As the helicopter lifted off and disappeared into the clouds, the roar of the whirring blades fell away and all that was left was the sound of the rain.
I just had been deposited deep inside Cochamó Valley, a remote cathedral of towering granite in central Chile that was at the center of a decade-long conservation battle.
I wanted to see this land for myself and hear firsthand from the people who had saved it. Now, I had to hike out.
My guide was a local activist named Rodrigo Condeza. An avid backcountry camper, Condeza started a nonprofit organization called Puelo Patagonia in 2013. His goal was to stop a proposed hydroelectric power plant in the area, a project that would have entailed the construction of roads, transmission lines and electric generation facilities.
On the other side of the fight was Roberto Hagemann, a wealthy Chilean industrialist who had spent years acquiring property rights from 200 local families to assemble a 325,000-acre (or roughly 500 square mile) property. Hagemann’s plan to develop the land would have disrupted a sensitive ecological corridor and, in the minds of environmentalists, spoiled one of the wildest places in South America.
In a separate article that we just published, I tell the unlikely story of how the two sides battled each other for a decade before ultimately reaching a surprising resolution: Hagemann has agreed to sell the land to Condeza’s group for $63 million.