Torres Del Paine

I just want to have a quick update of where we have gone thus far in Patagonia.

After flying into El Calafate, we drove to El Chalten, did some hiking there, drove back to El Calafate, took a tour to the Perito Moreno Glacier, and drove into Chile to Puerto Natales.

On Sunday we were up early and on a bus to the Torres del Paine National Park to begin our hiking and camping. The main hike in Torrest del Paine is the W. It is a 4-5 day hike that makes a W shape, and there are over 1000 people per day (during the high season) on some portion of it.

We were hiking for 3 days seeing the highlights of the W. This makes it relatively easy as we only needed to hike with a daypack returning to one campsite one day, transferring by bus and ferry to another to use as a base for the second and third day. We started off from Puerto Natales and headed north back to the border crossing we passed through from Argentina. However, instead of crossing, we continued north for about an hour to get to the park. The torres (towers) are quite stunning pieces of uplifted granite, and look spectacular even from afar.

Here is Mike with our tour guide, Neil from Toronto.

On our way in we saw many guanacos, an Andean fox, and a few rheas. This group of guanacos had some yearlings in it.

We continued on and passed the entrance to the park unloaded what we needed from the bus and began our hike. Our destination was the Mirador Las Torres 8.9kmk away and 751m higher.

We started off at 11am. The hike was fairly rough to start going uphill which got us to a great vantage point of the valley we were heading into.

The river below was essentially a cascade of whitewater the whole way down. The trail continued as a bit of flat to the refugio (refuge) where there is a campsite, washrooms, and a “teahouse” that serves drinks, sandwiches, etc. After having our lunch box there, we continued through the forest.

After breaking past that, it was our final uphill slog to the top. It was slow as we were going over boulders and the soil was very sandy and slippery. Once we did make it to the top, the view was worth everything.

We all spent some time down at the lake, and the weather was just perfect. Again it is usually cloudy with a howling wind. People usually get there for 5 minutes of pictures and head back down and we were there for almost an hour. Our weather was about 22C with a lot of sun, making the hike more tiresome.

With all the heat we went through a lot of water, thankfully the streams are “safe” to drink from, so that kept us hydrated. The wind started picking up for our descent, making it so you couldn’t even wear a hat, but luckily it started to die down once we got back into the forest. Heading back all the way down seemed to take a lot longer, but I think it was that most of us were getting fairly tired from the hiking and heat. Once we finally made it down to the bus 8 hours after departing, we were whisked away back to G Adventures private campsite where we got a welcome pisco sour and had a whole spread of food ready for dinner.

Our campsite looked pretty nice with all the tents lined up in a row.

And the view from our tents was awesome.