With more than 18,000 hectares with mountains, steppe, fjords, and native forests, Estancia La Península has great potential for visitors who want breathtaking nature and adventures. Since September, we have been working on expanding our trail network with the help of an expert within sustainable trails and experience development, and we have already introduced new routes for our horseback riding activity.
The tourism operation on Estancia La Península focuses strongly on local culture like the gaucho and Kawesqar culture, environmental concepts and adventurous experiences. Around the property we have various trails build for horseback riding, the jeeps, and trekking, but also trails made by our animals like the horses, sheep, and cows. We wanted to expand our trail network to reach new areas of the property and to enhance user-experiences for both people working at the estancia and our visitors. When we started to look into how we could develop more trails, we discovered that there is a whole new world about trails that, if made correctly from the beginning, requires a minimum of maintenance, are sustainable and give its user a good and safe experience. This is why we contacted Jacob Brett from EarthBound projects to come and work with us, make a report of our existing trails (created by gauchos when checking on the animals) and propose a better way to develop our trail network.
Jacob is a technical designer and sustainable trail specialist for the ‘Shuswap Trail Alliance’ in BC, Canada; a non-profit company focused on design, construction, and maintenance of non-motorised trails and land access through partnership collaboration and stakeholder engagement. He also has his own company ‘earthbound projects’, which focuses on sustainable trail and experience development, working closely with recreation and tourism businesses to develop trail-based experiences that are both appropriate to the landowner, environment and user experience, whilst minimizing and focusing impacts in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. His expertise and focus on user experiences and sustainable trails go hand in hand with what we want to provide our visitors here at Estancia La Península.
“Trails that maintain people’s attention”
So what is a sustainable trail that also offers user experiences? When talking about trails for tourists, one important thing is that the trail has to lead people to beautiful places like viewpoints and interesting areas. It also has to lead people away from areas you for some reason don’t want people to go to. A good trail doesn’t tempt the user to leave the trail or to start making a new trail beside the original trail because this is when erosion occurs, and what we want to avoid. To be sustainable, the trail requires a minimum of maintenance and is safe to use.
During the month of September 2019, Jacob got to explore the property and work with on some of the trails together with the staff so they also learned about the principles of how to make and build good trails: “My time at Estancia La Peninsula has been spent working closely with the Maclean family to gain a better understanding of the Estancia La Penisula unique location and landscape and coupling that with the owner’s vision to share the heritage and history of the estancia and Magallanes region whilst showing off the stunning landscape of southern Chile and Patagonia, without compromising the very same sensitive environment and ecosystems. It’s humbling to see how deep this desire runs within the Estancia La peninsula, with a constant effort to instill this into their employees and visitors through education, best practices, and good old hard work.”
“Patagonian wind as an erosion factor”
When working with trails, there is no single formula to do it correctly because there are a lot of factors to considerate in each place. Weather conditions are one of them, especially here in Patagonia where strong wind also contributes to erosion; “Fragile soil types, lots of water and harsh weather conditions lead to environmental conditions that require thoughtful and careful planning and execution so as not to create future erosion problems,” says Jacob. Some of our original trails had issues with water and mud, and even the horses tried to avoid walking in the mid by walking beside the trails, causing the trails to be broader and broader each time we had a period of heavy rain. With the help of Jacob, we changed parts of the original horseback riding route and we now have a horseback trail with a higher experience level because we added more viewpoints, they trails get less muddy, plus, part of the trails are more protected from the strong Patagonian wind. This is a plus because there are many days with strong wind, so creating trails in wind-protected areas makes the experience more comfortable for our visitors on days with heavy wind and rain. A fun fact is that our animals also started to use these trails to move around the property which is positive in terms of less erosion. In the future, we want to get Jacob back to help build more trails and evaluate the once we just build. The goal is in the future to have new places to bring our visitors and continue developing our concept of adventure combined with an authentic estancia experience.
