Torres del Paine National Park

Wow. What an amazing week. Last Sunday our group met in the lobby of the hostel. Four women and one man make up the participants. Our guide is a delightful young woman from Peru.

While I was eating breakfast that morning I started talking to the only other person in the room, a man in his 30s who had just been in Torres del Paine park and was headed down to Tierra del Fuego. Taking the bus and camping. He was from Germany and was taking a month long vacation. Good role model for us Americans, both for taking an entire month of vacation and for hiking and busing.

Anyway, back to the trip. Luis (our driver for the trip to Torres del Paine) pulled up in a van shortly after we gathered and we all piled in to head north to Puerto Natales, the jumping off point for the Torres. We first headed off to the Sego Otway penguin colony. It was about 20 miles along the way to Puerto Natales, then about 15 miles along a dirt road. The countryside is relatively flat and dry, and not exactly what you would think of as penguin territory.

When we arrived to the penguin colony, we walked along a path for half a mile of more dry grass and low brush. We started to see lots of penguin burrows scattered about, and several penguin trails, and one can only imagine the number of short little penguin steps needed to waddle from sea to burrow and back to create these trails. The human path crossed one of the penguin trails on a bridge, and there was a sign saying don't loiter on the bridge since it will keep the penguins from returning to their burrows. Near the beach there was a wooden blind so that we could watch the penguins resting on the beach without disturbing them.

There were only a handful of penguins actually in their burrows, and maybe 30 or 40 on the beach, and the rest were at sea. The ideal time to visit a penguin colony is apparently either at dawn or at dusk, when the penguins are heading out to sea or returning, but that didn't work with our schedule. In any event, it was a treat to see them and I'm inspired to watch The March of the Penguins. This bunch was molting, so they were a bit scruffy and there were feathers all around.

After we left the penguin colony, we spotted lots of other wildlife, including nandu (an ostrich-like bird), guanaco (a wild animal related to the llama and alpaca), fox, flamingos, and skunk.

We got to Puerto Natales late Sunday afternoon. Puerto Natales is on Ultimo Esperanza Sound (Last Hope Sound, named when navigators looking for a passage tried one last sound.) The town was formerly focused on the sheep (mutton) industry and fishing, but now is also a tourist town, serving people visiting the Torres del Paine park and paddling the fjords. It's also the end point of cruises down the coast from Puerto Montt.

After a wonderful dinner of Chilean fare, we headed off to sleep to rest up for our big hike.

In the morning we met our local guide for the mountains, a young man from Turkey. Another wonderful guide, he spoke fluent Spanish and English and was more on top of English literature than I am.

We left everything we didn't need for the hike in the hotel, and the only thing I forgot was the spare battery for my camera, so I was somewhat sparing on pictures on the hike. More sparing than I needed to be, but c'est la vie. I'm sure the group will share.

After arriving in the park at mid morning we finally headed out on the first leg of the "W" hike. The term "W" comes from hiking up 3 valleys. The first day we hiked up to Refugio Chileno where we would spend the night. We dropped our packs in our room, and then headed up to the Torres, three granite spires that rise up out of a lake. (The picture at the top of the post is the Torres.) The final kilometer or so was up a boulder field, which was difficult walking and probably contributed to a very sore right knee by day four, but it was well worth it. We also saw a condor along the way, and he was actually underneath us so we could see the white feathers that are on the top of his wings. The first day's hike was about 14 K.

We learned that this area is not part of the Andes ... it's only about 13 million years old, compared to 50 - 80 million years old for the Andes. As was the case in North America, the whole southern part of South America was covered by glaciers during the last ice age that carved and shaped the terrain.

Day 2 we contoured around Lake Nordenskjol, with the changing lake opening up on our left and the mountain peaks on our right. Our destination was Refugio Los Cuernos, with a total hike of about 13 K. The lake was so big that it was sun dappled, as areas where the sun was shining through the clouds were a different color than where the clouds were hiding the sun. There were at least two levels of clouds ... a constantly moving low level that often scraped the mountain peaks and squeezed through the passes, and a high level that appeared motionless. We saw several local birds thanks to our alert trip members, including a Magellenic woodpecker tapping away on a dead tree. As we neared the end of the hike, we saw Los Cuernos, another amazing set of peaks. These are granite on the bottom with darker sedimentary rock on top, giving them a very distinctive and unique appearance.

Day 3 was a long hike, about 18 K. We headed up the French Valley to a lookout over a hanging glacier. We saw and heard pieces of the glacier break off and rumble down the mountainside. Then we headed back down the valley and on to Refugio Paine Grande, where we spent the third night of the hike.

We had fabulous weather all 4 days, but midday on day 3 the famous Patagonian winds started to blow. Easily up to 80 kilometers per hour. The wind would pick up the spray off the tops of the waves on the lake and swirl it around, or suddenly slam into a nearby tree. If you didn't want to use trekking poles to walk or to keep your balance crossing streams, there were still almost a necessity in the wind. On a previous trip, someone had actually gotten knocked over by the wind.

Day 4 we were supposed to hike up to Grey Glacier and take a ferry back. Unfortunately, when we were about 3/4 of the way there, we found out (via the guide's radio) that they had canceled the ferry due to the wind. My knee was quite sore by then and I would have been very pleased to take the ferry as opposed to backtracking (the planned 11 K hike turned into 15 K hike in a howling wind), but it all worked out.

The amazing thing about the park was that every direction you looked and every mountain and glacier you saw was different and unique and wonderful. I'm fading tonight, so am not doing this hike justice by any stretch of the imagination. But it's time for bed.

Just to bring things up to date, we got back to Puerto Natales last night. Spent this AM wandering around town (typical hardscrabble tourist town -- lots of hostels and outfitters and cyber cafes and entrepreneurs trying to make a living.) We then caught a public bus back to Punta Arenas, where we stayed in the same hotel. As we were leaving for dinner, the German tourist I had seen last Sunday arrived back at the hotel from Tierra del Fuego. Good to see him. Sounds like that's another great place to go.

Tomorrow we leave at 6:00 in the morning to catch a plane to Puerto Montt. We'll take a bus to our cabins in Ensenada, then go rafting. After that it's a day of biking, then kayaking, then a hike up the Osorno volcano, then back to Santiago on Wednesday.

Sorry for the rushed post; will try to be more coherent with the pictures.