Day 60 – Torres del Paine, Patagonia

April 4th, 2019

We got up very early to catch a 7am bus into the park of Torres del Paine to start our trek.  Once the sun rose we started catching out first glimpses of Patagonia!  The beautiful mountains, the blue lakes, lamas, emus, and flamingos!  The clouds were clearing for the first time since we had been in this region of southern Chile.  I saw an awesome rainbow and got super excited about this being a good omen for our trek. 

I wanted to text my family about my excitement but had no cell service.  This was the start of 5 days being disconnected from technology 😊. We arrived in the park where we paid our entrance fee and then went another hour by bus to a lake where we crossed by catamaran.  When we got to the lake we had an hour before the boat left so we took the guides tip from the free talk the day before and went up a trail to see a beautiful waterfall. 

This was a great bonus route and by the time we got there and back it was perfect timing for getting on the boat. 

The boat took us across the lake and to the site of our first campground, Paine Grande.  We arrived there at 11:30 am and set up our tent and grabbed a quick snack (of PB &J) before we started our first hike.  The nice part of staying here our first night was we could leave our big bags at camp while we did the hike up to Glacier Grey and back.  In hindsight I think we naively set out on this hike with just a pocket full of trail mix and a bottle of water.  Since this was our first day coming into the park we got a really late start on what was an 8-hour long hike there and back.  Everything was beautiful!  We had nice weather and it was great hiking without our backpacks.  It was about 2 hours to the first major lookout where you could see Glacier Grey. 

Brendan suggested turning back at this point; he was concerned that we would be hiking back to camp in the dark.  Taylor and I were so pumped to be there and have the great weather and beautiful scenery, we both wanted to push on and go another 2 hours to reach the glacier.  Brendan’s concern was legitimate, but we convinced him to continue on as we did have our headlights with us in the pocket opposite of our trail mix.  The trail was well marked so we thought we would be okay following it home with the headlights if needed.  The great thing about this park is you don’t have to carry a lot of water because you can drink water and fill your bottle out of any stream in the park.  We filled our water bottles for the first time with the fresh Patagonia water and it was delicious and ice cold.  We continued on for another 2 hours and stopped just short of our end point. 

We knew we were going to be walking part of the way back in the dark and wanted to get past the more difficult scramble part up and down rocks before the sun went down.  For myself, I felt really good the first 4 hours we hiked.  I started to feel tired on the way back.  The return to camp felt much longer!  We did enjoy very beautiful views all the way until the sun set on us.  We were getting pretty hungry and I realized a pocket of trail mix was not that much for eight hours of straight hiking.  My feet got very tired the last hour or two.  I felt all of us were ready to be back at camp.  Once it got dark, Brendan’s concern about it being hard to keep on the trail became real.  I was leading at this time and at one point I lost the trail.  The trail crosses over little streams and such quite a bit.  I ended up being on the other side of the stream from where the trail was and couldn’t find it.  The funny thing was that one of my first thoughts was: “I only have like 5 peanuts left!”   I definitely would have died from the cold, long before starvation, but my mind still went immediately to thinking about food and being concerned about missing a meal.  We were actually not in any real danger because we had descended into a valley, and at the end of the valley was the lake where our campsite was.  Even without the trail, we still would have known what direction to go as we could see the outline of the mountains that form the valley.  However, it was still an unsettling feeling for about 15 minutes while we thought we lost the trail.  I remember thinking how grateful I was to not be hiking alone, for I would have been a lot more scared.  Brendan luckily found the trail on the other side of the stream from where I was.  Once we were back on it even though we were tired and sore I think we all picked up the pace to make it back to camp.  My watch died towards the end of our day, but I think we did about 24 kilometers that day which was more than I had ever done.  I was very tired after this first day when going to bed.  I was fearful that I might not have the endurance for four more days of this.  Especially since we start carrying our packs tomorrow.  We made dinner with our little cook stove (lentil soup with pieces of hot dog which was either surprisingly good or we were just crazy hungry) and went right to bed.