Day 61 – Torres del Paine, Patagonia (Chile)

April 5, 2019

After an exhausting first day of our trek and not sleeping that great in the tent this morning when the sun came up, I decided to keep resting.  I didn’t think we needed to get up extremely early or anything.  No one else was getting up, I kept resting and felt it must have been the best sleep of the night.  When I finally decided to get up and out of tent, I looked at the clock and it was 10am!  I think we must be the only hikers on the planet who roll out of bed for the day at 10am!  I got up and seeing the mountains and lake all around, felt it was quite breathtaking and rejuvenating. 

Brendan and Taylor got up and we packed up our camp.  I felt so much better today than I did the night before.  It’s amazing what one night of not very good sleep can do to recharge.  My feet were still sore, but I knew I could be ready for the next leg of the hike.  The weather started to change, and it became very stormy.  Clouds rolled in and a lot of rain and wind started happening.  We went inside to the cooking area and made some breakfast (grilled cheese).  As we ate breakfast and got ready for the day, other hikers started coming in from the rain who had already done all of their hiking for the day.  We had heard no weather (good or bad) really lasts that long in Patagonia so we hung out and waited to see if the storm would pass.  As we were waiting, we watched one of the camper’s tent get blown away!  Literally blown away.  Not just tumbling over across the ground, but it blew straight up (approx. 200 feet in the air) and cleared the three-story lodge at the campsite.  It went way over the lodge before coming back down and landing far out in the lake.  We felt bad for them… When the rain didn’t look like it was going to stop, we finally decided we needed to get started because we didn’t want to be in another situation of hiking in the dark like the day before.  We did not have that far to go on this day but hiking in the extreme wind and rain made it very slow.  I’m not going to lie, for the first couple of hours I thought the weather made it kind of fun.  It was quite the challenge to not get blown over by the wind so took my mind off my sore feet and heavy backpack.  I don’t actually know how heavy my pack was, but it felt REALLY heavy.  Heavier than it normally felt because for the trek, I was carrying food and camp stove fuel with whatever else and this was the most challenging part for me.  All of our packs were really heavy… but I was happily tromping through the wind and rain and laughing to myself when the wind would almost blow me over.  The guide who had given us information before the hike told us there will be points where you just have to stop and lay down on your belly in the mud, so you don’t get blown away.  We all laughed at this thought, but it happened.  There were a few times during the hike I just had to get down on the ground and wait for the gust of wind to go by.  It was definitely the strongest wind I have ever felt.  Even Brendan got knocked over with his heavy pack and he said it was quite the challenge trying to get back up with the intense wind and a 50-pound backpack (like a bug on its back with its legs in the air that can’t get up)!  After about 2 hours of ongoing wind blasts and the rain not letting up, my fun started to change to misery when I became completely saturated with water.  My new Columbia “omni tech” jacket that is supposed to be completely wind and waterproof failed and became soaked inside and out.  It got my phone wet that was on my inside pocket (try again Columbia) and every part of me was wet and cold.  While hiking, we were able to keep body temp up enough to not completely freeze and stopping wasn’t really an option as I would immediately get too cold every time I tried.  Luckily this hike to our next camp was only about 4 hours in total (the shortest one on our trek).  The scariest part was we had to do 2 sketchy river crossings.  I guess these were places that normally did not have much water but because of the intense rain, water rose very fast.  We got to one crossing where two girls told us this morning there was not any water here.  Now it was a raging, knee-deep river.  The river was going so fast it was bringing down rocks and little boulders under the water.  Taylor and I were terrified to cross but realized there were no other option.  It was too far, and we were too cold to try and go back from where we began.  Also, with the rain all day there could have been other water crossings on the way back that were now dangerous.  As best as we could, we did one step at a time and made it safely across without falling and getting swept away.  Our feet were never dry again after this point on the trek… I wish I had pictures and video of this river, but I knew it was way too wet to try and get my phone out… so I do not have any pictures from this day.  After what seemed like forever, we finally made it to camp.  When we got there, and I was checking in for our campsite my fingers were so cold I could barely hold the pen to sign in.  This campsite was not conducive to this type of weather because of the layout.  It did have a huge bathroom with showers and an area undercover to hang clothes, but this was extremely far away from where we had to pitch our tent.  It was up a big hill that was totally muddy and washed out from the rain, over a little step bridge, and then through more mud to get to our platform that was too small for our tent.  Our tent took up the entire platform and we had just the smallest ledge that our feet hung off when we stepped up to the platform to try and crawl in the tent.  The tent, like everything we had was completely soaked.  There was a pool of water in the tent that we tried to mop up, but everything we had was so wet it didn’t really work.  Once we got the tent up we made the journey to the bathrooms, so we could shower and change into our the “dry outfit” we had waterproofed inside of our soaking wet backpacks.  We knew how important it was to be able to change into dry clothes at night and we kept them wrapped in plastic bags inside our backpacks. The women’s bathroom had no hot water and we all three had to use the men’s showers.  By the time we got there, Taylor and I couldn’t stop shivering and we were SO thankful for hot water.  We showered and put on our dry outfit with flip flops (the only other shoes we had since our hiking boots were completely soaked).  In this national park you can only use your cook stove in designated areas to cook.  It was really weird but the designated area to cook at this campsite was in that big bathroom.  The three of us sat on the floor of the bathroom (outside of the stalls) and cooked our dinner next to other groups of campers (we had more grilled cheese as our bread was disintegrating and a cup of noodles).  Dreading going back to our wet tent, we finally started the walk back since we were very tired.  We tried to hurry because the torrential rain was getting our only dry bedtime outfit wet.  We barely had any traction in the mud with our flip flops and we sank down a couple times getting our bare feet completely submerged in mud.  The little stream that runs under the step bridge was so high it was spilling over the wooden planks and I was so afraid of slipping and falling just going over that!  I remember thinking as we were trying to run back and the realization that the only dry clothes I had were getting soaked, “it can’t be any worse”.  Of course, we all know it could be, but in that moment, I couldn’t imagine anything else.  We finally got back to the tent after getting totally wet again.  I ended up having to take off my wet clothes and just crawl into my sleeping bag in my underwear since I had nothing else dry to change into.  I was lucky though that the inside of my sleeping bag was at least dry.  Brendan’s got wet and Taylor’s doesn’t wrap all the way around her as some type of anti-claustrophobic bag, so they completely froze.  We all agreed that night was the hardest we ever “roughed it”.  I was cold but don’t think I froze as much as the two of them did.  I was in the middle which helped, and the inside of my sleeping bag was dry.  I really wanted to sleep in my puffy jacket but every time I reached out to touch it, somehow it was continuing to get more wet and I knew I couldn’t bring that into my dry bag.  Also, the worst part of the night was when at separate times Taylor and I both had to get up to pee.  There was absolutely no way on this earth we could get up and go the million miles through the mud, through the river, down the hill to that bathroom in the never-ending rain storm.  We had to unzip the flap of the tent, go out to the edge of the platform (which was right on the outside of the tent flap) and squat with our feet hanging over the ledge, and pee off the deck trying to hang on and not get it on ourselves or the tent.  If we had slipped and gone over the edge, it would have been a catastrophe as we would have fallen the 3 feet into a sink hole of mud.  I remember in the midst of that hell, laughing to myself thinking how that guide told us that at some point, somehow during the W-trek you are going to pee on yourself and wished you had vacationed in Costa Rica…  I crawled back into the tent with my teeth incessantly chattering and zipped my sleeping back up over my head and tried to go to sleep.