Hello there, dear reader. Are you in a happy place? Would you like a pillow? Here, here’s a pillow. What? A hot cocoa? You want a hot cocoa? I don’t have any unfortunately. Seriously. No, you’re not getting any. Fine. Leave, see if I care. What do you mean, you always knew i was like this? I did too care about you. Hey, put down my goldfish tank. Stop! STOPPPP!! YOU SMASHED MY DAMN GOLDFISH TANK! Well, I don’t ever want to see you again either! [Hear a successsion of doors slamming, then a car starting and speeding off, then a lone child crying in the distance, then a waiter at Bertucci’s reading the specials}.

Aha. Ha. Hey. Sorry about that. Me and dear reader have been having a thing. Relationships aren’t always roses and stir fry, right?  Anyway, let me tell you about a magical place called Torres Del Paine. It’s what many guide books call the best national park in all of Latin America. I don’t know if I can say that (best is such a dangerous word, isn’t it? filled with venom and black ice and made-up vowels), but I will say the place is hot-dang incredible. The centerpiece of the park (which is located in Southern Chile) is a dramatic mountain range that is actually geologically separate from the rest of the Andes. I don’t know how exactly. I read that in a brochure, and now I’m writing it here because I went to public school in the US so fact regurgitation is like the one thing I feel comfortable doing. Anyway, regardless of the mountains’ formation process, they’re stunning to look at. This is a picture that I may or may not have created in a Willy Wonka dream incubator…

 

 

Looka them craggy peaks. Yeah, it’s just a visually stunning place, and the Chilean park service has done a real good job making the park accessible to the outdoorsy set — well-maintained and well-marked trails, good backcountry campgrounds, a variety of entry and exit points so you can vary the length of your hike and an extensive refugio system. And that last part, the refugios, really separate Torres from just about any other park I’ve been to in terms of accessability. Basically, if you really want to, you can hike the main Torres circuit – which takes around 8 days to complete and covers 70 pr so miles of terrain — without carrying a tent or any food. The refugios set up along the trail have beds, heat, food service. Everything but a goldfish tank. Oh, oh my poor goldfish tank. I hate that rapscallionish Dear Reader. So anyway, de to the refugios the park attracts a lot of people who otherwise probbaly wouldn’t do an overnight, long-distance hike. On the one hand, I find the whole system, well, retarded. I think the American backpacking mindset is you go out to the woods to face the harsh realities of nature — the cold air, the hard ground, the owls who sing Temptations songs all night. But on the other hand, any system that gets more people out into nature for long stretches of times should be encouraged. If I had had just a week off from work or something and went hiking in Torres to get away from the world, I would have been annoed to see these big heated structures and so many trekkers out on the trail. But since I’ve been lucky enough to do so much hiking over the past three months and have had some pretty amazing solitude out in the middle of pristine wilderness, I was glad to see so many people gazing up at mountains, being generally amazed and realizing how there’s nothing we can make that’s as perfect a river that’s never been altered. Well, I guess a gold fish tank would rank up there, but we won’t talk about that. DEAR READER!!!!!!!!!!

The version of the hike I did took five days and covered maybe 45 or 50 miles. And though I definitely appreciate the refugios for they add to the accessibility factor, I didn’t use them (I think a bed cost 40 bucks a night or so), choosing instead to sleep slept in my tent. Now that summer’s pretty much long gone down here, the sun was down by 7:30 and didn’t come up again till around 7:00 the next morning. I’d usually talk to some other campers while eating dinner, but darkness brought some serious chilliness with it, so I was in my sleeping bag by 8:30 and then slept gloriously for at least 10 hours every night. Well, everry night except for one. Torres del Paine is renowned for its wind and constanly changing weather. They say you get all four seasons every day. I say you get all four seasons every milk. Nobody else says that it’s completely nonsensical. Anyway, one night (my third on the trail)  the wind thing really came on strong.  I woke up to find my tent getting slammed by gusts that were definitely more than 50 MPH. The it started raining as well. Then hailing. After an hour or so the wind died down and I fell back asleep, but got woken up by even stronger wind a cople hours later. This time it snapped a chord that connected my rain fly to the tent itself and I had to rush out and do a repair nder the glow of my headlamp (in “repair,” I mean I tied a bunch of knots and swore at the air arond me). The wind continued off and on the rest of the night, and somehow the rainfly stayed on. At one point I found myself sitting upright watching the main pole of my tent bending as the gale blew through. “Please stop, wind,” I said, half crying. “Just please stop.” And guess what? It did!! Like three hours later!! No, seriously, that wind powerful. You might say it BLEW my mind. Wow. Nothing like a pun to change the mood. Okay. Some more pics from the trail.

 

 

And these here be the torres (towers) from which the park gets ts name. Me and some other fools climbed a mountain in the middle of the last night to get a look at them as the sun came up. Seeing them glow at sunrise may have been the best moment of my trip…