Patagonia Chapter 3 - Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

The big attraction in Chilean Patagonia is the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, a national park dedicated to a mountain range that is completely seperate from the Andes, and includes some very interesting granite rock formations. The park has various day hikes, and also longer treks that backpackers can do to see more of the park. The most common one is called the W and takes 3-4 days. A longer trek goes around the entire park basically and takes 9-10 days.

We started our adventure to Torres by waking up and eating another delicious breakfast by Eduardo and getting on the first bus to Puerto Natales at 9 a.m. Puerto Natales is the nearest town to the park, and is about four hours away from Punta Arenas. If you are going directly to the park and have no interest in Punta Arenas, I would definately suggest going directly to Puerto Natales, since otherwise a whole day is spent travelling to the park. Once in Puerto Natales, we had to wait about two hours for the next bus to the park, so we didnt actually get into the park until 4:30 p.m.

Pictures from the Penguineros and the trip into Torres.

From there, we set up camp and made a basic dinner of ramen noodles and crackers. After dinner, we had the opportunity to talk to two guides, Pablo and Carola, who do numerous types of tours around the park. The offered up some great stories, insights, and advice about the park and were just really cool people.

On the second day in the park, we got up at 8 a.m., made our lunches and headed out to do the Torres hike, which is about 4-5 hrs in each direction. The change in scenery throughout the hike was absolutely amazing. We started off in shrublands, made our way into forests that had glacial streams running by them, and finally up to the torres. The torres (or towers) are huge granite towers that rise right above a little lake and a glacier and make an absolutely breathtaking view that was worth the entire hike and the harder part of getting up to the mirador of the towers. But the most wonderful thing about the hike was that it wasnt just the towers that were amazing and beautiful, but the entire hike along the way was as well.

Pictures from our camp and our hike to the Torres.

On our third day, we had to make our way over to the other side of the W in order to do the hike to the Grey Lake and Grey Glacier, which lies at the southern end of the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. We had to take a series of inter-park transportation that was both park of the park and private. Luckily they all worked pretty much in sync, although not quite. This was definately a time when having a car would have made it much faster to get around the park and where we needed to go. When we finally got to Lago Pehoe, we took the catamaran across to a campamento that was very windy. After eating a quick lunch, we headed down the trail to see the Glacier Grey. There were parts of the trail that were extremely windy, but all in all another beautiful trail that had beautiful views and another great end result of the glacier.

Pictures from the hike and crossing Lago Grey.

On our final day in the park, we slept in a bit, packed up all our stuff, and took the boat back across the lake to catch the bus back into Puerto Natales. The boat ride really gives an awesome view of the other attraction of the park, the Cuernos (or horns). Another crazy and beautiful rock formation that creates spectacular views in the park.

Overall the park was an amazing experience. As Carola the guide put it, there are three types of people that come to the park. There are the hardore backpackers that come with all their gear and camp, there are the people that come and stay in the refugios, but do all the hiking, and then there are the people that stay in the hotel places and dont do too much hiking. We would have liked to put ourselves in that hardcore group, but we were somewhere in between. Unfortunately, we didnt have time to do the entire W, but I would definately like to come back and do it, or the entire loop and see the parts of the park that I didnt get to see.

The park is also great because it caters to all kinds of visitors. The hardore backpackers and hikers and go there thing, while people who are only interested in a day hike to see the torres can do that as well. However, the park can also get quite expensive quite fast. If you dont bring all the supplies that you need and all the food that you need, you can buy it there at a hefty price and even some of the campsites cost money. If you want to stay somewhere other than a tent and not cook your own food, it gets even more expensive (30$ a night for a bed and $8 for breakfast, for example). This park was definately a place that I loved and that I really would have liked to share with my family (I especially think my Dad would love it), and is a place that I want to return to in the future. I have been there, but not quite done that.