Hosted Trip Spotlight - Route 40 Road Trip, Argentina
Over the past 20+ years, we have been fortunate enough to spend a good part of every year fishing and guiding in Argentina and Chile. We started off as young, 20-something trout bums escaping the northern hemisphere winter, cutting our teeth, exploring new, wild and uncrowded waters, all while forging deep connections with Argentine and Chilean friends and anglers along the way.
Today, Patagonia remains a foundational part of our personal and work lives. While we may be a bit older, it’s now about sharing that love of the region with friends, family, and whoever else is interested in joining our trips — Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fish Montana, Idaho, or Wyoming 50 years ago? That’s a little bit what it feels like out there — remote, beautiful, and full of healthy and wild brown, rainbow, and brook trout. Throw in delicious meat slow-cooked over open coals at a traditional “Asado” barbecue, a few Argentine Malbec Wines, Yerba Mate, and some Gauchos driving cattle down the road and it becomes something else entirely.
That feeling — of being a trout bum on the move across wild, unbridled Patagonia, catching fish and experiencing Patagonian culture — is really what we tried to capture with our Route 40 Road Trip. While there are plenty of amazing self-contained fly fishing trips and lodges to be found across Argentina, we wanted to give our guests a chance to experience the vastness of the region, take in the landscape, and catch amazing wild trout in pretty much every conceivable way there is to target them with a fly rod.
While planning this trip, we decided to start with the basics — with “The Route”, or “La Ruta” in Spanish. Route 40 can be thought of as the Patagonian equivalent of our Route 66, connecting the entire Argentine side of Patagonia from North to South. Draw a line through the central-most bit of La Ruta from the town of Trevelin in the South, up through the town of San Martin de los Andes in the North and you’re looking at some of the juiciest trout country in South America — covering such famed rivers as the the Chimehuin, Malleo, Alumine, Limay, Futaleufu, Rivadavia, and Tecka to name just a few. In our opinion, there’s no better framework upon which to plan a multi-week trout fishing expedition in Patagonia — and it’s even (mostly) paved! With all of our relationships with fishing guides and lodge owners developed over the last two decades, we’ve been able to string together a phenomenal two-week adventure that takes place across multiple lodges and watersheds.
The trip kicks off in the Chubut Province in early December — early Summer in Patagonia — just outside the town of Trevelin on the Futaleufu. The Futa is a giant tailwater that eventually flows into Chile and dumps into the Pacific Ocean. This shockingly deep, swift, aquamarine-colored river serves as a dramatic introduction to flyfishing in Patagonia. You can spend an entire afternoon casting dries to dozens of voracious trout eating in a back-eddy the size of a football field. If streamers are more your thing, you can also target the banks and dramatic drop offs permeating the entire river— In many places the river bottom drops down 20 or more feet from the relatively shallow, willow-lined banks, offering the perfect ambush spot for a 2-foot brown to inhale your streamer.
