Patagonia: The wettest dry place on Earth.

Due to internet issues, this entry was written about a week ago and we are just posting now. Hopefully we will have another one soon to bring everyone up to date.

We just got back from a crazy 10 day backpacking trip in Torres Del Paine National Park. 

We arrived in Torres Del Paine National Park with some pretty good weather.  We made it to our first campsite without too much trouble.  In December, a tourist accidentally started a fire in the park so the area is still recovering and many of the campsites are still closed.  Within the park you are only allowed to stay in designated campsites so open campgrounds absorbed all the extra campers from other closed campgrounds. Our first campsite was part of a tent city where tents were crammed into every possible open area. We found a sloped rocky spot to call our own (and felt lucky to have it).  The next day we hiked up a valley with some nice views of glaciers and peaks. We saw an amazing avalanche come down an entire mountain.  Then it started snowing on us, so we headed back to the tent city.

Day 2 at the campground was even more crowded than the first.  It was hard even to find room to put down our backpacks or find a spot to cook and people kept tripping over our tent’s guy lines.  For the hundreds of people there, there were only two toilets and two sinks to share. You had to wait in line to brush your teeth, fill up water or do your dishes. Then the winds came!

Tamara had put in earplugs earlier because of people staying up talking loudy.  We woke up with the tent hitting us in the head. The wind had ripped some of our stakes out of the ground and the tent was being blown flat, but luckily always popped back up. The winds must have been at least 60 miles per hour. Waves of dust also came into the tent covering everything, our sleeping bags, our hair, our eyes. There were people shouting, and the sound of the wind was terrifying. We can’t even describe the howling it made. Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it and it was relentless. If it wasn’t for the earplugs, Tamara wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all. Dan didn’t sleep much.  Through it all we thought to ourselves, “this is crazy but this must just be how it is here.”  The next morning we saw that part of the adjacent building had lost a small section of roof due to the winds. Many people’s tent poles had broken and collapsed and they were evacuated to a shelter.  Apparently, the staff saw that our tent was doing fine and decided not to bother us (Mountain Hardware makes good tents).

We learned that Patagonia is not dry like we had thought. In fact, it rains all the time, even when the sun is out, it’s still raining. We realized that in Patagonia it is always either raining, or the wind is blowing 30mph, so that you hike in zigzags all over the trail. Sometimes you get lucky and it does both. The 60mph winds are only a special treat that we experienced a couple times.

Day 4 we were feeling the effects of the bad weather, the weight of 7 days worth of food and Dan was fighting off a cold so we were moving pretty slow.  We were traveling on a poorly marked section of trail when a pickup truck pulls up and we realize that we are actually hiking on an old road and that they can drive all the way to the next hut. “Great! We’re hiking on a (insert expletive) road.”  The truck pulls up and they ask if we want them to take our backpacks. They say they will drive them all the way to the hut, which was still another 4 hr hike. So we jump on the opportunity by quickly throwing our packs in the truck and we watch it drive off.  As the truck leaves, we become aware of the possibility that we may have just donated our packs to some unknown organization such as DODG (Darwinism Of Dumb Gringos).  All we had left on us was our money, passports, Negrita (our trail cat) and water bottle.  We hiked the next 3 hours feeling very light and having mixed feelings about the wisdom of our decision. We were relieved to find our backpacks waiting on the porch of the Refugio (campground).

Day 5 just poured, so we chose not to hike and spend the entire day in the tent, napping and reading.

Day 6 and 7 we were blessed with no rain and only a few blasts of 60mph winds. We even got to cook and eat dinner outside one night.  We celebrated when the sun finally came out until we discovered that when the sun comes out, so do the mosquitos.

Day 8 was already our most difficult day due to time and distance hiked.  We’re used to elevation gain from being in Yosemite but we were not prepared for the extra challenge mud would offer.  Since it had poured the night before, the trail was not solid ground. We tried for about 45 minutes hopping from stick to stick to solid piece of ground.  We quickly realized this method was not going to work if we were to make the next campground before dark.  So we put our gaiters on and tromped through ankle deep mud.  We were lucky as we got up and over the pass with minimal winds and rain and were amazed by the sight of the gigantic Glacier Grey.  We ended up hiking next to it all day, for miles. It was just amazing.

After the setbacks from illness (Tamara ended up catching Dan’s cold as well, but not as intensely) and weather we took two more days to do the trail than we had planned. We stretched our food out so we were pretty hungry, sore, abused, and not sorry to see Torres Del Paine go. Our pizza and beer that night were especially tasty.