What do you do when your inflatable kayak gets a puncture while you’re crossing a lake strewn with icebergs, and you’re over a week’s overland travel from the nearest town?
That was the challenge faced by explorer and environmentalist Charlie Tokely on his expedition to Lago Greve, one of the largest, most remote and least understood lakes in Patagonia. We caught up with Charlie to learn more about the expedition – and extreme puncture repair.
Inspiration for an adventure
Charlie Tokely is no stranger to sticky situations. On his first big kayaking expedition in Patagonia, he spent 24 days paddling and hiking his way around Laguna San Rafael National Park in Chile’s Aysen region, where the Northern Patagonian Ice Field tumbles out of the mountains into a patch of forests and fjords.
‘It’s very wild and pristine,’ he said, describing humpback whales breaching in fjords that even the park authorities didn’t think had been visited in modern times. In places, the ground beneath the trees was so deep with forest litter it was like walking through a continuous pitfall trap. But taking to the water brought a different set of challenges: one night he was forced to move his tent when an iceberg unexpectedly beached itself just metres from where he was sleeping.
This early experience planted the seed for an even more ambitious adventure. Instead of looking to Chile’s famously crinkled coastline, it was a feature on the map much further inland that caught his eye: one of the most obscure but potentially most exciting lakes in Patagonia: Lago Greve. It sits in the mountains in the northernmost corner of Chile’s Magellanes province—home to Torres del Paine and Chilean Tierra del Fuego— and is so rarely visited that it has an almost mythical aura attached to it.
‘It’s almost completely unknown, even though it’s the sixth largest lake in Chile and twice the size of Paris,’ explains Tokely. ‘It’s completely shrouded from the outside world because it’s behind the Pío XI Glacier, which is the biggest glacier in Chile.’
A quick look at the map shows the reason why. As the condor flies, it seems as if the lake should only be a short hop from Villa O’Higgins, the town that marks the southern terminus of the Carretera Austral highway. Unfortunately, the small matter of the Andes Mountains stands in the way. The peaks here aren’t just just a mass of rocky peaks, they’re topped by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field – the largest body of ice in the Southern hemisphere outside Antarctica. No wonder that Lago Greve is shrouded in mystery. No one could even tell Tokely the last time it had been visited.
A plan and a flood
It was clear that Lago Greve was no solo endeavour, and Tokely was joined by his friend Jose Mijares, a Chilean mountaineer, to put the plan into action. ‘We spent a lot of time looking at satellite images at different times of the year, trying to work out if the lake freezes in the winter or if it’s too windy in the summer. Being pinned down by wind on the far side of the lake and not being able to move was a recurring nightmare that we both had for years!’ he laughs. They were unsure if they would even be able to cross the Pío XI glacier – until the Covid pandemic put the entire expedition on ice for several years.
When planning resumed, they learned that the lake had also undergone an earth-shattering event. A team of glaciologists in Japan discovered that in May 2020, Lago Greve had suffered what’s called a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood or GLOF. GLOFs occur in alpine lakes when a naturally occurring dam suffers a catastrophic failure. Almost overnight, the water level of Lago Greve —which covers an area of around 240 km2 or 93 square miles— dropped by a staggering 18 metres (60 feet).
Had there been any settlements in the area, they would have been swept away in a tsunami of glacial water, but Greve was so remote it had only been detected by satellite. The thought that Tokely and Mijares could potentially have been on the lake when the flood happened hardly bore thinking about, but if they were able to reach it now, they would be the first people to see the aftermath of this almost Biblical event.
Don’t give up
Finally, at the close of 2024 with mountaineer Pablo Bessar also added to the team, they were ready to set out. From their starting point in Puntas Arenas, they travelled to Puerto Natales, from where they caught a boat for a two-day trip up the fjords. Each of them were carrying nearly 60 kg (130 pounds) of gear for the three-week expedition.
The last port of call was the tiny fishing hamlet of Puerto Eden, which is one of the last strongholds of Chile’s indigenous Kawésqar culture. Its bay is frequently clogged with ice calved from local glaciers, and the fishermen pull so many king crabs from the water in season that they practically give them away to anyone strange enough to visit.
From here it was a further eight hours by fishing boat to a trailhead. The vessel they chartered was called No Te Rindas, which means ‘Don’t give up’ in English – which all of the group took as a positive omen. ‘We decided that this would be our motto for the trip,’ says Tokely. As the boat deposited them on the shore and slowly chugged away, they were finally on their own. Now, only Pío XI glacier stood in the way of reaching Lago Greve.
Crossing the Pío XI glacier
Finding a path towards the lake was a constant challenge. Wherever possible, the group stuck to the land around the edge of the glacier rather than try crossing the ice itself.
‘We’d spent several kilometres on land until the mountain got too steep and we were forced onto the glacier. It was always tricky trying to find our way on the ice – it was one step at a time. We’d sometimes get lost in a maze of crevasses and have to go back and find a different route,’ says Tokely. ‘It was very stressful.’
A major obstacle was an unexpected lagoon that was impossible to pass. The group were forced to inflate their kayaks early – and it was here that the puncture happened. Tokely’s kayak developed a large rip that had to be painstakingly hand-sewed, before covering it liberally with glue. The tear threatened to cut the expedition short before they’d even reached Lago Greve, but miraculously the repair held true for the remainder of the trip.
It took over a week to make their way slowly across the Pío XI glacier, regularly laying food depots for the return journey. ‘We had to portage everything, essentially doing everything twice. We’d carry our gear up and deposit it, go back and sleep, and then the next day we’d bring the rest up.’ On average, the group made just two kilometres of progress a day. But after eight days of struggle, they finally got to see Lago Greve for the first time.
The first paddle on Lago Greve
‘The relief was mixed in with an enormous feeling of gratitude,’ Tokely tells me. ‘On the far side of the lake, you could see glaciers tumbling down. And we were blessed by an amazingly calm weather window. It felt like stepping into another world.’
That sense of stepping out of time was only heightened by the dark tide mark around the edge of the lake from the GLOF, and even more unexpectedly, thick strata of seashells embedded in the mudstone more than 70 metres above the water. The group recorded everything to share with the glaciologist back in Japan.
In total, the group spent seven days on the lake, with the weather holding out as if to repay their efforts in getting there. The idea was to circumnavigate the entire lake exploring each of the arms and fingers that reached off the main body of water, probing into the mountains. But even with good weather, there were some risks that they weren’t prepared to take.
‘We were scared of crossing in front of the northern terminus which is about five kilometres (three miles) from one side to the other. Even when the water is like a mirror, you can still get caught by a classic Patagonian storm that just comes out of nowhere. Suddenly the wind picks up and you start getting blown towards that glacial face, and things can get really spicy – being blown towards calving icebergs.’
The kayakers were dwarfed by the landscape – and enriched by the knowledge that they were likely the first to ever paddle its water. The crag of Volcán Lautaro loomed above them, the highest peak of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, whose glaciers feed into the lake itself. They kayaked across the front of the Greve Glacier, and penetrated into the forest wondering if the once nomadic Kawésqar had ever passed this way in previous centuries.
Encountering Greve’s wildlife
The extreme isolation of the lake meant that they would come across wildlife that had never laid eyes on people. There were rare huemul deer watching them from the undergrowth, and occasionally wandering out into full view with no fear of the visitors. An unusual bird encounter was even more rewarding.
‘I nearly stepped on a Fuegian snipe,’ laughs Tokely. ‘It’s just a little wader really, marked a bit like a tiger. At first glance, they’re pretty unremarkable.’ But Fuegian snipes are very rare indeed. Their precise distribution remains unknown, but they had never been recorded in this part of Magellanes province. All the details of the sightings were shared with CONAF, the national park authorities, at the end of the expedition.
After a week on the water, and having surveyed as much of the lake as they could, it was time for Tokely and his companions to turn around and return to civilization. But the lagoon that had caused so many problems on the way in was determined to play them one last trick.
‘It had almost completely frozen up. We would paddle over several hours, breaking the ice and then climbing up onto the icebergs and pulling our kayaks up, then making our way to a point where we could get back to the water and break more ice to continue paddling.’ As he recounts this, even Tokeley sounds surprised at how they had to tackle this final challenge. But after six days—two days faster than the outward journey—the three of them finally made it to their rendezvous point at the head of the fjord. The same boat was waiting to ferry them back to Puerto Eden. And on its side was painted the same cheery motto that had carried them through the entire trip.
No Te Rindas.
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