Torres del Paine W Trek, Patagonia, Chile (Part 3 of 3)
You want to see a sunrise? We’ll show you a sunrise
Torres del Paine W Trek Day 4:
Walk from Frances to Chileno (17km, up 816m down 561m)
This morning before light broke I did one of the weirdest things in my life: I threw away yesterday’s uneaten sandwiches in the bathroom trash feeling like a criminal.
I would have packed out our trash as directed except that, given N.’s bum knee, I figured I’d have to carry most of the weight of his pack back to Paine Grande.
It was then that, along with the usual signs — please help us save water, etc — I noticed that this particularly bathroom had a sign that asked guests to not defecate in the showers (I don’t have enough of an imagination to make this stuff up). In the bathroom, I also overheard a young woman tell another that she was going to Mirador Britanico and then would sleep at Grey Refugio — simple math told me that was about 30 kilometers/18 miles. Was that even possible?
Breakfast was downhill again, and we ate at a table that felt like a mini UN conference — we were joined by a young couple from Denmark and another from Chile. After the first moments of awkwardness, all developed an easy camaraderie from a sense of shared adventures.
***
I was fussing about getting ready to follow the trail back to Paine Grande, when N. refused to follow.
“I think I can hike to Chileno.”
“What about your knee?”
“I think it’s better.”
I had doubts. I had to get some intelligence.
So I found myself chatting in my elementary Spanish with one of our breakfast mates about the trail to Chileno — since they had already covered that section of the trek — an older lady overheard me and, speaking in English, reassured us that the trail to Chileno was not demanding (“Oh, you will be fine!”). And when I mentioned I was worried because my husband had hurt his knee, she got her husband to rummage into his bag and give me a few knee patches. Angels walk among us.
When I got back to N., he insisted again that he could trek to Chileno.
***
It was baffling — he hiked as if yesterday’s pain was long-ago memory. As that knee-patch-angel had said, the trail was nothing like that to Frances or Britanico, so yes, comparatively, it was easy. However, it was very long — 17 kilometers to Refugio Chileno, along Lago Nordernskjold and veering north, away from Central and the main visitor center there. From Frances to Chileno, the trekking map estimated 6.5 hours, probably measured for able-bodied young people, not for a bum-kneed official member of the AARP.
After the split, on the final 2 kilometers to Chileno, we ran into a bit of counter traffic of all the trekkers and day trippers on their way down. Each and every one looked like they had run a marathon: sweaty, flush-faced but grimly determined, as if they knew that if they stopped, they would not be able to continue. For the first time, we ran into one of those large Korean tour groups, a bit older than we, who did not look happy to be in their current predicament.
After a final steep section of ascents and descents, at the bottom of the valley next to a river, we arrived at Refugio Chileno. It was a miracle, given N.’s condition. (He later told me that he had indeed been feeling better, but that he began to feel some pain after a couple of hours. By that time, it was too late to turn back. Hence we do not have many photos on this stretch of the hike. N. also suspected that given my large volumes of complaints on this trek, if not this time, he may never see the towers ever again.)
Dinner at a long table included Americans from New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado, and a young couple from Hong Kong. We shared stories, laughs and beers. And parted ways early enough to get ready for the sunrise trek.
***
Torres del Paine W Trek Day 5:
Walk from Chileno to Mirador Torres del Paine (5 km, up 517m down 84m)
Walk to Torres Central & Norte (10km, up 215m down 932m)
Take a bus to Park entrance
Take a bus to Puerto Natales
A problem with our sunrise trek arose when N. nudged me awake and my alarm had not yet gone off: his watch said “4:20” while mine said “3:20”. What was happening? Because he had already seen quite a few headlamps bobbing in the direction of the trail and because it was better to leave early (rather than late), and because we were awake anyway, we got up and got ready.
I had been given to understand that a packed breakfast would be ready at the restaurant for us (since we paid for the food), but it was actually a spread on a table with bread, deli, cups (but no coffee or juice or water) along with a couple of boiled eggs. I slapped together a cheese sandwich, grabbed the eggs, grumbled about the lack of a clock in the place — what time was it — and we headed out.
We have come to believe that hiking in the dark, despite the dangers due to the lack of visibility, does offer an overarching advantage. We could see only three feet in front of us, so all we could do was focus on the three steps we had to take. Ignorance was, indeed, bliss. Except for the obvious upward incline, the task ahead did not look daunting — at least in three-foot segments. For the most part, we trekked in silence, without too many others crowding the trail or overtaking us.
This trail was notorious for its last one kilometer and its notoriety was well earned. Although there still was something resembling a trail, it included quite a lot of bouldering, enough to make me feel a bit like Alex Honnold. I also learned I’m particularly inept at gauging distances, since, after a certain point, I would think to myself, “That has got to be the end of the blasted kilometer!” And yet the trail continued. We arrived by the Torres and the lake while it was still pitch black. Head lamps bobbed here and there; we claimed our own little rocky spot, approximately in front of where we imagined the towers would be.
And the sun did what the sun does. Or should I say, the earth did what the earth does — which is rotate and hence allow the unmoving sun to shine its light on what was before us.
N.’s camera and phone captured the light before our own eyes could really detect any color. The general shapes of the towers and other formations around us appeared in silhouette first, black against the lightening gray skies — the mountains, the outline of the lake, the people bobbing here and there among the rocky shore. There was a good amount of clouds in the sky, which first worried us because we were afraid they would block our view.
Slowly, though, before anything else, the clouds, greedily capturing for themselves the light from the sun, turned pretty, almost ethereal shades of cotton candy pink, looking even more exaggerated against the baby blue of sky. We thought, wow, that’s pretty, but the show must be over. It was now bright enough for us to see everything around us clearly: the gray granite towers, the lake surface without a mirror effect because of the wind.
And then the clouds gathered above the towers began to shift and change and reflect deep oranges and reds right on top of the Torres. The photos look unreal, but they are but a poor imitation of the colors we saw in real life. The Torres — and just the Torres — looked as if they were emitting red light, burning hot in that cold windy morning.
And to think that we had considered turning back from Frances.
***
After such a sunrise, it was hard to feel unenthusiastic about the challenges of the day, the first of which was to get down from the mirador.
Now that it was full light, we could see what we had really accomplished and were grateful to have to ascend the trail in the dark. For the first kilometer, it was a rocky, almost vertical descent, made worse by the fact that you could easily see the trail — how difficult it was, and how long it was. The saving grace was the fact that we had gravity helping us on the way down. We breathed a sigh of relief finishing this section and managed the rest of the trail to Chileno.
Despite the early hour — it was barely 11 am — N. had a celebratory beer. A young man chuckled and said, “Hey, you can’t drink all day if you don’t start before noon!”
We packed our bags, picked up our bag lunches and headed “down, down, down.”
We must have been riding high on “sunrise surprise” still, because although both of us had been dreading the return to the first section from Chileno — yesterday, it appeared like a steep ascent where many daytrippers to the mirador had been dragging their feet — we arrived much earlier than anticipated.
The problem was the section from the split point to Central. It was ridiculously steep, rocky as hell, and we were complaining while we are going down; if we had chosen to hike the W from east to west, we would have had to hike up this trail from Central to Chileno and, I firmly believe, there would have been a good chance I might have thrown down my hiking poles and given up. The kicker was the fact that at certain points, the trail split between “people trail” and “horse trail” and the people trail was rocky and pockmarked while the horse trail was smoothly packed dirt.
We saw quite a few people with full packs — 50 to 70 liters — hiking up this way, along with a large group of Asians at the very beginning of their hike — on a smoother section — laughing and having a good time, with no idea of what was in store for them. N. kept laughing out loud, imagining what they would look like once they reached those killer ascents.
Eventually we passed the fancy looking Torres Hotel (whose guests must be the ones horseriding in those smooth trails), finally reaching the Torres del Paine Welcome Center.
There was not much time for dilly-dallying. We ate the rest of our bag lunches, N. got another beer, and soon enough we hopped on the shuttle that would take us to the park entrance where we would pick up our bus back to Puerto Natales.
***