Lava fields & LAKE SHORES

AT THE NORTHERN LIMITS OF PATAGONIA, A REALM OF HYPER-ACTIVE VOLCANOES AND GLASSY LAGOONS OFFERS SOME OF CHILE'S MOST ELEMENTAL EXPERIENCES, FROM ASH-STREWN HIKES TO WHITE-KNUCKLE WHITEWATER RAFTING. THE LAKE DISTRICT, AS IT'S KNOWN, MARRIES THIS DRAMA WITH A DEEP TRANQUILLITY, REVEALED THROUGH MEETINGS WITH THE INDIGENOUS MAPUCHE PEOPLE

- JAMIE LAFFERTY

Here's a story told in ash: a person came out to walk their dog along a track by the side of a volcano - an undulating, three-mile route defined by bamboo and untidy bushes and trees. To their left, the mighty Osorno volcano stood tall and intimidating beneath a high Chilean sky. The dog wasn't on a lead and presumably before the owner could react - it ran off. It had caught the scent of a pudu (one of the world's smallest deer species), which it followed to a clearing. The dog found tracks, stuck its nose to the ground, and tried to work out where its quarry had gone. Eventually, the owner caught up, retrieved their pet, and, hopefully, got it under better control. The unharmed pudu's tracks disappeared into the bushes.

Guide Marcelo Campos tells me this story while looking at imprints in the granular, grey earth. His forensic analysis is possible thanks to an accumulation of detritus, not from the nearby Osorno Volcano, but Calbuco, around 10 miles away, which blew its top in 2015. Here in the heart of Chile's Lake District, it helps to know which eruption from which volcano is responsible for the landscape in front of you - and which is likely to erupt next.

Media photographs of that particular eruption are spectacular. It may have gone off with the force of a nuclear bomb, generating its own electrical storms as it spewed volcanic matter into the sky, but there's something elemental and even beautiful captured in the shots. The aftermath is decidedly less photogenic. As I follow Marcelo along the path, he stops to pluck some ripe murta berries and shows me some photos of Calbuco's immediate aftermath. In them, ash covers every surface, knee-deep in places.