Torres del Paine and other Patagonian adventures

So this is overdue. The last month and a half or so of Chile was really hectic and getting back home and settling into life at ND has been pretty busy and I've neglected finishing up the blog. Unfortunately, although this last month was possibly the most interesting and exciting part of the trip, I'm gonna have to run through the highlights quickly.

First off, I flew from Santiago to Punta Arenas, the southernmost city on the South American continent. First thing I noticed was the cold. You are literally so far South at this point that it didn't feel like summer. A couple of the highlights in Punta Arenas were taking a day trip out to Isla Magdalena, a penguin sanctuary in the Strait of Magellan. This was unbelievable! The island had 100,000+ penguins, and they were scattered around everywhere, digging their nests, coming in from fishing, or just not doing much. As an added bonus, we saw dolphins on the 2 hour boat ride to the island and a whale on the way back. Another highlight of Punta Arenas was the cemetery. Patagonia gained all its wealth through giant sheep farms, and many of the families were quite rich. Walking through the cemetery was an interesting look back at this wealth through the elaborate mausoleums.

We next took a bus up to Puerto Natales, a small, quiet town most famous as the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park. As we arrived the evening before we were going to enter the park, rounding up all our rental gear was pretty hectic. Matters were made worse by the fact that 1/2 of our group had missed their plane our of Santiago and weren't going to be getting into Puerto Natales until around 2:00 am. After a couple hours of running crazily around town to round up all the required gear, we finally had it all. A bit of unneeded stress, but hey, one of the rental shop guys gave me a free winter cap because I came back so many times with more business!

The next morning came early, but we boarded the bus at 7:30 and made it into Torres del Paine. The park is phenomenal! A must see for anyone going down there. We did the classic "W" hiking loop, a 5 day trek, carrying all our gear. Above all else, we got a great appreciation for the weather. They say you can have 4 seasons in a single day down here, and that is 100% correct. We hiked through rain (luckily never very heavy), cold, and even a pretty fierce snow storm. But far and away, the wind was the most intense. Wind gusts can come at up to 120 mph and make you feel like you're going to be blown to the ground. It seemed humorous at first when we looked at the park map and there were sections of the trail that had warning signs for strong winds, but after our first day in the park, we knew that this was in fact a serious warning. As for the sights, they were simply breathtaking. The park is named after 3 granite towers (Las Torres) that are reached by a strenuous uphill climb, but in my opinion, Los Cuernos (the horns), a series of sharp jagged light colored granite rock formations that are tipped by darker granite, are even more impressive. Not to be left out, Glacier Grey is an gigantic glacier covering half of the creatively named Grey Lake that looks to be caught up on a giant island in the middle.

On a side note, it seems that every trip I took in Chile involved at least one day of waking up at the insane hour of 4:00 am. In Peru, we woke up early to get into Machu Picchu. In San Pedro de Atacama, we woke up at the same time to visit the geyser fields. And here in Torres del Paine, we woke up around 4:00 am on the last day in order to climb up to Las Torres in time to catch the sunrise up there. While it was a great experience to climb with a headlamp in the dark, the morning was unfortunately too cloudy for us to see the famous red glow of Las Torres when the sun strikes them in the morning. Oh well, it's not like they weren't amazing anyways!