On June 4, 2011 the Puyehue Volcano erupted in the Andes Mountains of southern Chile and threw a plume of ash 6 miles into the sky.  The immediate devastation was visited on the areas in very close proximity to the cone itself, but it became quickly apparent that the path of destruction would be vast. Ash began to fall the same day in the pristine areas of Patagonia, Argentina that are known for their beauty and winter sports, suddenly it was hard to tell the snow from the ash. The enormous cloud continued to rain ash up and down the Andes causing airport closures in Santiago, Chile as well as across much of Argentina and setting up days of flight cancellations all over the world.

The impact on hunters from the United States and around the world trying to get to their ultimate destinations in Argentina escalated within hours resulting in delayed and canceled flights. Many hunters lost days while trying to re-arrange flights and some lost their entire hunt. The groups that managed to finally arrive in Argentina and were unfortunate enough to be hunting in regions that were remotely near the path of the ash plume found that, while to the naked eye there appeared to be no trace of the floating debris, they were about to have the rudest of awakenings…no birds.  While I have made my rounds of the hunting expos and exhibits we attend each year I have heard horror story after horror story from last summer and we got countless emails from our groups coming in asking the same question – if we had birds.

The answer – we did and we do.  Fortunately both our lodges were located far enough north of the eruption so that it had no impact on our normal enormous amounts of dove, duck, pigeon and perdiz. We also didn’t lose a single hunter or experience one lost day of hunting. We got everyone in. We were able to do this because from the instant we are contacted about booking our hunts we work closely on every detail with our hunters, this includes their flight reservations and we are aware from the time they begin their trip from their home country until they are standing in front of us of exactly what is going on with their routes and flights. We were able to be in contact with our groups during this time and worked on our end to establish new flights and bookings through our ground support in Argentina. It was a frantic and exhausting couple of weeks but we didn’t have anything but great results for our hunters.

This is what Argos Hunts is all about, attention to detail, custom experiences and no task to great to insure that our hunters have the amazing experience they are expecting the first trip and every trip after that. To book for this year or next please visit our site at argoshunts.com and go to the contact page.