Patagonia: The W Hike, Day 3
**Completed in November 2019, The Torres del Paine ‘W’ hike is Sylvia and Brian’s fifth BucketList adventure completed together. It is also the furthest they have ever ventured for a hike.
No leisurely start today. We were up early for what promised to be the hardest day of this Trek.
Our plan was to skip over the free CONAF campground known as the Campo Italiano (Italian Camp) and continue to to Refugio Paine Grande. This Refugio is not only the start of the Lago Grey section of the Trek, but also the eventual end of the Trek as well. From there, a few days hence, we would (hopefully) board a catamaran across Lago Pehoe to reach the bus terminal at Pudeto and from there return to Puerto Natales.
The route itself was long but not considered especially hard by most sources. Book time for the entire hike was listed at five and a half hours, or perhaps less. But there were two significant disclaimers about this.
The first was that yesterday’s hike, which was considered to be fairly straightforward by the standards of the W, had not ended up being quite so straightforward. Inside of the listed book time of 4 hours, it had taken us closer to six. This was, of course, with repeated and sometimes lengthy breaks to layer or delayer and take large number of photographs…we had certainly not hurried. But still it was a cautionary example. Even easy sections of the W could not be taken for granted…and a pair of young hikers assured us at breakfast that there was a steep uphill coming our way.
The second disclaimer was that we had a detour in mind. To do the W without seeing any of the Valle Frances (French Valley) is unthinkable. Apart from the Towers, the Valle Frances is widely considered the highlight of the trek.
(By the way, in case you are wondering…everything in Torres del Paine is named for some European mountaineer, explorer or mountaineering team or other. The Italian Camp, Japanese Camp, English Camp…etc. Everybody but the Chileans seems to have explored here.)
In order to see the French Valley, we’d have to detour off our proposed route, hiking up a steep slope and back down again. Not exactly unthinkable…but not exactly an easy thing to think about either. This would add time, miles, and (most importantly) difficult terrain to our agenda for the day.
Brian had little hope of making it up to the viewpoint at the top of the valley (The British Camp…how the Brits snuck into the French Valley is anyone’s guess.) It was entirely possible to do — we’d spoken to a pair of young men from the Washington DC area who had in fact done our planned route in reverse and proceeded most of the way to the top of the valley before being stopped by authorities due to heavy snow. But these guys had been a few years younger than we (they had likely been born during a Presidential administration Brian had voted for or maybe against) and they had described the experience as arduous.
The book listed the total time to do the full valley hike as two and a half hours, one way. Even assuming we could descend much more rapidly than we climbed (not always a safe bet) this figured to add at least four hours of hard hiking onto the day. British Camp just wasn’t an option for us.
There was however hope that we could make it to a popular viewpoint about 90 minutes from the Italian Camp…this being, not surprisingly, the Mirador Frances. We had good information that one could drop packs at the Italian Camp and proceed with light gear up the valley, which was reputed to be steep. Without the burden of our heavy packs, this shorter excursion might well be doable.
Brian was apprehensive about this, but Sylvia to her credit never let up. She led the way out of camp, and for a while the trail descended directly to the lake shore and we walked right along the pebbly beach. Shortly after this, we became completely tangled up in the bushes. We found this the least clear part of the W, the hardest to follow.
This section was also the wettest and muckiest, and we soon found ourselves tip-toeing through the mud. Most printed and online trail reports of the W do not convey how often the trail is actually a running stream or a quagmire. Whatever the other problems here may be, finding water is not one of them. Finding too much water certainly could be.
The steep uphill promised by the two young men never really materialized; the way was mostly level, with minor ups and downs and much mud. It did not seem long before we were walking through the French Camp, a more recently developed camp that has a refugio and camp store. All this was however well off the trail, hidden in the trees….we never saw it. About 30 minutes past this, we reached the Campo Italiano.
Here at the small ranger station, HUNDREDS of backpacks were lined up, having been left behind by owners currently up exploring the valley. A solitary ranger stood watch over them. We were somewhat behind schedule, and there was a cut off time here as well, and we were close to it. However, the ‘lone ranger’ guarding the packs seemed disinterested, and assured us we could in fact make it to the Mirador with no problems (but not past that.) We dug out our trusty day pack and rushed off for the Mirador, the raging Rio Frances hard on our left. But the trail soon angles away from the river…and then the fun begins.
Brian, not exactly a gazelle under the best of circumstances, had a hard time keeping up with light footed Sylvia. Even the small day pack containing little apart from water seemed to weigh a ton, though it was not even a third the weight of his trekking pack. Sylvia was in the zone, and could not be slowed down…she raced ahead with the crowds, while Brian struggled up the steep, rocky and muddy slope, people passing by him just like the river flows around stones.
It was a tough climb; only the scramble up to Cerro Fitz Roy later in this same trip would surpass it. Along the way there is a somewhat dicey stream crossing, probably the diciest of the W (at least the parts of it that we saw) but Brian and Sylvia made it past this without issue.
Finally, the trail reaches a ridge, where trees only partly obscure a massive face of granite and ice. The boom of avalanches could be distinctly heard. Then the trees part, the trails climbs a tricky rock chute to an exposed knob…and there before us opened the Mirador.
What a place. It was blustery, misty, wet and sleeting when we arrived, and the photographs simply will not convey a tenth of our exhilaration, of the chaotic ambiance of this wild place. To one side of us towered the massive Horns of Paine at one end of a jagged row of granite spires. On the opposing westward side of the valley loomed the even more towering flank of Paine Grande…highest peak in the National Park at 3050 meters. Directly before us was the huge Glacier Frances, and every few minutes, snow and ice came tumbling off the snowfields above it, amidst huge white smoke-like plumes. It was a place to just stand and revel, to stare in awe.
We had reached the Mirador Frances! And what a view.
As we stood there, a bunch of American kids celebrated by posing for a picture shirtless and with a beer. One was apparently from Texas. Give those guys a football helmet and get them in the game…they are animals!
This was a place we could not stay long in, even if we’d had time. And so we headed down…it was a hard descent, taking us almost as much time as it had on the uphill. Fortunately, the crowds were much reduced on the descent due to it being later in the day, and so we took our time. The stream crossing that Brian had been somewhat concerned to have at his back turned out to be no problem at all from the opposite direction.
When we made it down, Brian almost could not help himself from laughing. We had crossed what was probably the crux of the hike…nothing we were likely to see on the W would be as hard as that, and it was behind us now, and the effort entirely worth it. We had dome something big, and nothing could possibly stop us now!
(As it turned out, the part about nothing being so hard was…well, a bit premature. Some tough stuff did in fact remain ahead of us, but that’s to come.)
We arrived back at the ranger station to find a lot fewer packs still in residence, no sign of the ‘lone ranger’, and much mud and squalor. We sat, had some snacks (as with the TMB, we brought no boxed or bag lunches with us…we sufficed on small snacks and packets of Gu) and gathered ourselves for the remainder of our journey.
It was fairly late in the day (Nearly 4 pm) and we still had many miles to go before reaching our night’s stop, Refugio Paine Grande. The book time said two and a half hours…a sign at the ranger station said the same. But we’d seen such signs before. The two of us hoped this one was right, and likewise that the terrain was not so rough…we’d left a lot of our stamina behind us in the French Valley.
But regardless of what the trail was or wasn’t like, we had no choice but to tackle it…and we had to get going. We hefted our packs, fixed our game faces in place, crossed the absolute scariest suspension bridge of the Trek (a sign warned us to go one at a time, and we eagerly complied) and got underway.
The start of this section was not auspicious — it began rough and muddy — but it soon settled down to the mostly level, if somewhat muddy, trail that we had hoped and indeed needed it to be. While much of this was in trees and or scrub, there are also some open sections as well, and many of these were quite windy, especially as the trail wound close to Lago Pehoe….the huge lake across which, two days hence, our ferry would take us.
Much of this area was devastated by relatively recent fires. While spooky and somewhat exposed, these dead zones afforded great views back, especially of the Horns. We also caught a glimpse of what we thought at the time was the elusive Towers, but in fact was Cerro Espada and Cerro Hoja along the east face of the French Valley.
One bit of monkeyshines did occur along this part of the Trek. We had been forewarned about the fact that pack covers are of mixed use in windswept Paine…they blow off and are never seen again. We’d come prepared for this, packing all our gear in heavy duty waterproof trash bags. But still, we’d not liked the experience of having soaking wet packs, which you can’t really bring into the tent with you and hope to keep anything else dry; and besides which, the wind has generally not been too bad. We decided to gamble and put the covers on…and In most of the photos, you can see Sylvia and I are hiking with pack covers on.
Well. As we were a bit more than halfway through this days endless march, Brian suddenly began feeling weak and weary, almost nauseous. The pack weight, which had been pushing down on him all day (and the day before) was beginning to take its toll…we’d been going for at least eight hours by this point. He told Sylvia he needed a break, and so we found a convenient rock, moved to the side of the trail…
…only to find that Sylvia’s pack cover was gone. We HAD passed through a somewhat windy area as the trail wound its way along the shore of Lago Pehoe but…it not been THAT windy, and Brian, who had been following, had not seen any pack cover lying about.
We searched our photos and found that, recently as twenty five minutes earlier, the pack cover had been present. But that could still mean a walk back of close to an hour, with no real way of knowing where the thing was.
We saw some people coming down the trail — a fortunate break, we’d seen very few people on this leg — and asked them if they had seen a pack cover in their travels. The first group answered no. The second, a man and a woman we’d passed some time before, also said no…until the woman suddenly stated, “OH…wait? Was it Green?”
Yes, we replied…the cover indeed was bright green. She told us with some surprise that she HAD seen it, but assumed it to have been a trash bag. It had been lying off the trail snagged in the bushes to the right. She reported seeing it no more than fifteen minutes before.
Brian, tired legs or no, was dispatched back sans pack to get the cover, grumbling about warnings as he went. Fortunately the trail was pretty flat here. He knew that just because the cover was out there somewhere did not mean it would be easy to find. His plan was to go fifteen minutes down the trail plus maybe an additional five, then more slowly retrace his steps in the other direction, which is how it had been seen. He asked a few people passing en route, but no-one but that one hiker had seen our missing cover.
Finally, at about the fifteen minute mark of his backward leg, Brian passed through the same spooky windy area populated by dead trees that we’d crossed earlier. On a hunch, he turned his head to look back…and there in the bushes, ten yards off the trail, was the cover.
(Our best theory is that it came partially loose while Sylvia was pushing herself through scrub in an attempt to avoid a flooded or muddy area. There were several such places. The loosened cover must then have blow off quite easily. Brian, who generally looks at the trail when he hikes, was entirely oblivious to its escape.)
Cover back in captivity, we put both covers away to prevent further escapades, put our heads down and hefted our packs and just hiked. Brian felt strong again. After perhaps an hour, the trail broke into an area of rolling grasslands, then crested a rise where a fine view of Lago Pehoe was achieved. Here too we spied the 6:30 PM catamaran, just a bit behind schedule as it sped across the lake to Pudeto. Then the trail turned a corner and, voila! Below us was the sprawling encampment of Refugio Paine Grande.
This would be the first Vertice Patagonia Operated Refugio we stayed in…the other two had been managed by Fantastico Sur. As Vertice had the best and most organized website, we had high hopes that the services here would be a little better, too.
This was not to be the case – a good webmaster does not necessarily imply an organized hotel. We found sprawling Refugio Paine Grande to be distinctly unremarkable. The staff was friendly enough, and the cafeteria style meal was not bad; but the service was highly disorganized, the refugio itself overrun with borish, chain smoking suitcase tourists come across on the ferry.
The tent camping area essentially a lumpy open soccer field devoid of cover, with tents shoehorned in everywhere in very close proximity like orange, yellow and gray mushrooms sprung up after a spring rain. The effect was something like a camp of Refugees with high end tents. At least we had nice neighbors…the nearest tent was occupied by the same couple who had assisted with the pack cover recovery operations.
But little of this mattered…we had done it! We had survived the hardest day of the hike, and past its mid point. We had cause to be proud. We also had two days left, and we didn’t think these would be easy, but at least we had cause to hope they would be easier than this one had been. They would definitely be shorter. It would not be all downhill…but we did not expect any ascents like we had seen in the French Valley.
We were bound next for the final key destination before our boat ride out…Lago Grey, at the end of which was Glacier Grey and the furthest extent of the W.
***Did you know? A quarter of a million people visit Torres Del Paine every year making it Chile’s most visited National Park. In 2018 this would have placed it 47th among US National Parks.***
Next Up: Into the Grey