The Strange Story of Nahuel Huapi

Explanation: Welcome to Argentina ... more specifically, the lakes district just east of the spine of the southern Andes Mountains and the country of Chile. Here range amazing peaks, Andean condors, old-growth forests of southern beech, and glacier-fed lakes.

Perched tarn lakes left from glaciers that carved headwalls
dot the high Andean peaks alongside Nahuel Huapi.

One of the more striking lakes of the region is just below us, as we angle in for a landing near the Bavarian-inspired town of Bariloche. This is Lago Nahuel Huapi, a cold deep lake filling a glacier-carved valley. The lake surface itself covers over 200 square miles (529 square km), and the waters sink as deep as 1,437 feet (438 m). The lake is part of a broader national park -- Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi -- which itself covers some 2,927 square miles (7,581 square km) and is the oldest national park in Argentina, having been designated in 1934.

But ... strangeness lives here.

The lake region, especially the lakeside town of Bariloche, has long been said to have been the haven for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun who, the story goes, did not die in the German bunker but used body doubles as their corpses there, and fled to this region of Argentina where they lived and thrived for decades.

Further, consider the story of Huemul Island within the lake, shown in this week's main photo, above. Apparently, in the 1940s, first president of Argentina, Juan Domingo Perón, commissioned a scientist, the Austrian Ronald Richter, to devise an atomic device and had a research lab built for nuclear-power experiments in the region. Further stories suggest that nuclear waste had been dumped into the lake from the secret experiments.

Cold and wind-swept are the waters here.

Wait, it gets weirder.

Apparently, no boats are allowed on Nahuel Huapi after dark, for safety reasons.

However, there is also massive speculation that the lake hosts a Loch Ness-type monster that locals call Nahuelito. I kept watch during my visit there, including during a boat ride across the lake and hours hiking its shoreline ... but I saw no evidence of the beast. Perhaps it was pure myth ... or a nocturnal predator created from the radioactive wastes that supposedly still rest in the dark depths of those frigid remote waters ...

Appearing like an Argentinean Lock Ness, Lago Nahuel Huapi
runs long, narrow, and incredibly deep among
the steep, glacial-carved valleys of the Andes Mountains.

EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week