Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Logistics and Recommendations

We took our time waking up on the last morning in the park, since all we had to do was take a boat and then a bus back to Puerto Natales. There are three or four boats from Paine Grande to a bus pick-up every day, the schedules are subject to change, but they usually were at 9, 12, and 5 while we were there. There isn't really much of a system to ensure that the boat will be able to fit everyone, it follows the same general rule of the park, which is "things tend to work themselves out". Which actually does seem to be true. All of the buses wait for the boat to arrive before leaving to their next pick-up, so we didn't have to worry about them leaving us. The boat ride back was absolutely astonishingly beautiful, and I'm glad that we decided to end the hike that way, because we were able to get an amazing recap of the park from a new perspective. Which brings me to the theme of this post:

How did we plan all of this and what would we do differently if we were to do it again.

First, here's a current map (as of December 2014):

If you're going during summer (December-February) I would recommend making reservations ahead of time wherever you can. But that is mostly just for peace of mind, because it really seemed like most people were just winging it, and it did appear to work out, more or less. In fact, the night we had a reservation for a platform to camp on in Cuernos (same price as regular camping), when we got there they said they were out of them and that they give them to whoever gets there first. But they did clear out a pretty decent location for us to set up camp, and at that point most people were setting up camps sardine-style in other sites or walkways, so it did still make a difference. There are two main companies that either own the land, or run the refugios/camps, in addition to state-owned free camps:

Fantastico Sur, they own a bunch of the land in TDP, including:

Refugio/Camp Las Torres
Refugio/Camp Chileno
Refugio/Camp Cuernos
Refugio/Camp Frances (Between Cuernos and Italiano, not shown on this map)

Vertice, they run:

Refugio/Camp Paine Grande (formerly called Pehoe, which is what many of the signs on the trail still say)
Refugio/Camp Grey

State Owned, free, no way to make reservations ahead of time. They include:

Campamento Italiano
Campemento Torres (not to be confused with Las Torres at the bottom of the mountain)

Those are all the camps along the W, there are a few more if you plan on hiking the O, more state-run ones as well as a couple more owned by Fantastico Sur/Vertice.

We chose to hike East to West, and to do it over 7 days and 6 nights; 5 days of hiking, 2 for getting in/out of the park. A lot of people seemed to be doing it faster than that, but I felt this was a great pace for two people that are in decent but not excellent shape. We definitely took our time with breaks to take in the scenery and take pictures, and this rate allowed for plenty of that. Here's a quick recap:

Day 1: Took the 2pm bus to the park, arrived at Refugio Las Torres, set up camp, hung out.
Night 1: Camped at Refugio Las Torres, ate the prepared dinner.
Day 2: Left our camp all set up, hiked up to Torres del Paine and back, took us about 9 hours total.
Night 2: Camped at Refugio Torres, ate our own food.
Day 3: Hiked to Refugio Cuernos, took us about 5 hours.
Night 3: Camped at Refugio Cuernos, ate the prepared dinner (the food on Christmas eve was great!)
Day 4: Hiked to Campamento Italiano (2.5 hours), set up camp, hiked up Valle Frances and back to Italiano (6 hours). Note that Campamento Britanico and the end of this trail is closed as of December 2014.
Night 4: Camped at Italiano, ate our own food.
Day 5: Hiked to Paine Grande, took us about 3 hours.
Night 5: Beds in Refugio Paine Grande, ate the prepared dinner.
Day 6: Hiked to Glacier Gray and back, took us about 8 hours.
Night 6: Camped at Paine Grande, ate the prepared dinner.
Day 7: Took the boat and bus back to Puerto Natales.

I almost forgot, YOU HAVE TO BRING IN CHILEAN PESOS. If you're staying in Puerto Natales for a few days, take out cash as early as you can. We ran into the situation where it was the day before we were supposed to leave, and all of the ATMs were just out of money. We found a secret one in some gas station, which ended up being a huge life saver. We brought in about 175,000 CLP (about $280 USD) for the two of us, and we used every penny. Although, we could have spent way less than this if we skipped out on beer, but it's hard to resist a delicious beer after a long day of hiking. And I should add that we paid for our lodging and most of our meals ahead of time, so if you aren't reserving ahead, make sure to bring more (the rates will be on the above sites).

This whole trek is pretty flexible, so if you're in a hurry, I might recommend the following route. If you go faster than this you are either a complete beast, or will be cheating yourself out of really taking in the scenery. I should note that there is no way I could have pulled this off myself at the time, I was definitely not in good enough shape. You can definitely make your own agenda too, just be careful of underestimating how demanding it can be if you aren't in peak physical condition. Times are less precise than above.

Day 1: Take the early bus to the park, hike up to Refugio Chileno (2.5 hours). [Or if you want to save some money and are feeling hardcore, go all the way up to Campamento Torres, which is just before the steep climb up to the mirador at Torres del Paine (1.5 hours from Chileno). This is particularly tough if you're bringing all of your own food, since this is the heaviest your pack will be and this is all uphill.]
Night 1: Camp at Chileno [or Campamento Torres].
Day 2: Start early, hike up to the mirador Torres del Paine (2.5 hours from Chileno, 1 hour from Campamento Torres) [the sunrise is supposed to be amazing, but you'll only have a chance at seeing that from Campamento Torres], come back down, pack your camp up, take the shortcut to Cuernos (4 hours from Chileno, 5.5 hours from Campamento Torres).
Night 2: Camp at Cuernos.
Day 3: Hike to Campamento Italiano (2.5 hours), set up camp, hike up Valle Frances and back to Italiano (6 hours).
Night 3: Camp at Italiano.
Day 4: Pass through Paine Grande and hike to Refugio Gray (7 hours).
Night 4: Camp at Refugio Gray.
Day 5: Hike back down to Paine Grande early enough to catch one of the boats back to the buses (4 hours).

It's definitely not a race, so I wouldn't personally recommend the second one unless you are an experienced backpacker, but we really did take our time, so doing some kind of combination of the two isn't a bad idea.

There's a lot of debate on the trail over if it's better to go East-West or West-East. I think the biggest arguments for either direction are: going West-East gives you a way better view between Paine Grande and Italiano, the wind generally goes West-East, so having that at your back is nice, and going East-West saves the beautiful panoramic lake ride for the end, so you can admire how far you've gone. These directions should work just fine in reverse, just study that map while you're planning it out and you should be ok.

It wouldn't be a post about Patagonia if I didn't include a bit about the weather. The weather can turn on you in a second, so prepare for the worst, just in case. You could tell who all of the new hikers were because they all had these giant neon sails on their packs called "pack covers". We entirely skipped that and just lined our packs with heavy duty garbage bags, which did the trick. Although, we got INSANELY lucky in that we had uncharacteristically fantastic weather for almost our whole hike. We had one day where it was raining, but it never got too bad, and we had already set up camp, so we weren't carrying our full packs.

Hopefully someone finds this informative, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Day 3

After our awesome night of Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas day promised to be much less cushy. The plan was to hike from Cuernos to Italiano (the only free campsite on our itinerary), set up camp, and then head out to hike up the Valle Frances and back to camp.

This is probably closer to what the hike really looked like...

But this is what it felt like. Because a large chunk of the W is on private land,  different groups of people make different signs, depending on where you're standing. This is one of the signs made by the official park service of Chile. Th… — But this is what it felt like. Because a large chunk of the W is on private land, different groups of people make different signs, depending on where you're standing. This is one of the signs made by the official park service of Chile. The more hand-drawn ones are done by Fantastico Sur.

The first leg of the trip was really smooth, we breezed through it. Well, aside from that apparent wall that we had to climb, that was rough. I think that image is just ever so slightly exaggerated, however.

As we were rounding the corner up to Italiano, the valley that we were about to explore began to take shape.

Nikki walking toward Valle Frances, Cuernos del Paine on the right.

Italiano is one of the two available free campsites on the W (the other one being close to the base of the final ascent to the Torres del Paine, which we skipped to avoid carrying our packs). We got there around 2, which was absolutely perfect timing. Some people arrive at the camp late, and hike through the valley early in the morning, so those people were just about finished taking down their camps when we arrived, so we got some prime real estate. We left at around 3, which gave us about 7 more hours until dark. Going later in the afternoon continually paid off for us, since the W is generally pretty crowded (not like midtown Manhattan, but more like car-camping in a national park in the states), and for some reason everyone just needs to leave at 7am, so the trails feel much emptier during the last 5 hours of daylight (5pm-10pm during December).

It's one of those valleys that are actually mountains.

The trail in the valley definitely had some of the most diverse terrain in the whole park. One of my favorite parts was when the trail just turned into a gentle stream, it seemed like something out of a fairy tale.

It didn't take us long to reach an unbelievable view, so of course, we took a selfie.

You'd think I'd be better at not cutting off anyone's head at this point.

The incredible thing about this spot is just how dramatically different the landscape appears depending on what direction you're looking.

The most impressive thing about this glacier is that since it's in a valley, you could hear loud, ringing thunder echoing around you any time a chunk of glacier fell from the cliffs. You can get a sense of how windy it gets in this neck of the woods by the amount of dirt and rock that has been blown onto the top of the glacier.

The river was a lot smaller once we made it up past the main glacier.

As we were repeatedly warned, the weather can change in a heartbeat down in Patagonia, and this leg of the trip proved it. Pretty soon it started to rain pretty steadily, so we had to don our full rain gear.

Nikki rushed through the exposed rock field to get out of the rain, but I stuck around to take one of the many "is this an alien planet?" pictures.

Even though conditions were less than ideal, the view was still pretty spectacular in its own rain-filled way.

Despite being well-prepared, scrambling over loose rocks on a steep incline in the rain isn't that easy. We thought we'd never make it up to the top, and after making it to a pretty cool summit, we came across this subtly modified sign.

Those nails make me think this isn't temporary...

And just beyond that, additional subtle signage.

Warning tape and two more signs, seems like it might be a good idea to stop here.

We later found out that there was some rock slide activity and the end of the trail is closed until further notice. The good news is that we were standing in a pretty awesome spot, so it wasn't all for naught.

Standing on a cliff (well, from this angle)

We turned around after this, and began the fun process of understanding what our knees will feel like in 40 years. Everything looked a bit spookier on the way back, accompanied by the fact that we had the whole trail to ourselves. You can tell we were super thrilled about the weather:

Somehow, while the rain refused to stop directly over us, the sun was shining bright on the mountains to our left on the way back.

It wasn't too long after this that the combination of only eating a PB&J, my knees not being cooperative, and slippery conditions conspired to make me completely eat shit. Slipped on a root and totally bent my pole. I then had the brilliant idea to try to bend it back, which of course caused the tip to snap right off. Luckily I didn't get hurt outside of a scrape on my finger and some good old dirt battlescars on the jacket, so it could have been way worse. Glad I decided to get careless where the ground was nice and soft.

We finally make it back to camp with about an hour of daylight left to spare. We finished off the day with two more delicious PB&J's for our lovely Christmas dinner. Not quite as glamorous as the night before, but I'll be damned if that wasn't the best PB&J I've ever had.

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Day 1

The central piece to our Patagonia trip was to complete the famed W hike through Torres del Paine. It's probably the most well-known hike you can do in Patagonia, and for good reason. The W is about 54 miles, can can take anywhere from 3-5 days. My personal advice would be to really take your time, since why on earth would you come to a place this beautiful and then just blast through it as fast as possible. We elected to spend 5 days hiking, and stay in the park for a total of 6 nights (our first night just camping, and our last night after we completed the trail).

There are a lot of different ways you can enjoy the park, ranging from pure luxury to completely roughing it. There's a hotel that offers rooms in the region of $1,000 USD per night, there are refugios that offer dorm-like rooms filled with bunks if you'd prefer to sleep on a bed (cheaper than the hotel, but definitely not the cheapest option), but the vast majority of people on the trail elected to camp. We'll go into more detail about the specifics of how we planned this hike later, since there are actually surprisingly few resources online about how it all works. For now, we'll go through all of the awesome stuff we saw on our specific hike.

Night 1 consisted of us getting a bus from Puerto Natales to the park, followed by another bus from the park entrance to Las Torres, a refugio with a campsite. There are two times that buses leave from Puerto Natales during high season, 7am and 2:30pm. Since we were just planning on setting up camp on night 1, we went for the afternoon bus. The drive was actually very beautiful, we drove through several herds (not sure if that's the right word) of guanaco.

I should have gotten a video, they have the goofiest walk.

We had a pretty good feeling about it when we realized that our campsite already had a great view of the famed Torres.

The white tents to the left are the beginning of the campsite. There are companies that will set up tents for you in a big tour, in case bringing and setting up tents isn't your thing.

Once we set up our tents, we headed straight for the refugio to grab a beer, because I mean, beer in a beautiful place just tastes better.

We were lucky to have a pretty clear night that night, so after the sun finally went down (it took until about midnight for it to be dark enough for this picture), I took a long exposure picture of the stars. I'm definitely no expert on the constellations, but it was definitely weird not being able to recognize most of the stars. We could spot good old Orion (not in this picture), but it was upside down, which took us a second to work out in our heads.

The next morning we set off to hike from camp to the mirador at the base of the torres and back, leaving our big bags at camp, and only bringing cameras, lunch, water, and rain clothes in our day bags. The whole hike there and back takes about 8-9 hours, depending on how often you stop for pictures. It didn't take long at all for the views to get incredible, this is probably only 45 minutes into the hike:

The slogan for this trip was "nope, that's not real"

We had to stop every now and then due to the huge wind gusts, which were beyond impressive. We heard stats that they were up to 90km/hr that day. The craziest thing about it is that you could hear the gusts of wind coming from miles away, maybe 30 seconds before they hit. We would hear the sound or rustling trees careening across mountains until it finally hit us like a ton of bricks. The gusts let up long enough at a local peak for me to grab a picture of the river in the valley below.

Going down, but not for long. This is maybe 1 hour or so into the hike.

At this point, we aren't far from the next camp/refugio, Chileno. Since we left all of our stuff at the campground at refugio Torres, we wouldn't be stopping at Chileno.

Nikki looking like a badass, Chileno in the distance.

I started taking pictures of the trail signs around here, they compress the trail in a way that makes you look awesome as hell, so I think I'm going to include them. The only one I missed was between Torres and Chileno.

At this point, seeing this sign was pretty crushing. We started at an elevation of 150m, were currently standing at 480m, which, after some very challenging math, meant that we had done just about half of our climbing for the day, and we were both beat at this point. We stopped here to get some lunch, which definitely boosted morale. We also needed to refill our water bottles, which was actually one of the best possible tasks. All of the water you need comes in the form of amazingly delicious glacier water trickling down the mountain.

The last part of the climb up was very rocky, but of course beautiful.

We finally made it! It honestly wasn't as bad as I was expecting, we made it up with zero issues.

This is the point where the story starts to get really interesting. After taking in the view for a while, I realized that there was no better possible time to ask a question that I was planning on asking for quite some time:

Both of us legitimately to not remember this moment.

She said yes! If she didn't, it could have been a very uncomfortable 5 nights in that tent...

So, some background here: I bought this ring back in NYC, in late October. On the advice of my good friend, I hid it in a pick case until the right moment presented itself. I had a ukulele with me on the trip, but I actually left it back in Buenos Aires since if I had to shove everything in a backpack, I needed to be as light as possible. There was only one close call where Nikki discovered it (while buying a bus ticket, not super romantic), but thankfully I dodged the bullet and kept it secret. This first day of hiking was definitely a challenge, there was even a point where I silently contemplated the idea that we might not make it and have enough time to get back to camp before dark. But we kept going, and the reward of that sight at the top just completely melted any doubt I had in my mind that this was anything less than the perfect moment to pop the question. There is this kind of reverence that people have there, people have some kind of awe-induced reaction, and then usually just stand and soak in the sight/sound/smell in complete silence. After doing this for a bit, I found a fellow hiker, Tae, who seemed to have a good photographic eye, and asked him if he wouldn't mind taking a picture of us. I didn't tell him anything beyond that. Then I pretended like I needed to fix my boot, as I frantically tried to fish the ring out of the pick case (it was IN there). After essentially breaking it open, I completely blacked out for about 5 seconds and have only flashes of memory of what I said. Luckily, Tae was able to capture this exact moment. Nikki also doesn't remember putting her hands on her head, so kudos to Tae on that awesome timing! I couldn't have planned it better if I tried.

I knew people would wonder about who took the pictures, so I made sure to grab a picture with Tae.

Afterwards, we just explored the area around the lake, because we were in absolutely no hurry to leave.

We stayed up there for probably an hour or or so, and would have definitely stayed there longer if we didn't have half of our hike ahead of us still. Going down was definitely faster, and it also felt like a completely new trail.

The trees just decided to stop growing right on that line.

We rented poles for this trip, and I'm glad we did, because my knees were already starting to feel it on day 1, but they really did help. The way back was amazing, since the low sun on the horizon really made for some stunning views.

It felt like we had the trail to ourselves.

Looking back up towards the end of the hike.

This got a bit long, but, well, it was a pretty huge day. Not a bad start, I'd say!