Beyond the Postcards
In 1878, a British noblewoman named Lady Florence Dixie grew tired of her aristocratic life in England, and decided to set out for the wild, unexplored land of Patagonia. In her 1880 book, Across Patagonia, she describes her party’s trek across the scrubby Patagonian steppe; their enthusiastic hunts for guanacos- a relative of the llama- and ostrich; their discovery of glittering glacial lakes; and most memorable, their journey to the base of the peculiar and magnificent “Cleopatra Needles.” Of this particular expedition, she writes,
A glance showed us that we were in a new country…The background was formed by thickly-wooded hills, behind which towered the Cordilleras,- three tall peaks of a reddish hue, and in shape exact facsimiles of Cleopatra’s Needle, being a conspicuous feature in the landscape…we still directed our march towards the three Cleopatra peaks rising out of the snow glaciers far ahead of us.
The needle to which she refers was an ancient Egyptian obelisk transported to London and erected only months before she set off for Patagonia. The geographical feature she describes is a trio of red granite spires that soar over 8000 feet, better known today as Los Torres del Paine. Today, the same towers that Lady Florence first stumbled upon in 1879 are the most recognizable and visited feature in all of Patagonia.
The Torres, which translates to towers, are the main attraction of the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, and lure tens of thousands of visitors a year to southern Chile, on the desolate tip of South America. Backpackers load their packs and bus two hours in from the nearest town, Puerto Natales, across the featureless pampas to trek through the park, and, like Lady Florence, marvel the awe-inspiring towers. The spires are seen on travel book covers around the world; dreamt of by adventurers and climbers; immortalized by countless artists.
The dusty well-trod path leading from the park’s entrance to the towers feels like a cattle-chute some days, when the weather is mild, and throngs of day-trippers shuffle up and back down the six-mile hike to the Torres lookout. Serious trekkers plan longer stays, completing the five-day “W” loop, or the eight-day “Circuit” of the park which takes them on the far side of the Torres and past the impressive Glacier Grey. The word “Patagonia” has been traced to mean “land of the big feet,” and being in the park, the sensation is indeed that one has been misplaced in a giant’s world. No matter the intensity or trajectory of their trek, all hikers who visit the towers pass through the Campamento Torres, or Towers campsite. Here, in the last bit of protected land, just before the earth rises above tree line, trekkers can pitch tents and hunker down in the low wind-battered forest for the night. Those who do have the opportunity to see beyond the trafficked trail and really get a sense for the mountains they’re climbing. Those who camp at Campamento Torres are the ones who scramble at dawn up the last hour of vertical trail over a boulder fields and attempt a glimpse of Torres at sunrise, when the spires flare orange and fiery scarlet and announce the day to the world.
It is a brisk, overcast fall day in late March when I dig my tent stakes into the ground at Campamento Torres. I am college-aged, a solo trekker, living in Chile, traveling through Patagonia, fluent in the language, and infatuated with the land. It drizzled all afternoon and the wind tore my t-shirt but I marched my way up from the park’s entrance anyway, taking in each view alone without a companion to turn to and gape with. I am no stranger to the wonders of Chilean mountains and volcanos, but the granite cliffs of Patagonia are exotic to me. I have seen people cry when relating the strange beauty of the Torres and the milky lake that sits below them and collects the runoff of their glacial icecaps. I have heard weathered trekkers swear that nothing on earth is more spectacular than the Torres on clear morning at sunrise. I have read countless brochures and travel blurbs championing the uniqueness of the Torres experience. I expect to be stunned.
Campamento Torres is somber this afternoon. I reach it around 4:00 pm, find an empty campsite, #45, and build my tent in silence. Although there are other tents pitched, most people are up at the Torres, or taking shelter from the impending rain. I explore the site and see the A-frame ranger’s hut, the damp outhouse, and the swollen stream where I fill my bottle and drink the runoff of last winter’s snow. Back in the forest, raindrops titter through the canopy above and the trees rustle and drip and sigh in the wet.
I knock on the ranger’s door and tell him I’ve come to register as a camper. He is a dark, short man, not much older than myself, and wears a thick, knit sweater. The peak of the A-frame is an intimate loft where I see he sleeps, with a mattress and a pile of blankets. Below, where we stand, is a wood burning stove- I feel a pang of sympathy for the donkey tasked with transporting it up the mountain- a wooden bench, and shelf with books, boxes of food and large cans labeled Café and Té. Maps of the park, of the web of trails, campsites, shelters and viewpoints, hang on the walls. They are worn and faded, much used and relied on my decades of rangers, it seems.
We fall into easy conversation because outside it is cold and raining and neither of us has anyone else to talk to. He tells me he’s from Santiago, working in the park for the summer for the adventure of the experience. The season ends in a few weeks and his deflated enthusiasm suggests that after three months alone in this hunt, the experience has been mostly sapped of adventure. I tell him I work further north, with horses in the Lakes District; he knows the area because it is a popular vacation destination for Santiaguinos, and his eye flash at the mention of horse-trekking.
“Wow,” he says. “Horses? I have never ridden, that sounds incredible. And you pack everything with you on the trail? That’s amazing.” I realize that although he looks the part of deep woods ranger, he is really a city boy. Although I am the America, this forest is more home to me than him.
“I wanted to see a different part of the world,” he says. The park is roughly 2000 miles south of Santiago, and a world completely unlike his home in the country’s smog-filled capital. “I heard the people down here were friendly. Chileans you know, we have that reputation, but here it’s like a different country- it is as though this place is too desolate for humans-”
I have noticed this also and add, “-as though the sky is too dreary, and the wind is so ferocious they are always anchoring themselves from getting blown away.”
“Yes!” he says, “They are so… closed. So buttoned up. They walk like this…” and here he clutches his sweater to his neck and bows his head to the floor as if he is bundling up from the cold. He laughs and I laugh. It is probably the first time in a while someone with enough Spanish to talk with him has stopped in the hut for a chat. He looks like he hasn’t laughed in a while. The surge of heat from the stove warms me to my core and I try to prolong my return to the frigid tent.
I ask if he has any recommendations for my hiking in the park. He says people really seem to like the sunrise hike up to the towers. I ask him if it’s worth it and he shrugs his shoulders. I decide to hike up in the morning anyway. After a cold sleep, during which the patter of wind, rain, and leaf fall on my tent never ceases, the alarm on my phone goes off. I unzip my tent and stare into the black, drizzly night. I consider getting back in my sleeping bag; the views will be few. But I am here, at the bottom of the world, in the land of giants, why wouldn’t I try for a sunrise?
I put my headlight on, strap my sleeping bag to my day pack and head out into the dark hours of morning. It is a slow hour to the lookout; I pull myself up the steep trail, jumping across streams and ducking the low, horizontal spreading trees. The air is heavy and wet and grows colder as I rise. When I reach the rock field that marks the upper limit of these slopes, snow starts to fall in small specks, and then thickens to a more significant dusting. I clamber up the final yards racing the sun, whose rays are about to brighten this mountain. Up and over one final rock ledge, and I am there, at the overlook, a mere hundreds of yards from the three gargantuan towers. The middle one is the tallest, and this morning they rise as ghostly grey specters through the haze of snow. The small lake beneath them is hardly turquoise or emerald, as I have seen in many pictures; rather, it is the same cloudy slate color as the cliffs and towers around it. Despite the absence of color, the curtain of haze which is moving to block out the right tower as I watch, and the now-heavy snowfall that wets my head, I am awestruck. It is difficult to fathom that these spires are only the worn remnants of once-grander towers, that this is the result of eons of decay.
As I huddle down in the rocks and wrap myself in my sleeping bag, the clouds conjoin into a seamless cover, and though day has dawned, little light reaches this sheltered spot. The view in the opposite direction, from whence I came, back down the valley and out over the pampas, is nonexistent. It is cold, the wind howls through the Torres, over the lookout and back down the ravines, and snow blankets the rocks and trails back down the mountain. Two other American trekkers reach the lookout. They turn off their headlights and look around. They see the obscured towers, the sea of grey, and groan.
“What a bust,” one says to the other, “I can’t see anything. Not the towers, not the valley. Look at this- clouds everywhere.”
Motivational and commencement speakers like to use mountains as metaphors. The comparisons are relatable, though too-often trite. But once, I heard a man say that if you’re going to climb a mountain, you better make sure the climb is something you’ll value even if there are no views from the top. With the snow falling, and the towers retreating behind the haze, I think that the view from the top hardly matters at all. Thousands have seen the towers alit with the fire of dawn. Far fewer are we who have witnessed the Torres shrouded peacefully in snow in the first hours of day.
