Buta Ranquil
The fuel stop at Buta Ranquil — mid-morning, with about three hours already behind — sits at the foot of Volcán Tromen (4,114 m / 13,497 ft), a dormant cone that dominates the skyline from every corner of this small town. The name is Mapudungun: buta (great) and ranquil (carrizo, a type of grass), for the grasslands of the upper Río Colorado valley. The town's founding is conventionally dated to 1895, when a group of families crossed from Los Huayes in Chile's Linares province through the Paso de las Lástimas. For most of the next century, nearly all its inhabitants were Chilean-born; it only became the departmental seat of Pehuenches after 1915, when a catastrophic flood from Laguna Carri Lauquen destroyed the former capital, Barrancas, erasing its civil records and forcing relocation upstream.
Buta Ranquil remains a small town — a few thousand inhabitants, a petroleum economy layered over the older pastoral base — but its position at the intersection of the Ruta 40 and the volcanic Tromen massif gives it an outsized presence on the landscape. The church, built in the 1940s on the main avenue, is one of the oldest in the northern Neuquén. From the town, the full cone of Volcán Tromen and its neighbours — Bayo, Negro, Wayle — form the western horizon. Fuel here and continue south.