“Patagonia?” asked friends when I told them where I was heading on vacation. “I didn’t know they had an outlet store.”
They do and they don’t. The manufacturer of rugged outdoor apparel has several outlets, but the even more rugged region of southern South America, after which the clothing is named, doesn’t. To experience the actual place, you’ll need to get on a plane and start heading south.
Thus I found myself aloft for nearly 22 hours total, flying from Chicago to Miami to Santiago, Chile, to Punta Arenas, the southernmost mainland city in Chile. I was now in the region described by various world-class visitors-Ferdinand Magellan, Charles Darwin, Antoine de St. Exupery and Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional Arthur Pym, among them-as a desolate, bitter, sterile land inhabited by savages that nevertheless, in the hopeful words of Darwin, could “boast of a greater stock of small rodents than perhaps any other country in the world.”
Darwin went on to describe a species of mice with thin ears and fine fur: “No sooner was a mouse caught in one of my traps than it was devoured by the others,” he wrote in his log from the H.M.S. Beagle. If it were cannibalistic mice I was seeking, I apparently had come to the right place.
Of course, I hoped to see more than bloodthirsty rodents. My destination was the spectacular Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, where I would be joining a handful of other travelers on a 10-day backpacking trip sponsored by the Sierra Club. Embarking on this expedition were Rod Carroll and Michael Rohde, from southern California; James Schoen, from Massachusetts; Dr. Albert Bosch, from the Chicago area; our trip leader, Bob Madsen, from the San Francisco area; and myself.
The park, which has been given UNESCO world heritage status, is most famous for its namesake, three spectacular torres (towers) of granite that emerge from an icefall above an alpine lake. This was what most of us had come to see-we reveled in the thought of camping with a view of the towers, of a challenging hike to their base, enjoying them in all their glory . . .
“Don’t count on it,” snarled a woman from Washington state.
This unhappy camper spoke to us on the streets of Puerto Natales, several hours north of Punta Arenas via a road that’s paved on one side, gravel on the other. Puerto Natales is the final jumping off point for most adventurers heading to Torres del Paine, as a bus runs daily (except Sundays) to the park. Here, travelers can enjoy a decent meal and accommodations and stock up on film and gear before heading out to see the torres, or the nearby Balmaceda Glacier and Mylodon Cave.
In the case of this Seattle traveler, however, Puerto Natales was merely a soapbox from which to make dire predictions about others’ journeys.
“I was in the park three weeks with my kids and we didn’t see anything,” she said bitterly.
“It’s the damn weather. I bet you won’t see anything either,” she added smugly before stalking away.
Another traveler who had overheard her smiled at me sympathetically. Noting his outdoor gear and eager for a kind word, I asked him about his experiences in the park.
“The park?” he asked. Long pause. “Well, the park, she is rough.”
Visitors to Patagonia seemingly can’t help but contribute to the anthology of horror stories regarding this land.
Take Magellan. On his voyage around the world in the early 16th Century, through the strait at the southern tip of South America that now bears his name, the Portuguese explorer set anchor along the eastern Patagonian coast. The plan was to find a winter haven where the ships could be repaired and supplies restocked before heading west again in search of the elusive Spice Islands.
Magellan soon learned that it’s possible to go too far south for the winter. His crew, incensed because their captain refused to return to glorious Rio de Janeiro until spring, mutinied. Magellan and loyal followers defeated the mutineers, but at a heavy cost. Forty men were found guilty and condemned to death-a sentence commuted for many, as Magellan could not afford to lose so many crew members. Those who survived spent their time in Patagonia in chains, cleaning filthy bilges and manning the pumps. Two disloyal captains were decapitated and their bodies quartered, with the dismembered parts erected on poles on shore.
The region’s history is filled with such grim tales: a colony of missionaries starving to death after trying to subsist on fungus, seaweed and dead seabirds that had washed ashore; sailors brutally killed or tortured by natives (one seaman who survived a massacre reported to his rescuers that the locals had plucked his eyebrows and full beard with sharpened mussel shells); ships pounded to pieces by the 100-foot waves off the coast. Even in fiction, the picture of a terrible landscape persists: the fictional Pym’s account of his dreadful journey, which takes him to Patagonia and beyond, is filled with descriptive phrases ranging from “horrible butchery ensued” to “We were raving with horror and despair.”
Equally brutal is the Patagonian weather. This fearful force has tortured men’s bodies and imaginations for centuries, and it is a subject all visitors are eager to talk about.
The British explorer Eric Shipton, who made four expeditions to Patagonia, wrote, “The chief problem is presented by the weather, which is said to be some of the worst in the world. Heavy rains fall for prolonged periods; fine spells are rare and usually brief, and above all there is the notorious Patagonian wind, the savage storms which often continue for weeks at a stretch . . .” On Shipton’s 52-day trip across the Patagonian ice cap, the weather was so poor that “we had only a vague idea of our position, and we were never quite sure of the course we should steer. But the most irritating thing about it was that we saw so little of our surroundings.”
The Patagonian wind is fiendish, assaulting the terrain-and anyone unfortunate enough to be out on it-at gusts of up to 130 m.p.h. Everyone who travels to Patagonia has a favorite wind story. Shipton described weighing a boat down with boulders and having it swept up like a kite once the boulders were removed. The French pilot and author St. Exupery recalled being blown out over the sea by the wind, then fighting the gale for over an hour to cover the 5 miles back to land. Anthropologist George Gaylord Simpson, who journeyed to Argentine Patagonia in 1930, observed wild geese heading into the wind being carried rapidly backward.
Apparently then, should the weather be clear enough to permit visibility, I would likely see only the pebbles on the trail, which I would doubtless find myself traversing on hands and knees while struggling to keep from being blown off the mountain.
But we were down here now, and all we could do was hope for the best-whatever that meant in Patagonian terms.
We left Puerto Natales the next morning after Sergio Olavarria, a Chilean native who would accompany us on the trip, outlined the circuit we would be taking through the park. The trip would take us on a 65-mile odyssey to the base of the towers, over Paine Pass, through forests, across rivers, and alongside glaciers and mountain lakes.
The backdrop would be the massive granite spires of the Cordillera del Paine, a small mountain chain near the Andes. The peaks, formed by glaciers in the Pleistocene Age, rise above 10,000 feet in some cases; the countless glaciers filling their canyons are an extension Patagonian ice cap, a 187-mile-long terror stretching over the Andes between Chile and Argentina.
The park is only a small portion of Patagonia. The bulk of it, on the Argentine side, is a vast, bleak prairie. Across the border in Chile, the land is cut by glaciers, mountains and fjords and covered by thick forests. On our way to the park, however, we passed through vast stretches of the treeless pampa. The road from Puerto Natales to the park was smoother than the road from Punta Arenas-but not without its own perils. Signs in Spanish alongside the road warned of exploding mines: remnants, Sergio explained to us, of past wars with Argentina, which lay only a few miles to the east.
After several hours’ travel through the minefields, we got our first glimpse of the park, whose mountains rose, like the Emerald City, above the flat grassland into a gauzy veil of clouds. A few minutes later the sky cleared, revealing the famed towers. Already the trip seemed like a success. We practically pranced about taking pictures of these mountains many miles in the distance, not knowing if we’d see them again.
Near the park entrance we encountered our first guanacos and rheas, Patagonia’s most famous animal residents.
Resembling the ostrich, the rhea (also called nandu ) is a large, flightless bird. Belying its awkward gait, heavy feet and flapping stubby wings, the rhea can run at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.
More amazing, however, are its breeding habits. A dozen or so females collectively lay their eggs-anywhere from 60 to 70-in a single group. Then off they go, perhaps to lunch, or out for drinks, or maybe for a romp in the hills. It really doesn’t matter, because their pre- and neonatal cares are over; it’s up to the males of the species to incubate the eggs and raise the chicks.
The guanacos are famous for their spitting, of course, and for their hides, which are of poorer quality than those of their llama relations to the north, but still in enough demand that human hunters have reduced their numbers significantly. Unlike their rhea counterparts, the females of the species have less cushy breeding habits, enduring an 11-month pregnancy.
Fortified by this display of wildlife-added to a list that included the outgoing president of Chile, whose three-car entourage we had passed earlier on the road from Punta Arenas-we pushed on to our first campsite. From here, the next day, we officially began our trek, starting with a march to the base of the towers.
The trail is described by various guidebooks as “short” and “moderate.” Translation: a three- to four-hour walk along a steep path and through dense forest, then a tough scramble up a boulder-strewn slope, the work of an untidy glacier. An occasional cairn marked the way through the moraine. After an hour of crawling around and over slabs of granite the size of garbage trucks, my ankles quivering, I reached the top.
Every agonizing minute then and every ache in my muscles that night was worth the view: Torre Sur (9,350 feet high), Torre Central (9,186 ft.) and Torre Norte (8,530 ft.) standing guard above a snow-streaked cirque and compact, steel-colored lake. Cloud shadows sped across the surface of these spiny mountains, which were etched with deep cracks. High above us soared dozens of Andean condors, majestic with their 12-foot wingspans.
Back at Camp los Torres that evening we all congratulated each other on our remarkable accomplishment of once again seeing something in Patagonia. Smugly, I abandoned my tent that night to sleep under the light of the moon, the Southern Cross and other exotic constellations.
A long but leisurely hike the next day took us though a grassy valley along the Rio Paine. The flat, grassy terrain looks appropriate for grazing. In fact, before the park was formed in 1959, much of the area was leased to local estancias (ranches). Ranchers commonly cleared the forest by setting fires, especially in the eastern side of the park. The result is a prehistoric, African veld look in some parts.
Other parts of the valley were as lush as Eden. Flocks of Austral parakeets, bright green in color and the size of large parrots, provided an exotic touch. Puma tracks lined parts of the trail. That night I once again slept outside, under a full moon and a gentle Patagonian breeze. In my mind I began composing a letter to Eric Shipton, whose salutation read, “Dear Wimp.”
My hubris was rewarded handsomely in the days to come, of course.
The following day we finally came face-to-face with the famous Patagonian wind in a gap known as Windy Pass. Before ascending to this notch in the mountains Sergio warned us, “When you get blown over, be sure to fall to your left.” Good advice, as a fall to the right would have dropped us several hundred feet into the valley.
I have no pictures of Windy Pass. Had I tried pulling my camera out from under my wind gear, the gale would have no doubt smashed it into my face. One by one my traveling companions dropped to their knees. Sergio shouted something; no one could hear his words, which doubtless are still blowing across the Patagonian pampa. In a surreal maneuver I leaned forward into the wind with all my might, pushed even more by my heavy pack, yet remained upright. I felt like a cartoon character improbably suspended in midair after dashing over the edge of a cliff.
“You could fly a bowling ball in this wind!” Rod shouted. Quite possibly. In any case, I added that image to the tall tales already told about the Patagonian wind: of a man firing a rifle into the wind and being killed by his own bullet blowing back, and of chickens being plucked clean by the monumental breezes.
Descending from the pass we headed toward Lago (lake) Dickson, one of only a handful of refugios, or campsites, in the park. This camp boasted an uninhabitable wooden shack, with garbage piled high beside it. While the park receives only about 2,000 visitors a year (according to the estimations of the one park ranger we met), trail and campsite maintenance is minimal.
We pitched our tents with a view of Ventisquerro glacier and Lago Dickson. The latter’s shores met up with black gravel beaches; miniature icebergs floated on the water like ice cubes cooling one very large drink. Leaving Lago Dickson the next morning, we also left behind our days of gentle walks alongside Rio Paine. We were now following the course set by Rio de los Perros, up steep slopes and through a dark beech forest.
A two-hour climb from Refugio Lago Dickson rewarded us a Wagnerian panorama encompassing Dickson Glacier, the mountain it encircled, and the southern portion of the Patagonian ice cap stretching far back into a bluish mist. Surely Valhalla lay just beyond; one could practically hear a chorus of Valkyries in the distance.
From this heady view we then plunged into the jungle, struggling over moss-slick logs and ducking under low tangles of branches. Our grunts and curses were punctuated by the loud tapping of the Magellanic woodpecker, which, with its bright red head, was easy to spot in that green wilderness. Sergio tried to cheer us up with a little story. Apparently the spot where we were headed-Campamento Laguna de los Perros-was named after a man who tried to cross the river with his dogs, which drowned in the attempt. I mulled this over each time we crossed the icy torrent that day, both on foot and over log bridges well past their prime.
The campsite, fortunately, was not as gloomy as Sergio’s tale. The next day, unfortunately, was. This was the day we tackled el paso, the pass.
We arose in total darkness that next morning and broke camp in a steady rain. We became even more wet as the morning wore on, wading yet another icy stream and slogging our way through muddy, boggy ground as we slowly worked our way up to the tree line. Near the top of the steep slope-at 4,200 feet Paine Pass is the highest point of elevation on the circuit-we crossed the stream again. And finally, with a blast of polar wind greeting us, we arrived at the top.
Stretching out far below us was Grey Glacier, a seemingly endless flow of ice that completely fills the valley. We had little time to enjoy the stunning view, however; minutes after we reached our lofty goal a snowstorm erased all traces of this enormous blue-and-white ice field.
Our descent in the snow soon became a descent in hail, followed by a descent in sleet, rain and fog. “Descent” sounds too peaceful, too planned, however. “Free fall” more accurately describes our plunge into the forest bordering the glacier. We practically bushwhacked our way down and up a trail buried in mud and rocks and overgrown with vegetation. At one point I found myself thigh-deep in mud; at times I struggled uphill on my hands and knees, gaining ground with my fingertips. In this humble position I began composing another, much more emphatic, letter to Mr. Shipton.
The most difficult part of the day came toward the end of our 12-hour trek, when we inched our way up a sheer stone wall using a rope. I was the last one to ascend. As I climbed I heard one traveling companion after another utter an expletive after reaching the top. The reason for their curses soon became clear: The weary were greeted at the end of their climb by a hand-scrawled sign left by a previous backpacker: “Cafe” it read, with an arrow pointing into the woods.
The only thing resembling a cafe, of course, was the miserable, wet little camp we set up that night in the dark. Throughout the night I could feel my legs involuntarily jerking up and down in my sleep, as if I were still descending from the pass.
Yet the hardest leg of the trip was over, and in the days to come we were rewarded for our efforts with more, only-in-Patagonia views and experiences. We camped along the shores of Lago Gray, watching Gray Glacier calve. This icy drama was, improbably, accompanied by the exotic sound of squawking parakeets. “Is this a jungle or Antarctica?” asked a Swiss tourist sharing the campsite.
An afternoon at Campamento Frances and Campamento Britanico treated us to views of unimaginable beauty in every direction: spectacular high peaks, glaciers, avalanches and waterfalls, a view of the magnificent Cuernos del Paine as well as the Argentinean Andes in the distance.
By ferry we crossed the turquoise-colored Lago Pehoe, the Cuernos rising in the distance. With their black-topped horn formations, these peaks-along with the torres-are the best-know landmarks in the park. And later, outside the park, we saw the remarkable spectacles: the shores of Tierra del Fuego, a penguin colony, the famous mylodon cave.
Herman Melville described the “marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds” in “Moby Dick.” They are marvels, indeed, and worth every blast of wind and weather and step of outlandish terrain that must be endured to experience them.
DETAILS ON EXPLORING CHILE
Getting there: Four airlines fly non-stop from Miami to Santiago-American, Lan Chile, LADECO and United Airlines. Round-trip fares will vary depending on the season and availability. Lan Chile and LADECO fly from Santiago to Punta Arenas. The cheapest fares from Chicago to Santiago via Miami start at around $900; add another $300 or so for the round-trip flight to Punta Arenas.
Visitors to Chile will need a passport but not a visa. An airport tax-ranging from $12-$15, depending on exchange rates-must be paid by travelers upon leaving the country.
If you’re not traveling with a tour, you can take a bus from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales and from there to the park. Some bus operators also offer tours of the park during the summer season.
When to go: Chile’s location in the Southern Hemisphere places its seasons opposite of ours, making late November through early March (late spring through late summer in Chile) the best time to visit Patagonia.
Trekking tips: A free map of the park-more like a vague sketch-is available at the park headquarters. You’re better off purchasing one of the more detailed park maps for sale at various stores and kiosks in Puerto Natales. The route is fairly well marked by orange paint on trees and stones as well as orange stakes, although the trail itself often seems non-existent.
Be prepared for any type of weather-from hot, sunny days to snow and freezing rain, and, of course, wind. Your best bets are polypropylene/Lycra clothes and long underwear, which are lightweight and dry quickly. Pack wind gear as well as rain gear, and wear heavy-duty hiking boots-the trail has no mercy on the poorly equipped. You might want to consider bringing a pair of river sandals for crossingthe many streams. Sun block and glacier glasses are essential.
Group tours: Wilderness Travel will be offering off-the-beaten-path trips from November 1995 to March 1996, avoiding the regular circuit in favor of lesser-used trails in the park. Cost for a 14-day trip ranges from $2,495 to $2,995, not including air fare. Call 800-368-2794.
The Sierra Club generally offers a trip to Torres del Paine in late February/early March; the price varies depending on group size and does not include air fare. Call 415-923-5522.
Information: Contact the Chilean tourist office in Santiago at 011-56-2-236-1416 (fax 011-56-2-236-1417). Or call the Chilean consulates in New York (212-980-3366), Miami (305-373-8623) or Philadelphia (215-829-9520).
