Carolyn McCarthy

Live from the Americas

From the Rockies to Patagonia, original stories about culture, the environment and travel throughout the Americas.

Carolyn McCarthy

Live from the Americas

From the Rockies to Patagonia, original stories about culture, the environment and travel throughout the Americas.

Featured
Beat the Crowds: Cerro Castillo, Chile
Patagonia is packed with legendary hikes, like the iconic Torres del Paine circuit. While the best known of them are famous for a reason—rugged terrain, breathtaking vistas—with fame comes crowds. Detour instead onto the Carretera Austral, a road that snakes hundreds of miles through southern Chile, to one of the country’s most stunning yet under-the-radar hikes at Cerro Castillo, a razor-sharp peak about 900 miles south of Santiago.
Outside
Featured
The best of the Colorado River: one step, pedal or stroke at a time
Snaking 1450 miles, the Colorado River is nothing less than the nerve center of the great American West. Capturing snows off the Rockies, it drops through pine stands, winds down into the desert and carves the Grand Canyon’s rosy depths. In the American psyche, it’s a powerful life force, a natural wonder that has created bounty and a marvelous place to play.
lonely planet
Featured
Silent Darien: The gap in the world's longest road
Stretching from Alaska to the pencil tip of Argentina, the 48,000km-long Pan-American Highway holds the record for the world's longest motorable road. But there is a gap - an expanse of wild tropical forest - that has defeated travellers for centuries. Explorers have always been drawn to the Darien Gap, but the results have mostly been disastrous.
BBC News
Featured
The Perfect Trip: Argentina & Chile
Standing beneath the massive towers of craggy blue ice that is the Perito Moreno glacier, it’s impossible not to feel like a speck on the face of the planet. It’s a view that rallies guide and former park ranger Marcelo Jannes, even after 28 years. ‘It’s one of the few places in the world where reality surpasses expectations,’ he says.
Lonely Planet Magazine
Featured
Puelo River Dammed
Those who stumble upon Chile’s Puelo River Valley find paradise: a swollen, turquoise river twisting through stands of southern beech, hemmed in by glacial peaks. These natural barriers have long kept the valley pristine. A century ago, while Argentina populated the other side of the Andean divide, the government lured pioneers to stake claim to this region in the name of national interest. Now, a hydroelectric project may force their descendents out for the same reason.
National Geographic
The Patagonian Pursuit
The wind greets you first. The southern sky is big and ringed with clouds, their hues ranging from chalk to slate, scattered over the tawny steppe. Welcome to Patagonia.
Wanderlust
The Greatest Adventurer You've Never Heard Of
It was an audacious youth that any globetrotter would envy: Lucas Bridges hunted wild bulls, pillaged abandoned shipwrecks and explored a once-unblemished Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of the Americas. In time, he would befriend the “savages” that Charles Darwin had sneered at from the H.M.S. Beagle. Meet E. Lucas Bridges, the greatest adventurer you’ve never heard of.
Patagon Journal
Southern Comfort
The Atacama, in northern Chile, is one of NASA's preferred research destinations. Because the high-altitude terrain of the world's driest desert bears an uncanny resemblance to Mars. Tierra Atacama tucks into the arid landscape with luxe minimalist style. While nearby 19,423-foot Lincancabur volcano dominates the view, raves go to the hotel's fairy-godmother service.
Outside
Chile's wine country: a spirit worth bottling
In a dim tasting room, Hugo Andrés Casanova, the fourth generation of the Hugo Casanova winery, pours the last of an acclaimed 2000 reserve. A few swishes wake up a peppery, smooth cabernet sauvignon. It's a moment to savour. On the century-old adobe walls there are dozens of framed awards – and, in a corner seam, one enormous crack.
The Telegraph
Go Citybreak: Panama City
PANAMA CITY is a sunny destination with complexity: a cocktail of roiling history, brisk commerce and Latin culture. Long before its glittering skyline went up, explorers straggled around the isthmus in pursuit of the Pacific, pirates made frequent pit stops and foreign governments gambled on the biggest dig of all time – the Panama Canal. Grossing nearly $4 million a day, the canal, now in the hands of Panamanians, has made Panama both the richest Central American city and the most connected. But it would be an error to assume Panama’s treasures are all bankable.
Irish Times
Little seen and untamed river stirs Patagonia
The Carreterra Carretera Austral is a lonely place. Its 750 miles of washboard rumbles south through thick Valdivian rain forest and across sprawling steppe, bound toward for the tip of a continent. But before it can arrive, it’s blocked by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the biggest chunk of continental ice outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
The Boston Globe Magazine
Yellowstone naturally: Go find the remote
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. -- The mist was lifting on Fishing Bridge, where an elk forded the river upstream. I stood on the bridge and watched, the sole witness, as he crossed the current, strong and swift. It was shortly after 7 a.m. When I got in the car and prepared to move on, a bison wandered onto the bridge.
The Boston Globe Magazine

About

Carolyn McCarthy

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Wilderness Travel

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Carolyn McCarthy specializes in travel, culture and adventure in the Americas. She has written for National Geographic, Outside, Boston Globe and other publications. A former Fulbright fellow and Banff Mountain Grant recipient, she has documented life in the most remote corners of Latin America. Carolyn gained her wide expertise by researching guidebooks in diverse destinations. She has contributed to over thirty guidebooks for Lonely Planet, including Colorado, USA, Argentina, Chile, Peru and National Parks guides. She is also the sole author of Lonely Planet's Trekking in the Patagonian Andes and Panama.