Patagonia: The W Hike, Day 1
**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.
(We are skipping past our first full day in Puerto Natales, which was basically spent on buses in hot pursuit of our ‘misplaced’ luggage. The best thing we can say about that day is how fortunate we were to have a spare day built in. Suffice it to say, we and our luggage were art last re-united. We’ll just skip over the specifics of the baggage chase and jump right to the action.)
We had ambitious plans for the first day of the W Trek, and so we were up and out early, bound for the first bus to the National Park, which leaves at 7 am sharp.
Actually, there are a good dozen ‘first’ buses that leave all at the same time, each owned by different bus companies, which head out in a sort of caravan to the park. So it’s far less a question of catching the bus as it is figuring out which bus to catch. We quickly got it figured out and settled into our seats for what we expected to be a two to two and a half hour ride.
It was actually only ninety minutes. However, Brian arrived at the park in poor condition (carsick, in desperate need to go to the bathroom.) En route we saw some wild vicunas, relatives of the llama. But we had seen hundreds of those around Colca Canyon and Misti in Peru.
After some confusion we were herded into line with the rest of the tourists and marched into the National Park entrance station to watch an educational film and then purchase entry tickets. We had intended to purchase these online but never got around to it; as it turned out, doing so would not have allowed us to avoid the line, so there seems no advantage to reserving.
After this it was into line to take the shuttle to the main camping areas. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t free.
After arriving in Paine Grande we got our bearings, headed for the camping area and checked out. People were camped everywhere, almost right on top of one another; most, aware of the wind, had chosen to camp well into the trees and at the base of the hillside where the wind was less a threat. Inside this forest was a second forest of tents. We went a little further out and set up inside what we hoped to be a sheltering copse of trees. The weather had by then really come in, with a light rain falling from very low, cotton thick banks of clouds.
After set up, it was time to hike. But we had already wasted hours…it took longer to get going than we had hoped, as we had to not only set up camp, which had be thoroughly secured from wind and rain, but also to reconfigure our packs for day hiking and then fetch water. It was nearly 11:30 by this time all this was done…which was still ahead of what Brian, the Minister of Expedition Planning, had expected.
Our full W Trek itinerary is fully explained here.
Brian had known all along our chances of making it to the Towers on day one, the same as our arrival, was a long shot. But he figured we could still hike up to the towers and down before sunset, which in Patagonia this time for year is quite late (9:30 PM.)
Our late start was to have ramifications later; but at any rate, it took only one look at the forlorn sky to inform us that our hopes of glimpsing the majestic Towers seemed equally forlorn.
But nonetheless, we had come to hike, and so we set off squishing down the muddy, wet trail.
The trail out of Sector Central begins easily, if muddily, but soon steepens after the first bridge crossing of the Rio Ascencio.
Somewhat ominously, we saw no parties behind or ahead of us headed up. Well, the weather might explain this. But we saw plenty coming down, and this was perhaps even more ominous. Every face we saw was long. In fact Sylvia and I have never in our lives seen so may unhappy faces as we saw on that uphill slog, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Many of these people had flown halfway around the world, at considerable expense, all for the pleasure of seeing a panorama of cotton candy. But hey…that’s Patagonia.
We continued our slow progress uphill and as the walls of the Valle Ascencio closed in, the weather improved some. We started to get some decent views. The valley itself, quite abrupt and V-shaped, is impressive.
After crossing some steep pitches and then a totally washed out section where a mudslide had taken part of the hill away, we again crossed the river and arrived at the Refugio Chileno, where crowds of sodden hikers milled about.
Brian had been using Cicerone’s guide book for this Trek (Trekking Torres del Paine by Rudolph Abraham.) This book got the times for this section all wrong; but Brian had been aware that the Refugio was the halfway point, with the steepest section still ahead. We reached it a little after 3 pm, only to see a barrier across the trail and a sign saying “Don’t attempt this Trail after 3 PM.”
Well, we’d seen something similar at the beginning as well. There are cut off times now for each hike, and Brian had been aware of this. What he’d not counted on is that the cutoffs applied to the portions of the W as well as the longer full traverse (The “O”.) His research had not been able to uncover this.
We spoke to the camp host at Chileno, who confirmed that we would not be allowed past the CONAF checkpoint at the Torres Camp more than an hour up the trail unless we hurried (it was nearly closed now.) But he advised us not to waste our time; there would be no mirador today, he told us with a shake of the head. Only clouds.
We decided to venture down the trail a short way anyway, but this section was so gooey and muddy that we immediately turned around and headed back. The Towers was simply not to be, not this time.
(Later we were told by multiple people that there would have been no sense at all in continuing…the end of the trail is a very strenuous ascent over huge boulders, with no payoff on a day like this one. Only one person we spoke to claimed to have seen anything like a view that day, and this person was at the mirador before noon. It was simply never in the cards for us to see the Towers close up that day, and it was best we saved our legs for what was to come. Such is the trek.)
On the way down the views across to the lakes opened a bit further. We can only imagine what the views from the towers must be like on a good day.
As we neared the campsite we chanced to look up and…strangely, the clouds had parted just enough so that we could see just a bit of the towers. But by then it was well after 6 pm. Anything not camping up there should have been packed up by that point. I wonder how many were rewarded by patiently awaiting that view…or just by plain being late.
We returned to the refugio for our meal, where we chatted with some British and Aussie hikers. Then it was off to bed, where we hoped our tent would withstand the elements.
We had struck out at the Towers….fate had been against us all along. But we had four more days ahead of us, and while Brian was apprehensive about the weather forecast, there was still a chance we might see something. We would be headed toward Paine’s other famed signature attraction…the Horns of Paine.
***Did You know? The Towers of Paine were once called Cleopatra’s Needles.***
Up Next: The Horns of Paine