Aside from a precious few tourist havens and industrial centers, Santa Cruz Province is an immense swath of parched, lonely land where wild animals and a few tough inhabitants eek out an equally tough existence.

But within this inhospitable region one also finds a land of desolate beauty and dramatic contrasts, where angry spires of barren rock and icy peaks give way to a seemingly never-ending horizon of harsh, semi-desert steppe that extends several hundred kilometers all the way to the bleak Atlantic coastline. This is indeed Big Sky country – Patagonia style.

Simply enduring the utter emptiness and natural ruggedness of this frontier region, which has a population density comparable to the Sahara Desert, is in many ways the very essence of the Patagonian experience. Wrested from its native inhabitants barely over a century ago, much of this remote badland is still unknown to the outside world. Perhaps for these very reasons, the austral landscape of Santa Cruz seems to captivate the imagination unlike any other portion of Patagonia.
 

Yet a closer look at these barren expanses also reveals a surprising diversity of life. Among the more conspicuous native species are guanacos, rheas, condors, foxes, sea lions and even penguins, along with the elusive puma. And though they were introduced only about a century ago, all species of anadromous and resident salmonids found throughout Patagonia now survive – and even flourish – in some part of Santa Cruz, the sole exception being landlocked salmon.

Arguable the most alluring of these species from a fishermen’s perspective is an elusive race of Atlantic steelhead that inhabits the enormous Río Santa Cruz. The second largest in Argentine Patagonia (after Río Negro), the glacial-fed Santa Cruz begins high in the ice-capped Andes as the outflow of the largest exclusively Argentine lake, Lago Argentino.