Reserva Nacional Altos de Lircay

Friday, May 1st was Labor Day in Chile, a public holiday, so the boys had it off from school. We took advantage of the long weekend and drove 4 hours south to a National Reserve called Altos de Lircay, hoping to see some fall colors. The city of Santiago itself gets some fall colors, but not a ton. Maybe half of the trees change; the other half are varieties that stay green even during the winter, so more tropical I suppose. By going south, we were going to areas with colder winters, so most of the trees would be changing, and we weren't disappointed. I also did not realize that grape leaves change color as well, so all the vineyards we passed were spectacular. And so many different shades! Yellows, oranges, reds, deep maroons. Very lovely. 

On the drive into the valley, we got a really nice view of some rocky cliff faces. My two goals on this trip were to see some colors and to get a view of this valley. 

The first afternoon, we took a short hike on some private land (which is for sale if anyone is interested!) to the two lagunas or lakes. The hike was fun because it through some impressive, old growth forest. 

The lagunas themselves were lovely. They are much bigger and deeper than they appear in these photos. You could easily cliff jump into them. And so pristine! We saw a handful of other people on the hike. 

Saturday was the day we had tickets to go into the National Reserve itself. The day started a bit rough, as Emerson didn't want to go hiking; he wanted to stay at the wild camping spot we had and play. But, after realizing the goal of the day was to just spend time in nature and not do a forced march, he acquiesced. Our first mirador was everything I was hoping for, a lovely view across the valley. The hike to this mirador is very family friendly. The reserve was technically sold out, but we hardly saw anyone all day. I think alot of people do much longer, multi-day hikes through this valley, so for us, it felt like we had the place to ourselves. 

One surprise of this area is it was chock full of little lizards. They were everywhere, of all different sizes and colors. The boys had fun making "habitats" for them, aka creating little water pools to see if they'd come drink. And they did!

Since spending time in nature was the only goal, there was lots of time for things like tree climbing!

Another surprise of this National Reserve was the old growth forests, which had some HUGE Coihue or Dombey's Southern Beech trees that were hundreds of years old. The one in the picture below was 500 years old! If you ever need a mental reset, give a tree a hug. It does wonders. 

Our last exploration was along a hiking route that goes up to a rock outcropping. We weren't going to make it all the way today, but for adults, it looked very nice. 

We found a perfect climbing rock, so we spent most of our time pretending to be animals living in caves amongst the rocks. 

The view back across the valley was lovely. It kinda reminded me of the Smoky Mountains, as the cool clouds were getting trapped amongst all the nooks and crannies. 

We ended up staying out in the Reserve the entire day, and the boys had a great time. Adventure's out there!

We were wild camping at this flat pullout along the main road into the reserve. Every morning, we'd see the Caballeros walk the tourist horses up to the places you could go to rent them for the day, and every night they'd walk them back down to their fields. 

Also, as we cooked bacon for breakfast two days in a row, all of the nearby dogs came to visit to check out the smells. They were very cute.