the w — Blog — Wandering In South America

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.

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!

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Day 3

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Day 1