Mar 9-12: Torres del Paine National Park

After 10 days exploring Glaciers National Park in Argentina, we headed south to our final destination of Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, and once again I have too many photos to include in this post, so once I again I made a slide show with the full monty:

Although I didn’t blog our Patagonia trip last year, some of you may recall that Nancy and I spent 3 days in Torres del Paine National Park last year and did some epic hikes. We were thrilled to return this year with Caitlin and do a repeat plus a new hike (or two), weather permitting.

Torres del Paine (“Towers of Paine”) National Park borders Glaciers National Park to the south, but across the border in Chile. The Torres del Paine is a group of three distinctive granite peaks that rise 8,200 feet above sea level, although it’s worth noting that the Park hosts even higher peaks, including Paine Grande that rises to 9,462 feet. The Park, established in 1959, encompasses ~700 square miles and is located roughly 190 miles north of Punta Arenas (the beginning and ending point of our trip). It is Chile’s most popular national park, with a quarter of a million visitors a year and is designated by UNESCO as a World Biosphere Preserve. The Park is noted for its dramatic granite peaks (much like Fitz Roy and neighboring peaks), but a large portion of the Park is covered by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, also similar to Glaciers National Park to the north, and there are several glaciers that empty directly into lakes.

We camped at Lake Pehoe looking west across the lake to the peaks of Torres del Paine. You can’t find a more stunning view from a campsite, truly!

Note, if you were feeling a bit tired from traveling or just feeling lazy, you could just sit in your Lago Pehoe campsite and stare at the spectacular peaks for days on end and probably not get too bored, but alas we were here to hike.

Day one included an early morning catamaran boat ride across the lake for a long all-day hike up a valley into the heart of the Torres del Paine where condors soar and alpine glaciers thunder and calve off chunks of ice and snow that crash down mountainsides. Here’s a few pics from this epic hike:

Day two was a bit of a respite after the long preceding day’s hike, and involved hiking up to a viewpoint – perhaps the best in the entire Park – behind our campsite and then doing a bit of a primitive and circuitous trail to get back to camp. Here’s a few pics:

Day three involved a steep ascent to a viewpoint of one of the largest glaciers in the Park, Gray’s Glacier, and a view of the Peaks from the south. The trail was crazy steep – no such thing as switchbacks in this country – and started out cloudy and wet, but eventually turned into yet another beautiful day. Here’s a few pics:

On our last day leaving the Park, we stopped at a National Monument called the Cave of the Milodon. The Milodon was one of Patagonia’s Pleistocene megafauna that died out during the Pleistocene extinction a little more than 10,000 years ago – the same mass extinction of megafauna that occurred throughout the Americas around the same time. The Milodon was a huge sloth-like herbivore that was a major prey item for the early human hunter gatherers of the area. Here’s a couple of pics just for fun:

Here’s the promised slideshow of our visit to Torres del Paine, mostly of our hikes of course:

Torres del Paine slideshow (5.5 minutes)

Here’s a composite video of several panoramic videos that Caitlin took on our hikes, which does a good job of bring to life some of what we saw and were experiencing:

Torres del Pain composite video (3.5 minutes)

OK, we are wrapping up this trip with a one-night stop in Puerto Natales and then on to Punta Arenas for a couple of nights to drop off our camper and say goodbye to Patagonia once again. Who knows, we might be back again since third times a charm!

Adios amigos. Thanks for joining along on this trip to Patagonia. See you on the next trail!