, they can’t even do that in peace. Crouched in the grass or bramble around it might be the majestic animal that brought me to the near-bottom of the world. The apex predator of the Andes mountains.

The puma.

Often seen as a nuisance in the U.S.—certainly not a tourist draw like grizzlies, bison, or wolves—in Chilean Patagonia the puma is a star. Photographers from around the world pay top dollar to come and get a shot of these solitary large cats, and Netflix has made some of the pumas household names. At the invitation of Quasar Expeditions, the cruise and tour operator, I spent a recent fall down in the Torres del Paine tracking and watching—sometimes up close—these magnificent creatures.

Quasar crafted a trip for me that was simple but filled with promise. Two and a half days would be spent with their puma trackers on the trail of one of the most regal animals in the Americas. Then a day and a half of activities typical of a guest at Torres del Paine Explora Lodge, one of the world’s most iconic hotels. And then two nights in Santiago at The Singular, a luxury hotel right in the heart of the city’s bohemian Lastarria neighborhood with a rooftop that looks over this extraordinary city.

In an era of conveyor belt tourism where everybody is frankly wasting their money on going to the same places to check the same boxes, this trip was a reminder of how much value there is in spending a sometimes substantial amount of money to have a great experience. It’s still possible to do something that is, for lack of a better word, special.

The lodge is in Torres del Paine National Park, which is named for its signature mountain towers and is filled with glaciers, rivers, mountains, and wildlife. Puerto Natales is the airport closest to the park, with a scenic two hour drive. Unfortunately, the flights from Santiago are in the morning, making it nearly impossible to connect immediately off an overnight flight from abroad. The other option—which I took—is Punta Arenas. Located near the bottom of the Americas, it’s a five hour drive to the hotel in the Patagonian steppes, a landscape eerily similar to eastern Colorado and western Nebraska. Looking back, I wish I’d added a night in Santiago on the front end so I could relax and adjust at the hotel before flying to the closer airport.

Puma safaris are similar to most overland safaris. You wake about an hour before sunrise and shuffle blearily to greet your driver and pile into the car. To get to the ranch east of the national park where Quasar guides are one of the few outfitters allowed to go off-road to spot pumas is about 45 minutes.

The road in the morning cuts a ribbon-like path through the foothills and along lakes as the sun slowly rises in front of you. It’s a groggy race to be there with just enough light to hopefully see the pumas in action—prowling, hunting, on the move—but not so much sun that they want to call it quits on their crepuscular activities.

With nature, however, there are no guarantees. In African safaris, potential disappointment is mitigated by there being so many different types of large animals. Puma safaris are more like tiger safaris—you’re here to see one animal and they’re elusive. That being said, as my driver J.P. pulled into the heart of the ranch on my first morning there, a radio call came in from Christian, the tracker. He had found a puma. Just as J.P. started to reply, he slowed the car to a halt. Perched on a small rise maybe 30 feet from the car window was another puma!

After admiring her for a few minutes, we bounced down the road to watch the puma the tracker had spotted. Blinka was the name given to her by guides down here, and she was crouched in the grass, her eyes on a guanaco resting alone on the slope below. Tawny-colored, Blinka is something of a marvel. She has only one eye—the other was lost when she was three months old and an older male attacked her and her brother—and is missing one of her teeth. She walks with a slight limp as she broke her leg while rearing two cubs, both of which survived.

Two guanaco kills the night before led to the unbelievable fortune of watching seven different pumas that morning. Included in that mix was Daniela, the Norma Desmond of the cats here—always ready for her closeup. Heart racing more from excitement than fear, we trailed her on foot as she loped over small hills, stopped to lap up some water, occasionally sniffed the air, always stopping and seeming to strike a pose. And on our way to lunch we had what I was told was a rare sight—a young male fording the Paine River.

As soon as the temperature ticks up even a little bit, any chance of glimpsing pumas in action pretty much disappears. They’re cats after all, and daytime is for resting. Just shy of miraculous is how I would describe my tracker Christian’s skill at spotting a sleeping puma in the various rocky hillocks. Even with binoculars and knowing exactly where to look, it took immense concentration and often watery eyes to actually distinguish a languid puma from a rock. Photographers will often stay in the field in hopes of getting a great shot of a resting puma. My first day, I also stayed out there, passing the time learning about these creatures and their environment.

It turns out that the puma remains a somewhat mysterious creature for naturalists, and one that constantly upends accepted knowledge. These cats that can reach up to 180 pounds were once thought of as solitary creatures, but here they certainly aren’t and will often share a kill. Their habitat is one of the largest in the world, stretching from Alaska across 28 countries down to the bottom of Chile. The ones in Patagonia are believed to be the largest, in large part because of the guanaco. These hefty rusty red camelids, one of four in the Americas (llama, alpaca, and vicuña being the others), are the main source of food for the pumas and down here they are plentiful.

Their bones may be scattered across the land here, but they’re no easy mark. They have remarkable eyesight and utilize a system of sentinels who are constantly scanning the land for pumas. In fact, trackers often rely on alarms sounded by guanacos to find pumas in the wild. And while I wouldn’t exactly call them pretty, there’s something sublime about watching a herd of them canter across the range with towering mountains as backdrop.

The safari has its fair share of waiting. Sometimes it’s crouched and ogling a puma lounging. Other times, given the knock-you-down winds, time is spent looking through binoculars or with crossed fingers in the car hoping a resting puma will move.

After a morning of winds so powerful they turned a waterfall into a spout blowing back up the rocks, the afternoon of the second day my luck continued. One of the young males, a steely gray cat named Paine, had been spotted. We got out of the cars and started walking through the fields, never in his way but stopping in spots where he might choose to pass by, which he did, sometimes within a dozen feet. The sole other guest on the ranch that day, a professional photographer, was positively giddy. Paine had paused on top of a ridge with the serrated Torres del Paine on the horizon and turned back to look to the valleys behind us. A money shot in the world of wildlife photography.

Patagonia tours with Quasar are five or four nights and run from $6,600 to upwards of $13,150 per person depending on season and accommodation type. Within that, though, is freedom to customize. Some want nonstop pumas. Others, recognizing that Patagonia is quite simply one of the most beautiful places in the world, want to do some outdoor activities. After two and a half days tracking pumas, I spent my remaining day and a half tapping into the staggering array of treks and horseback rides on offer from Explora Lodge.

The lodge itself is arguably one of the more famous in the world. If the name isn’t immediately known, most will recognize a photo from one of its rooms looking across the glacial lake to the Torres. From a distance the hotel looks quasi-futuristic, like something the Norwegian firm Snøhetta would design. But the lodge is all wood, painted white on the outside and inside covered in planks of honey-colored timber. The design is restrained so as not to distract from the hotel’s environs.

The hotel offers 13 different horseback excursions and dozens of hikes and overland tours to keep guests busy. While that’s a lot of options, what is available varies. Everything down here is determined by the wind. It’s a wind that will make you reconsider ever describing something back home as “a windy day.” On drives you can see it streaking and swirling across the surface of the water, churning up whirling dervishes of icy mist.

At dinner, the howling wind outside enhances the feeling of coziness in the simple wooden space. While I was determined to do the French Valley day hike, a wind that had the hotel groaning left only one option: the hike to the base of the torres. This is the “signature” hike for the park, but luckily it wasn’t high season yet so it wasn’t overly crowded. And at 13 miles round-trip it is long enough that it thins out in parts.

Best of all, when I got to the little lake at the base and sat down to eat my lunch, the wispy clouds covering the towers drifted away. Apparently the luck I’d had with the pumas hadn’t run out. I got to dine with a clear shot of one of nature’s wonders.

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