Living on the Edge

On an expedition to the remote Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America, Michael Snyder gets a taste of life as a homesteader.

- Michael Snyder

An Explora Expeditions group in Parry Bay, in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

AFTER GERMÁN GENSKOWSKI and his family decided to set up a homestead on the island of Tierra del Fuego in 1985, it took him four years to build a cabin using hand-sawn timber from the surrounding mountains. He brought tools and appliances into the area bit by bit, traveling two days by boat from the port city of Punta Arenas, on the mainland, to the jetty at Caleta María, where his father, an immigrant from Poland, had worked as a logger in the 1940s. From there, Genskowski would lug materials another full day east along the Azopardo River, nearly to the border with Argentina. From the cabin, the nearest settlement was a three-day horseback ride away.

His wife and children would return to Punta Arenas each winter, but Genskowski would remain at the cabin, often cut off from the world by several feet of snow. Today, he is considered one of the last settlers on the sparsely inhabited Chilean side of the island, part of the rain-lashed archipelago where the South American continent ends.

I met Genskowski, now 80, on a weeklong trip across Tierra del Fuego led by Explora, a company that leads expeditions throughout South America. He told me how, when a gravel road finally reached his property in 2004, he met the change with a shrug. “I didn’t like it much,” he said. “I was happy with things as they were.”

Things have gotten easier in this isolated part of the island, certainly—a welcome development for Genskowski since a riding accident a decade ago left him unable to mount a horse—but ease was never the point. Our expedition leader, Nicolás Vigil, summed it up when he recited an old Chilean saying before we embarked on our journey: Quien se apura en la Patagonia, pierde su tiempo—“who rushes in Patagonia, wastes their time.”