I haven’t done much multi-day trekking in my life, so this made me nervous and excited! We had arranged to complete a 6 day trek called the ‘W’ in Torres del Paine National Park which receives 150,000 visitors each year. On Dec 14th Colin and I headed to Puerto Natales, a city which serves as a base for doing the W Trek. It only took us about 3 hours to reach Puerto Natales from Punta Arenas. The city of Puerto Natales was created originally to lodge workers from a freezer plant or 'frigorifico,' similar to the one we toured in Uruguay but this one needed for sheep instead of cows. The plant is no longer kept as a museum/national monument, having been turned into a 5 star luxury hotel called 'The Singular Patagonia' in 2010.
We arrived and immediately got a bit freaked out by tons of wind we heard, whipping around outside – we would be out in that soon for 6 days. Before we braved it we enjoyed relaxing for a couple of days in Hospedaje Costanera, buying food and supplies to prepare for the big hike. While we had chosen against carrying a tent or sleeping bags (just some decent-sized blankets) with us and booked beds, we did think it would be much cheaper to bring our own food. By the way, I didn’t know this at the time, but if you show up and the refugio and campsites are fully booked, the refugio MUST rent you a tent and allow you to camp. So you don’t really have to book in advance if you don’t want to! Just a tip, but beware, carrying all that stuff would be rough.
Every day there is a ‘3:00 pm Talk’ at a pub called Base Camp in Puerto Natales, and we attended the evening before our trek at 3:00 pm on the 16th. The talk was really extensive, covering tons of information and route choices, giving us tips on food and general attitude. For example, Ruth (who gave the talk) told us we should expect for our feet to be wet nearly the entire time of the trek – so just slosh through the first puddle and don’t risk twisting your ankle on some rocks while trying to avoid the water! A lot of the talk had to do with camping, but we had chosen to book spots in shared dorm refugios through Fantastico Sur and Vertice Patagonia in advance which are the only two companies with refugios on the W Trek. Their monopoly leads to really high prices such as $11.00 USD for a simple boxed lunch of a sandwich and fruit and ridiculous expenses for guests such as $10.00 USD extra for a bed with sheets (which really means with a blanket included) – so outrageous, but they are in a remote area. Still, you get wiped out if you are on a budget.
Ruth also mentioned that we should eat throughout the day in small bursts rather than a big lunch to avoid a food coma, and wraps and granola bars (things you can hold in one hand) are perfect to eat quickly or while you walk. With all this in mind we headed to the supermarket and some corner stores, buying tortilla wraps (for ham, cheese, and salami), a ‘popcorn-like’ bag of maize puffs, granola bars, fruit and nut mixes, and plenty of chocolate. Plus soups for dinner, just add water! We made the mistake of buying a few apples – they were heavy (like carrying rocks), large, and not too filling but we brought them anyways.
With our stuff stored away in our hostel’s luggage storage, we enjoyed one last big meal of chicken tacos at a cafe called Nandu’s and headed off for the W with just one bag and a day bag in the afternoon. Once we got to the Torres del Paine National Park we were herded in to pay our entrance fee and watch a short video on park safety. There was a huge fire in the park which burned down tons of trees – but I’ll get to that later. After the video we caught a transfer from the ranger station to the bottom of the hike to the Torres del Paine, stunning peaks from the mountain range called Cerro Paine. For reference, the first park we tackled was the branch on the right side of the picture below.
Torres del Paine National Park is a collection of mountain ranges including Cerro Paine and Cuernos del Paine. The park has many valleys and is filled with glaciers belonging to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. Throughout the park are beautiful bright colored glacier lakes and rivers.
We decided to mark down our times we started and ended each trek, so we could see how close our walking time is to the quoted time. Colin and I also ranked each piece of the trek by a difficultly level out of 10 (1 being easy, 10 being insanely hard.) In addition, we gave each hostel a ranking based on how good we thought it was. (10 being really nice.)
At 5:10pm we arrived at Hotel Los Torres and started walking to Refugio El Chileno. The start of the trek was through some stunning scenery, crossing a few small rivers and relatively flat. We saw some animals along the way – rabbits, condors, finches, and huge yellow and black Patagonian bees. But as the path started to curve uphill, it became a lot more intense! Perhaps it was because it was late in the day and we were already a bit tired, but this first part of the hike for me was actually the most difficult. Plus, I didn’t really know what to expect. The uphill climb was quite intense, and carrying a bag made it pretty difficult. At this point we hadn’t eaten any of our food yet, so everything was quite weighted. The scariest part of this first walk was along a long, windy cliff with a huge drop down below. I’m pretty freaked out with heights – especially when you are walking along a really narrow path on basically the edge of the mountain. The path was so narrow we couldn’t stop to take any photos of it, especially because there were horses coming down the path while we were trying to climb up it!
While the hike up was strenuous, we still managed to make it to the refugio we booked – Refugio El Chileno – by 7:50pm. This was within the quoted time of 2 hours and 30 minutes from the uphill incline of the trek. Not too shabby! Colin pulled out our book and we ranked this portion of the trek as a 6.5 in difficulty. We hadn’t booked dinner, so we got out our tomato soup and some small bread rolls we brought and added hot water from the kitchen into our cups. This made for a tasty, although light, dinner. The dorm rooms were OK (the bed had a thin sheet and pillow) but our blankets weren’t too helpful and we were both really cold in the evening. Unfortunately carrying huge sleeping bags or renting them at extortion prices per night was not an option!
The next morning (Dec 18th) we snacked on some granola bars and headed out from Refugio Chileno at 9:10 am. We were on our way to see the infamous Torres del Paine. The evening before we had debated going up to see the towers for sunrise, when the towers have a beautiful orange glow on them, but we ended up being really glad we hadn’t tried this walk in the dark because at times it was quite intense. The first part of the walk through the woods was easy – we ranked it a 5 for difficulty and arrived at at Camp Torres at 10:55 am. It was just a pretty pleasant walk, slightly uphill towards the end, through native lenga forest. There were lots of twisted tree trunks and branches covered in moss – it reminded us a little of Tierra del Fuego National Park.
At some point as we left the forest, we saw a sign telling us we were entering Torres del Paine National Park. What? I thought we were in the park the whole time… apparently not. According to Fantastico Sur’s website, much of the land surrounding the towers and other popular monuments in the park is actually private land. Back in the late 1970’s, the land of the National Park was still private land. 12,000 hectares of this land was donated to the Chilean government and the National Park was established in 1977. However, the 4,400 hectares of private land known as ‘Estancia Cerro Paine’ is still owned by the Kusanovic family since 1979. They originally purchased the land for cattle, but now use the land for hotels, refugios, and campsites. There used to be free campsites in the park, but these are being done away with and the areas are being built into refugios and paid campsites by the companies with monopoly power. Since they own the land, they charge the prices they want.
The hike up to the Torres mirador (viewpoint) however is marked as taking about 45 minutes. This is not true, well not for us - maybe only for everyday hikers! This hike took us 1 hour and 20 minutes to walk up and we ranked it an ‘8’ for difficulty. For detail, we thought that the 1st 20 minutes was about a 6 in difficulty, but the following part was a 7.5 or 8 in difficulty. While it was a stunning hike, there were plenty of boulders which required attention and light to ensure safety – I don’t know how people do this for sunrise! Eventually we made it to the top just after 12:00 noon and took plenty of photos of the peaks rising out of the mountain, and the stunning bright lake below them. There wasn’t too much snow since it was summer, but we did see bits of ice and snow far up above us which provided a nice contrast to the green-blue of the lake.
‘Torres del Paine’ is the name of the park and of the site we were now standing at. This translates to ‘Towers of Blue’ which is supposedly what the indigenous people in the area called them because of their icy look during the winter. I’m not sure about this because it makes much more sense to me that the indigenous would be talking about the massive and otherworldly-looking blue glaciers if they mentioned ‘towers of blue,’ in the area but it is just a thought.
On the way back down from the viewpoint we were moving a bit faster, but because of the steep journey it still took us longer than predicted. We left at 1:15 pm from the mirador. The hike took us 1 and 1/2 hours to get back down to Camp Torres and we thought it was a 6 in difficulty. When we reached the bottom we stopped to take a rest. While sitting, I saw a something large and dog-like in the distance. It was a red fox! Red foxes are the largest foxes and are found throughout the world – quite a successful animal. Despite their popularity of being hunted for their fur, they are not yet endangered. The fox was far for a decent photo, but we got a good look through the binoculars. It was protecting a baby, which we could see as a little ball of red fluff. While there were tons of people around, most of them didn’t notice the fox because they were charging through the trek so quickly. The fox didn’t seem too bothered by the trekkers either, it stayed away but wasn’t scared.
We left Camp Torres at 2:45 pm and arrived back at Refugio Chileno at 4:05 pm; difficulty 5.5. Once we got to the refugio, we had a quick lunch and then started our next trek at 4:40pm. As the horses came in with food for the refugio, we started heading back down the mountain to Refugio Torre Norte. While it was a bit steep and windy at the beginning, the way down was OK. It took us about 2 hours and 10 minutes total to get down to the refugio.
We had one night - December 18th - booked in Refugio Torre Norte, in beds without sheets. As we got to the bottom of the mountain we started looking around for some signs – anything that would tell us where the Refugio was. We walked through a few rivers and continued looking for at least 30 minutes, lost and a bit annoyed by the Refugio’s invisibility on the map.
Colin met someone who had worse problems than not being able to find the place – an American couple were booked into an accommodation site that didn’t exist yet! A campsite called Camp Francis was supposed to have already been open, as the company was selling accommodation spaces online, but the truth was (which we confirmed when we passed the site walking the next day) that it wasn’t even built yet! (There was nothing there at all.) While Fantastico Sur tried to sooth him with a free bottle of wine and a booking in a further away refugio, his whole trekking plan was based on being able to stay at the particular camp and he now had to rework the plan midway through the trek. This shouldn’t have been too difficult for him to do – but how could you sell a campsite that doesn’t even exist yet to tourists online? Buyer beware.
We left Refugio Torre Norte around 9:45 in the morning, hoping for a relatively easy walk to the next refugio, Refugio Los Cuernos. Instead we were greeted with an ‘up and down’ hike which stretched on for ages – the scenery was quite amazing though! We stopped a few times to power up with our meat and cheese wraps (salami and ham) and our granola bars or chocolate. And plenty of glacier river water! As we walked many people said ‘Hola’ to us and we said it back to them – which was quite funny considering the majority of the tourists in the park were foreigners who spoke English!
In Lake Nordenskjold we saw many cool-looking islands, and while there were a few steep climbs, the overall view was worth it. Since the handholds were covered in Patagonian thorny scrub (such as calafate) we had to pull out our gloves for parts of this hike. Soon we saw the Cuernos del Paine. The Cuernos is a stunning rock feature which was created by tectonic and glacial forces. There is an interesting history behind this formation; why it looks as spectacular as it does:
“More than ten million years ago this kind of sedimentary rock cloaked vast areas in the region. At some stage, the rock was invaded by magma from the core and later on, gave birth to granite. After, the enormous pressure coming from the center of the planet made it flourish. When the ice age arrived, the ice cloaked the whole shire. Only the higher mountain peaks stood out. When ice disappeared, granite was unveiled, capped by the black rock that had not been reached by glaciations.” (Torres del Paine National Park Literature)
But we still have to say we were ready to see Refugio Los Cuernos when we arrived at 4:30 pm, ranking this walk a 7.5 in difficulty because of its length. We got settled into our blazing hot (the sun was strong that day) green plastic “domes” which were basically large 6-person tents with beds with sheets and blankets inside. It was hot to begin with, but we were glad for the blankets when by nighttime the dome had become quite cold. For some reason the domes were actually more expensive than the dorm rooms in the refugio. We’re not sure why, as they weren’t very comfortable comparatively. Plus since the bathroom was inside the main building and no shoes were allowed in there, you needed to work to use it. We had these rooms for the next two nights – December 19th and 20th – as we ended up taking a rest day in the middle of our trek.
Our rest day in the middle of our hike turned out to be a great choice for us, because the weather was horrible (rainy, windy, and cold) on the extra day! At one point in the day the cleaners came in to ‘clean’ the room but simply moved all the beds around in a strange way, removed the sheets and left them on the beds, and left the cleaning supplies in the room for the rest of the evening. This was all despite our suggestion that we leave so she could clean – she just couldn’t be bothered and left with a huge sigh.
Since we were around during the day we hoped it would be pretty quiet, but the refugio was still rammed with people the entire day. Having an extra day just hanging around at the refugio really allowed us to see just how poor the service at Refugio Los Cuernas was – and how many people were unhappy with the quality of service (besides us.) We also saw how pushy and angry the tourists could be in response to the generally shitty attitude of the staff. For example, we decided we wanted to participate in the lunch at the refugio but we only had our credit card on us. The attendant in charge of the refugio told us that the card machine and radio didn’t work and there was no way to charge our card.
The truth was that he just couldn’t be bothered to help us. I asked him multiple times to run the card and give it a try, but got no empathy. Eventually a few minutes later once lunch was over, I asked him what we were supposed to do for dinner. After getting fed up and confronting him more harshly, he finally picked up the radio and processed our order via credit card, which went perfectly smoothly. Nothing was broken at all – he just couldn’t be bothered to do a little more work, and we missed out on lunch (and the company on $16 USD per little lunch box) as a result. Outrageous! That’s a monopoly for you.
That evening we shared one of the (way too expensive at $25 USD per person) dinners in Refugio Los Cuernas. The menu sounded pretty good: carbonada soup, chicken with green rice, and chocolate cake with mocha cream – but unfortunately the food wasn’t great. But it was a change from our soups and cheese wraps so we were grateful for it! We sat down with two girls from Canada and had a nice conversation over our meals, which was the nicest part of the day!
The following day the weather was much better and Colin and I headed out to Valle de Francis, also known as the ‘French Valley.’ We were told this would be the most beautiful part of the trek, and it really was fantastic. We left early (7:04 am) and pushed ourselves, ended up at Camp Italiano in 2 and 1/2 hours as this part was only a 6 in difficulty.
During the second part of the walk from Camp Italiano to Mirador Britanico it took us 4 hours because we stopped a few times because, well, it was rough at a 7.5 in difficulty with lots of ‘up and downs,’ boulders, and rivers! Plus we witnessed our first avalanche, two of them, which we got on video (the smaller one) and in some photos (the bigger one.)
Mirador Britanico was really worth the walk as it provided a panoramic view (360 degree view, I might add) of the whole park’s features (minus Grey Glacier) – fantastic! We also ended up climbing even higher up a super steep, boulder-filled walk (8.5 difficulty!) about 45 minutes further from Mirador Britanico. We felt pretty accomplished after that – not many people make it up that far. While the view was pretty much the same as Mirador Britanico, we did see a glacier from here plus felt much closer to the snow and ice on the mountains. If you don’t have time for this part, don’t worry, but you will feel very fit if you make it that far up!
As we walked to our final refugio, we had to really hustle. We tried to fit a lot into one day – walking more than 23 kilometers up and down all over the park. The sky started getting darker and the clouds came rolling in quickly. There’s that Torres del Paine weather we heard so much about! The raining started and we became absolutely soaked. We splashed through the puddles covered in muck and sweat… feeling so far from clean. After 3 hours and 19 minutes of this we found Camp Italiano and crossed a bridge to head to Refugio Paine Grande. Another 3 hours and 25 minutes after this (yes, it rained that entire time) we spotted Refugio Paine Grande in the distance, which was thankfully the best of all the Refugios in comfort and kindness. We were never so happy for a meal and a warm shower. Ever. 6 hours and 20 minutes of walking in the rain…
December 22nd we woke up for our final walk – up to see Glacier Grey. On this part of the walk we witnessed the evidence of several major fires which occurred in the park. These fires have destroyed hundreds of square kilometers of forest – and all of the fires were started because of reckless campers. The first fire in 1985 burned 150 square kilometers of the park, a fire in 2005 burned 155 square kilometers, and the most recent fire in early 2012 burned 176 square kilometers.
As we walked the 2 hours and 10 minutes through this part of the trek we could clearly see the damage. The wood still looked freshly burnt, even in the area we saw the evening before walking to Refugio Paine Grande was covered in burnt wood and ash. It was pretty sad to see this, so I really hope people are more careful in the years to come.
Eventually we reached Lago Grey. This is the lake in which the massive Glacier Grey calves (or breaks off) into. Glacier Grey is a large “finger” of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which isn’t a flat ‘plain’ of ice (like it sounds) but rather a series of mountains covered in snow. In some places the snow compacts tightly and produces ice. This ice makes up glaciers such as Glacier Grey – which calves off into the water when global warming becomes too intense. As we approached Glacier Grey we saw blue and white chunks of ice – little icebergs – floating in the lake in front of us. The blue parts of the ice are compacted the most, the white much less; the wavelengths that reach our vision produce amazing colors.
By the way, during the course of our trek we saw loads of people, young and old, using trekking poles. We thought they looked a bit cheesy, but we learned later on that they actually have important jobs. While they aren’t really necessary on the flat trekking, we could have really used them for the ‘up and down’ bits – especially Colin, since he was carrying the heavy bag (sometimes both of the bags!) during the walks. We learned that trekking poles help trekkers prevent knee pain, which was what Colin ended up having towards the end of our walk. Now we know for next time, use poles to prevent knee pain because they provide stability on steep slopes and help you avoid injury… plus apparently they help you walk faster and breathe easier, which would benefit me a lot!
Glad the trek was finally over, Colin and I relaxed in the warmth of our refugio, glad to be dry and eager to have a shower and feel human again when we returned to the city. We finished our snacks we had brought for the adventure and in the late afternoon on December 22nd we caught the boat across the lake at 6:00 pm, meeting a bus which would take us back to Puerto Natales. Once we arrived in the city we found a taxi (eventually, everyone was trying to get one at once and taxis don’t just show up at the bus station – you MUST call for one!) and returned to our hostel. So glad to be back somewhere clean, dry, and NOT windy!
Knowing our journey on the “W” was finished was a relief! A total of 62 kilometers walked in 5 days! In Puerto Natales we started to get ready for a very windy (not snowy!) Christmas…
Francesca
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