national park does attract an increasingly large number of visitors each year, most of whom arrive in the peak (summer) season of January/February, when the ‘W’ route can get quite crowded, yet despite this it is still possible to find solitude, particularly in the more northerly areas of the park. On my first visit to Torres del Paine I sat among boulders by a stream in the Valle Francés, mesmerized, as shafts of early morning sunlight struck the enormous east face of Paine Grande, all dark rock slung with glaciers, and glistening crags festooned with clouds. It mattered nothing that there was a campsite with a few dozen tents hidden in the forest behind me; in those few moments I was completely and utterly alone. On another visit I clung to an exposed section of trail in screaming winds, only to turn and see a Condor rising effortlessly out of the valley, utterly still except for the feathers on its wing tips, and so close I almost felt I could reach out and touch it.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Torres del Paine
Place names almost always provide a fascinating window into a region’s past. The Paine massif probably takes its name from the Tehuelche world for ‘blue’, paine. The Tehuelche, the indigenous inhabitants of this part of Patagonia, have also left their legacy in other place names (pehoé means ‘hidden’, as in Lago Pehoé; baguales means ‘wild horses’, as in Sierra Baguales; as well as in the names of various plants and animals. And the correct pronunciation should really be ‘pine-ay’, not ‘pain’.
Patagonia
Patagonia is a region covering the southernmost part of South America, made up of the southern parts of Argentina and Chile. The name ‘Patagonia’ derives from the description of the native Mapuche population by Antonia Pigafetta, in his record of the voyage of Magellan. Pigafetta described the Mapuche as ‘Patagones’, which has long been considered to have meant ‘big feet’ or ‘big footed’ in Spanish – although while pata does indeed mean foot, there is no real explanation for the -gon suffix. His description gave rise to enduring legends of a race of giants inhabiting the wilds of southern South America. His description tells us as much about the teller as the subject – the average height for an adult male Mapuche was 5′ 11″, while that of the average Spaniard at that time was 5′ 1″.
Another more recent explanation for the origins of the word Patagonia is that it comes from a 16th-century Spanish romance, Primaleón of Greece, in which the hero encounters a race of ‘savages’, who ate raw flesh and clothed themselves in animal skins (as did the native population encountered by Pigafetta), including a creature called Patagon, described as strange and misshapen, with ‘the face of a dog’ and ‘teeth sharpe and big’ – in other words, all those things the ‘civilized’ explorer might have expected to encounter in a race of ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the Earth.
Geography and geology
Chile’s 4300km-long, stringbean shape encompasses an enormous variety of scenery (not to mention climates), from the parched salt pans and blistering heat of the Atacama desert in the north to the splintered fjords, fractured glaciers and frigid wilds of its far south. Its highly indented coastline runs to over 6400km in length, yet the country is on average only some 175km wide. Far off its coast in the waters of the Pacific, its territory includes the Juan Fernández Archipelago and the ever mysterious Rapa Nui or Easter Island – the latter separated from the Chilean mainland by over 3800km of uninterrupted ocean.
The country is divided into 15 administrative regions, their names preceded by Roman numerals and (with the exception of two regions newly created in 2007) arranged numerically from north to south. Torres del Paine national park lies in the 12th (southernmost) of these regions, XII Región de Magallanes y de la Antártica Chilena, the regional capital of which is Punta Arenas.
Running along (and effectively defining) Chile’s eastern border is the Andes mountain range, which stretches some 7000km down the western side of the South American continent and constitutes both the world’s longest mountain range and the highest mountain range outside Asia. The highest peak in the Andes (and in the southern hemisphere), Aconcagua (6962m), is located about 100km northeast of the Chilean capital, Santiago, over the border in Argentina; the second highest peak in the Andes, and the highest in Chile, is Nevado Ojos del Salado (6891m), which lies some 600km north of Aconcagua.
Cerro Paine Grande (Walks 1 and 2)
Further south, the Andes are generally lower in elevation, with the highest peak in Chilean Patagonia (Monte San Valentin) reaching 4058m; while the highest peak in Torres del Paine national park (Cerro Paine Grande) clocks in at a mere 3050m, or somewhat less according to some measurements. Formed by the movement of the Nazca and Antarctic plates beneath the South American plate, the Andes also contain many volcanoes (Nevado Ojos del Salado for example, and the 6570m Tupungato which towers above Santiago) – several of them active (Chile’s Llaima volcano erupted in both 2008 and 2009; Chaitén in 2008–9).
Chile’s position on the edge of the Pacific plate means that it also experiences its share of earthquakes, including the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960 which devastated the city of Valdivia and measured a staggering 9.5 on the Moment Magnitude Scale (MMS, a development of the Richter Scale which measures large earthquakes more accurately) – the world’s strongest ever recorded. In February 2010 another huge earthquake struck the area south of Santiago, measuring 8.8 on the MMS and causing widespread destruction.
The Andes are rich in mineral resources, and mining is extensive – with Chile ranking as the world’s largest copper producer, supplying a third of the world’s copper consumption. Argentina is also a major copper producer, while the Bolivian Andes are particularly rich in tin; and historically, it was the mineral wealth of the Andes which supplied the Inca civilization – and later the Conquistadors – with silver and gold.
Torres del Paine national park lies a little under 2000km south of Santiago on the edge of the vast Campo de Hielo Sur or Southern Ice Field, fingers of which (the Grey, Tyndall and Dickson glaciers) penetrate deep into the national park. These feed the lakes and rivers which, in their turn, drain southward into the Seno Ultima Esperanza or Last Hope Sound. The lakes and rivers carry large volumes of suspended particles of rock produced by the action of glaciers (‘glacial milk’), and it is this which gives many of the lakes (such as Lago Pehoé and Lago Nordenskjöld) their vivid turquoise hue.
On the trail by Lago Pehoé (Walk 1)
The national park covers an area of some 240,000 hectares, and is roughly delineated by the Chilean-Argentine border and Argentina’s Los Glaciares national park to the north, the Río Zamora and the eastern shore of Lago Sarmiento in the east, the Southern Ice Field to the west, and the Río Serrano and the enormous Bernardo O’Higgins national park to the south. The Cordillera del Paine or Paine massif lies more or less at its centre, slightly separate from and to the east of the main Andes chain – a landscape of vertical granite spires and shattered rocky peaks, which emerge above unspoilt forest, fast-flowing mountain streams, spectacularly coloured lakes and massive glaciers.
Much of the Paine massif constitutes the exposed remnants of a granite laccolith – igneous rock, which was injected into the earth’s crust some 12 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, forcing the surrounding sedimentary rock upwards. An earlier intrusion (a mafic intrusion of monzonite, and later olivine-gabbro) underpins the granite laccolith. Since then the surrounding sedimentary rock has been gradually eroded, leaving the more resistant granite Torres (‘towers’) – along with other peaks such as Fortaleza and Cerro Espada – gloriously exposed. This exposed granite also forms the central portion or band of the Cuernos (‘horns’), while their dark, spiky upper bands constitute the shattered remnants of the surrounding sedimentary strata. The underlying intrusion is only partially exposed.
The southern portion of the Paine massif is bisected at its centre and towards its eastern side by the two river valleys, the Valle Francés and the Valle Ascencio. Both the Río Francés and the Río Ascencio drain south into Lago