Story by Ryan T. Bell  /  Photographs by Eliseo Miciú

It was a simple premise for a pack trip: deliver a friend to the bus station.  But in the backcountry of Argentine Patagonia, even an everyday errand requires miles – and days – in the saddle.

“The teeth of a storm.”  For the first time, I understood what that meant.  Molar shaped clouds brewed over the mountain skyline, looking like the gullet of a terrible being about to eat us raw.

“This doesn’t look good,” Eliseo Miciú said.

He stowed his camera in a backpack he wore when shooting from the saddle.  Next to him, my fiancée Madeleine rode huddled down in a poncho with the blanket’s fringe draped over her rein hand for warmth.  A head wind blew us into a “V” formation, like a gaggle of Canada geese that didn’t get the memo about when to fly south.

Then again, we were already south.  South of the equator, in South America, in southwestern Argentina.  It’s a quizzical land to a northerner.  Everything is reversed.  Birds do fly north for the winter.  The constellation Orion is flipped upside-down, looking like a skull-and-crossbones.  And water swirls in a clock-wise direction when you flush the toilet.  Scarry.  If the hands on my wristwatch spun backwards, I wouldn’t have been surprised.  But that’s the beauty of Argentina.  It’s a loophole that allows horsemen to glimpse what life might’ve been like on the American frontier.

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