Torres del Paine (Chile)

We arrived in Puerto Natales late on January 8, 2006. Took most of the day on January 9, 2006 to sort out our travel arrangements to the National Torres del Paine Park (also an UNESCO world heritage protected park).

Getting to the park is not easy. It involved a 3 hour bus ride from Puerto Natales and then a half hour catamaran ride to our dumping off spot, the Refugio at Lago Pehoe.


Here is a picture from the catamaran ride. All of the lakes (or lagos) that we came across in the park were this aquamarine colour due to all of the minerals and glacier run off.



Here is a picture of our home for the next 5 days of the trip. This picture was taken at the first Camp site at Lago Pehoe. We opted for proper sleeping bags (good to minus 7 degrees celsius), but cheaped out on the tent. We thought we did not need a $300 tent. Turns out we would come to seriously regret this. The first night we discovered that the fly on the tent caught the wind and as such flapped all night making a horrendous noise. As such, we did not get much sleep...well that and we were beside a bunch of partiers who were done their hiking circuit and celebrating.

So our first day on the trail involved hiking to Lago Grey in the morning and then going ice hiking in the afternoon on Glacier Grey. The hike to Lago Grey was supposed to be 3.5 hours or 11 kms...but we soon discovered that when you have a 30 pound pack...okay well Wade had more of a 40 pound pack...on your back, that those times were just not achievable (we did it in 4 hours 10 minutes). Well that and that we are four unfit accountants that had gotten pretty soft in the Caribbean. I am going to blame some of it on the elevation though!

As you can see by this picture...it was not exactly the easiest of trails either.









Here is a picture of the first ice berg that we saw.




This is at the ice trek and Wade & I are jumping over a crevice on the glacier. Some of the crevices went down about 300 feet or so. This one was not so deep and thus the guides allowed us to jump it. The guides told us that this particular glacier loses about 10 cms a day...thus new cracks are continually forming. The Company we went with was very professional and we thoroughly enjoyed it (one of the highlights of Chile so far) and would recommend it to anyone. We were on the glacier for about 3 hours. Click here on Big Foot Patagonia if you are interested in seeing their website.

Here´s the four of us as we´re getting started on the ice hike. You definitely do not want to get your toes stepped on when somebody is wearing these bad boys.




This is also at the ice trek and Wade is scaling the 50 to 60 foot ice wall. It was a little unnerving. Especially when you got to the top and then had to lean back, dig your feet into the wall and try to descend with your sharp ice axes behind your back. One of the girls almost got an ice pick in her butt cheek. There was a big ooh and aah from the rest of us. We ended up pretty unscathed apart from terrible blisters from the crampons...which really did not bode well as we still had 4 days of hiking ahead of us.

So the second day of hiking involved going back the same 3.5 hours that we did the day before and then trying to go another 2.5 hours or 7.5 kms. Given our aching & blistered feet, sore backs & knees...we opted to push the 2.5 hours into the next day.

Day three started off not so bad. We went the 2.5 hours or 7.5 kms, then took a lunch break and went another 2.5 hours or 5.5 kms (harder section than the first 2.5 hours). This ended up at Camp Los Cuernos. After lunch we experienced the wrath of Patagonia. If we thought it was windy before...we had much to learn. We rounded a mountain and the wind was so fierce that it was picking up sheets of water off the glacier lake and whipping them back at the mountain that we were on.

Here is a picture of the sheets of water coming off the lake.It was miserable trying to walk and sometimes we would have to take shelter behind a tree until the latest gust died down. At one point Tanis and I were literally knocked off our feet. It was crazy. The wind was so strong that it even caused a waterfall coming down the mountain to temporarily defy gravity. The winds were easily tropical storm force winds and we are not joking when we say this. It was impossible to set up our tent and in the midst of it we got rained on. This is where we really regretted not purchasing the expensive tents. Our weekend leisure tents were not cutting it. The wind just lifted them like kites, even when we got them pegged. What were we thinking? We basically took a leisure tent to the equivalent of the Arctic.

As such, we had to rent tents that night from the Refugio at Los Cuernos. We were pretty grumpy the next day as the tents leaked and we all had either wet clothes or wet backpacks.

Meals were pretty meager as we had to carry everything we wanted to eat. We had to cook with gas stoves as wood fires are not allowed in the park. I am sure all of you are jealous of our fine dining.

The fourth day involved making it to Camp Chileno which was 6 hours or approximately 15 kms. It was a pretty uneventful day...scenery was beautiful, but we were getting pretty tired. We were very happy to get to Camp Chileno and find out that the Refugio there had full service meals and accepted VISA! It was a fun filled night of beer, wine & our first meat meal in four days!!!

Last day, or 5th day was supposed to be easy and one of the highlights of the trip. We were to hike to the granite towers of Torres del Paine. We had been advised that it is most impressive to see the sunrise at the Towers and thus we headed out on the trail at 3:30 in the morning in order to make it there by 5:45 am. In hindsight...setting out on a trail that is not very clearly marked in the pitch black was not the brightest of ideas. How we all came back in one piece is still amazing. There were lots of drop offs and narrow paths...but we did not really know better until we were walking back in the daylight. To make matters worse, the batteries on Wade's headlamp gave way and he had to walk between Tanis & myself.

The last 45 minutes of this trip involved scaling a never ending rock pile, and by rocks I mean boulders, to reach the summit. Unfortunately, the path was not very clearly marked and we were obviously not paying close enough attention, as we headed in the wrong direction. This resulted in us turning 45 minutes into 2 hours and 15 minutes and thoroughly exhausting and alarming ourselves. By the time we realized we were seriously off the trail...we had no idea which way to go. Eventually we had to climb another bolder pile (well actually Casey & Tanis did) to try and see where the trail was. It was slightly relieving and depressing at the same time when we figured out where the trail was. Casey & Tanis saw flashes from people's cameras at the bottom end of the lake...but we were so far away that we could not actually see the people. To put things in perspective...we were on the other side of the mountain and did not even realize there was a lake on the other side and to top it all off we were at the wrong end of the lake. So we had to trek back, climb another mountain of boulders and then scale down to get where we were supposed to be.


Here is a look down at the end of the lake where we should have been...we are about half way there at this point.






Here is a picture of what I am calling boulder piles...although I don't think the pictures do it justice.





And here we all four our at the target destination with the Towers in the background. We were pretty happy at this point.

Our 4 hour morning hike turned into 7 hours and then we had another 2 hours to go after that to get out of the park and to the end of our hike. By the end of our trip we had hiked somewhere between 75 & 80 kms and although it was a fabulous experience...I think we were all glad when it was over!