EVERYBODY IN THE VILLAGE of Puerto Bertrand has a nickname, and one look at our boatman's pink face and watery eyes explained his: La Chancha Ciega, "the Blind Pig." Lago Plomo was pale green in the thin morning light as La Chancha piloted his 20-foot skiff west through spitting rain toward the Valle Soler.

Four of us—including 34-year-old Basalt, Colorado, photographer Pete McBride; Vail retailer Candice Wilhelmsen, 27; and Nate Simmons, the 35-year-old co-owner of Carbondale, Colorado–based Backbone Media—rolled in last night to find Scott and Jonathan sorting gear in front of Jonathan's A-frame house. Tiny Puerto Bertrand looks like a displaced Irish fishing town, and in his wool sweater and beret Jonathan could pass for a fisherman—except for the long knife stuck gaucho style down his jeans. At 31, he's got bright-blue eyes, black hair curling with its first gray wisps, and a wide-open expression.

"Welcome to the real Patagonia," he said.

Jonathan runs the logistics from here with his wife, 31-year-old Mary Ann Mogavero, a chef, bush pilot, and horseshoes ace he met in 2001 in Bozeman, Montana. She came down to visit, went back for her two dogs, and that was that. They live here most of the year, next door to Manuel the Anarchist, a retired documentary filmmaker who's taught his pet chicken to do backflips off his leg. Winters are long in Puerto Bertrand.

As we head out for the trail, the group swells to include Jonathan's guides-in-training. There's Patricio "Pato" Ormeño, a 25-year-old local with a long ponytail and fatigues; 26-year-old Juan Pablo Castillo Diaz, a Coyhaique raft guide studying tourism in Santiago; and Jose Castaño, 26, a tall Santiagan industrial designer who lived with Mary Ann's family as a high school exchange student. The American exception is Toby Mogavero, Mary Ann's 27-year-old brother and Jose's partner in crime, a snowboard bro fresh from his Army tour as a Humvee gunner in Iraq. Down here, surrounded by family, he's slowly leaving the stress of combat behind.

The boatman beaches us on a spit of land leading up to a stone house surrounded by willows. The farm belongs to rancher Ramon Sierra, who, with son-in-law Hector Soto Vargas, is providing sturdy Patagonian criollo horses, still shaggy in their winter coats, to get us up the Soler. As Ramon and Hector pull on goatskin chaps and nylon slickers, we head up-valley, following the faint trails left by huemules, Patagonia's endangered red deer. Upriver, 9,399-foot Cerro Hades is busy making weather.

The route forms a giant C. We'll head west along the 17-mile-long Valle Soler, using the horses to cross the Río Soler's swollen glacial runoff. In two days we'll reach Palomar, Jonathan's ranch. There we'll turn south, entering Laguna San Rafael park and leaving the ponies behind. For four days and 21 rugged miles, we'll backpack the park, crossing the Neff Glacier and continuing past several glacial lakes. We'll take Jonathan's boat across the largest, Lago Colonia, exiting the national park to arrive at his second ranch, Sol de Mayo. From there it's an eight-mile hike and ride down the Valle Colonia to the Río Baker, where we'll meet trucks for the two-hour drive into the 6,000-person gaucho town of Cochrane.

It's pristine, beautiful, lonely. On some trips, you can almost feel each step slide into a bootprint of the trekker who got there before you. Out here, you can believe you're the exception. We walk with empty water bottles. No filters. No iodine. We drink straight out of every river and stream.

A few hours of wet hiking brings us to a field of RV-size boulders. Scattered among the rocks are six green Eureka A-frames, half blown over by the wind. Jonathan finds a cow femur to prop one up.

"We'll have six of these tents on platforms," he says, "and a separate 750-square-foot yurt or dome, with a table for 15, a wood-burning stove ..." He gets more excited as he describes the rest—small stream turbines for electricity and running water; wastewater channeled downhill through a bathhouse with two composting toilets. He finishes off with a wonk's analysis of sustainable firewood projections for the next 60 years.

This is the kind of long-range thinking that Jonathan and his Patagonia Adventure Expeditions partner, Ian Farmer, a 40-year-old British outdoor-education veteran who runs operations in Coyhaique, used to convince CONAF to endorse the trail. PAEX has a 15-year exclusive on guiding it, renewable indefinitely in five-year increments. Other outfitters may send clients, but they'll hire horses, guides, and boats from PAEX, as will the five independent trekkers who head out every day. The Wyoming-based National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) sends students up the Soler, and they'll continue to do so.

So far, no other companies have squawked at this arrangement—Geographic Expeditions, the Sierra Club, and local outfitter Azimut360 have all arranged trips for 2006—but it's ripe with potential for resentment. For that reason, Jonathan doesn't like to use the word monopoly, stressing equal access and environmental stewardship instead.

"Ian and I took all our idealism and designed this concession that's superstrict, even anticapitalist," he says. "If we go above and beyond duty to create a situation where CONAF has no complaints, to create value and capital, why in the world would they kick us out?"

Never mind that on this trip we're still burning our trash, including plastic. Never mind that Jonathan still needs to come up with $250,000 to build the yurts. We sit down in the empty boulder field in the middle of the wilderness, fortified with plates of Mary Ann's meatballs and boxes of Gato Negro red wine.

Toby, more than any of us, needs this. All Toby ever wanted to do was ride his snowboard. Instead he found himself firing into the night on patrol outside one of Saddam's minister's palaces. Toby's on inactive reserve, but in the unlikely event that the Army calls him up again, he doesn't want to go back. He's bought 50 acres on a trout stream overlooking Puerto Bertrand, and Jose's going to design him a cabin where they can hang out and hide from the rain. Patagonia, he says, is his therapy.

"Dude," Toby says from across the fire. "This place, for me, it's healing. We came up here a couple of days ago and I kind of drifted off. I was dwelling on things, and you have to put a stop to that. This may sound kooky, but I'll say it: Out here the mountains talk to you."