Torres del Paine

Advance warning. Long blogpost. I really did try to keep my retelling brief, but apparently I'm incapable of that

Puerto Natales

 The bus ride from Puerto Natales to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine is about an hour and a half. The sound of rain on the metal roof of my CouchSurf hosts' house had woken me up at 3am and was still drizzling down from the grey sky as my bus my headed towards the park at 8am. I sad there staring out the window and the drenched yellow green of Patagonia hills and thought "What the hell am I doing? Why am I going to go hike and camp for 5 days? That is five days of mostly alone time, that is about 7 hours a day of just walking where I'll have nothing to do but stare at the scenery and think. Just me and my little brain. Plus this bus if full of tourists! I don't like hanging out where all the tourists are! I want to be around the locals, get to know the local culture. What am I doing this for?"  Those of you who know me pretty well know that the idea of me and my brain having 5 solid days alone together with few distractions can be a very frightening prospect as I tend to think too much. Turns out the five days, even with all the thinking time and the plethora of tourists, was worth it.

Puerto Natales

The park felt very busy and full and I can't imagine what it would be like in January, which is the height of the season. This time of year the number of visitors is declining but with the exception of the first campground I stayed in the campgrounds seemed full to me (though I'll admit not packed to the gills). A lot of people do the hike that I did, the W (named for the shape the trails take on the map), and I passed the same people over and over again on the trail. My first couple of days I mostly kept to myself, actually savoring some of my alone time, but by the end of the 5 days there was a sense of comradery with the people that I'd been seeing everyday and I spent a lot of time talking with a couple from Redding, CA, a couple from Quebec City, and a young guy from North Carolina. I was told that Torres del Paine gets about 200,000 visitors per year. To the people telling me this 200,000 clearly seemed like a very large number and, sadly, a huge number of these people have little experience camping/hiking but do the W (because its very feasible to do with little experience) and end up damaging the park. However, to put this number in perspective...Yosemite National Park received just under 4 million visitors in 2009. About 80% of TDPs visitors are foreigners, which means that prices are high and the local economy is clearly thriving on digging deep into visitors pocketbooks. It cost me $100 to rent gear, $30 to enter the park, $24 to get into the park and back to P. Natales, and $22 to take a catamaran from one of the entrance points to the start of the most popular trail in the park. Not cheap. (It costs a Chilean $10 to get in and the entrance fee plumments in the off season).

Torres del Paine, Lago Grey

The first day was grey and wet and I couldn't see anything on the trip into the park. All of the mountains were obscured. Luckily it cleared up when I hit the trail though. My first two days hiking were the hardest, not just cause my pack was laden with food. Most people stop and camp 4km closer to the start of the trail than I did, but that campground costs money and I'm my father's daughter. The campground was right next to a viewpoint for Glacier Grey and was delightfully empty. There were only two of us there when I went to sleep, me and an 18 year old kid from Pennsylvania, Sam, who was taking a year off from college. However, the trail up to campground was fairly steep and wet and I was ready to scream and start hitting trees with my hiking poles when the campground kept not being visible from the top of hills. I was very happy when it appeared. I had been able to see the glacier for a lot of my hike, but it didn't beat the mirador near the campground. The blues in the crevices and crack were what mesmerized me. Sam had just tried traversing a glacier in Northern Patagonia so I got an awesome miniature lesson on glaciers, including how incredible it was that it was dead calm, no wind at all, where we were.

Glacier Grey

Day two was NOT fun. My shoes had gotten wet the day before and hadn't dried out so my feet were instantly wet when I put them on. The first 2/3rds of the hike was retracing my footsteps from the day before and I  had 23km, which is a little over 14 miles, to hike. Luckily the weather was nice but my feet were KILLING me when I arrived at camp, which was the dirtiest and most cramped of any I camped in. (Apparently it was supposed to be closed but that information wasn't being shared with hikers so it wasn't being enforced by the Guardaparque).

View from Valle Frances

Day 3 was the most amazing. Valley Frances is the "crown jewel" of the park (as told to me by a info guy in P. Natales and was my favorite part of the hike (maybe partly cause I left all my gear in camp and did it with just a daypack). As you hike through the valley there is a mountain with a glacier on your left. Every once in a while there would be a sound like thunder and if you were lucky you would be able to spot where a chunk of ice or snow was tumbling down a cliff of the mountain. You could see waterfalls of glacier melt and the weather was perfect and the sun kept dancing on the cliffs and the snow. If you looked over your shoulder you were greeted with a completely different vista, lakes and rolling green hills. It was beautiful! The hike up the valley ended at a mirador where the mountains and rock formations formed a U in front of you. What ever direction you turned was just stunning. There is no way that a photo could capture it.

Valle Frances

Valle Frances viewpoint

I was really lucky with weather during my hike (As you can see from the sunshine in these photos). Torres del Paine is known for unpredictable, quickly shifting weather and strong winds. I only experienced those strong winds on day 4, but I could hear them throughout the hike, especially on night 3. Where I was camped there was nothing more than a light breeze but I could hear the roar of the wind coming off the mountains and could see the wind pushing, swirling, and blowing the clouds. It was mesmerizing just to sit there and stare at them, which I did for hours (aided by the fact that it doesn't get dark until 10pm this time of here down here.)

Me at Valle Frances viewpoint

Day 4 was the day that I got to actually experience the infamous TDP weather. Most of the hike was through open grassland, the result of a fire caused by a careless hiker a few years ago. It rained most of the hike, starting off as a light mist but turning into real rain later on. But it was sunny so when I put on my raincoat I instantly started to overheat so I just let myself get wet. Then I hit a point where the trail through the grassland meets a trail that runs up the edge of a ravine. That was where the weather hit. The wind was so strong that the drops hitting my skin stung. It felt practically identical to what it felt like when I rode my scooter 35mph in rain with exposed skin. I walked up the hill hunched over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, my head down so that the wind didn't catch the brim of my hat and blow it off and with sunglasses on to protect my eyes. Without the aid of my hiking poles I am not sure I wouldn't have ended up in the ravine that plunged down hundreds of feet on my right side. Thankfully I could see a refugio (a hotel/camping area) in the distance so I managed to brave my 20 minutes of famous TDP weather easily. After the refugio the trail headed into the woods, sheltered from the wind, and the rain cleared up. By the time I got to camp it was mostly sunny and nice.

"grassland" area

Day 5 was a bit of a disappointment. If you had talked to me about Torres del Paine after day 5 I would have given you a "meh" assessment of the park and my time there. It wasn't until I started detailing each day in my journal and looking through my pictures that I realized/remembered how incredible the scenery and experience was. On day 5 I got up before sunrise and hiked, with pretty much everyone else in the campground, up to the viewpoint for the torres (which is towers in spanish) from the name Torres del Paine. Supposedly they are supposed to be amazing when the sun hits them. I'd hiked up to the torres the night before just before dusk and was looking forward to seeing the sun hit them and light them up pink and make them beautiful. This did not happen. Instead they just came into clearer view as the sky lightened and clouds swirled around their tips and I got to sit there and silently curse the loud Israelis. When I finally headed down to break camp the sun finally caught the torres and danced on them for a second, but it wasn't anything awing or jaw dropping.

Torres del Paine

It was fun to see a shift in all of us W hikers the last day. The last day of hiking was easy, pretty much downhill, and ended on the lawn across from the fancy schmancy hotel that costs nearly 1000 USD per night. For five days we had been mumbling "hola" as we panted past each other or had grunted what worked as a greeting. We had been tiredly smiling at each other at campgrounds and some of us had built little two day long friendships over campstoves. Now that we all collapsed on the ground the energy suddenly became a little festive. There were jokes about mobbing the kiosk and stealing on the ice cream (we had the numbers to pull it off) and comments about stinky feet and armpits and sore knees. It was as though we had unknownly created our own little community during the last few days and this was our last hurrah.

Twisted tree

 The weather was brilliant my last day in the park and as the bus drove away I looked over my shoulder and realized what Torres del Paine looks like from a distance. All of the land around it is low, rolling, and grass covered. Out of this pampa rises this circle of mountains and jagged rock formations, seemingly out of nowhere. It was a stunning sight to see and suddenly made me appreciate more where I had just been. I have had this realization that the combination of growing up in the Pacific Northwest and my work with Trek America has raised my standards of what I find incredible. I have seen many of the most beautiful and awing places in the USA. My parents live in one of the most beautiful regions of the USA. On a clear day in Portland you can see not one, not two, but THREE large snowcapped volcanoes. Sometimes these high standards mean I fail to really give credit to the beauty and wonder of what I'm seeing. That almost happened with TDP. But luckily it didn't.

Leaving the park (aka being too impatient to wait for the $3 shuttle so walking 7.5km cause alerady having walked like 50 wasn't enough)

I really want to write about the AMAZINGNESS of glacier Perito Moreno (where I went yesterday) and the fabulousness of my current couchsurfing experience, but I think that this post is long enough already. So...that will wait for another time.