Walking into the wind at the bottom of the world
Five days on the W trek in Torres del Paine, where the weather has four seasons an hour and the granite does not care about your itinerary.
Dev Ramaswamy
Torres del Paine, Chile
Everyone warns you about the wind and nobody warns you enough. It is not weather; it is a character. It comes off the Southern Ice Field with the specific momentum of something that has crossed an ocean without meeting a single tree, and on the second day, on the exposed ridge above Lago Nordenskjöld, it took a full water bottle out of my hand and threw it fifty metres into the lake, and I laughed, and the laugh was taken too.
The W is named for its shape on the map, three valleys and two connecting legs, and it is a walk of about eighty kilometres depending on how often you get lost. You do not need to be an athlete. You need to be stubborn, and you need waterproofs that were expensive, and you need to accept that the towers themselves, the three granite fingers that are on every postcard in Puerto Natales, may simply decline to appear.
They declined for me for three days. I walked up the Ascencio valley in cloud so thick I could hear the moraine before I could see it, and when I reached the viewpoint there was a lake, a wall of grey, and nine other people eating sandwiches in silence like a congregation. We waited an hour. Nothing. We went down. That is the deal in Patagonia: the mountains are not a service.
The mountains are not a service.
What you get instead is everything else. Guanacos standing on the ridge lines like punctuation. A condor that came so close over the French Valley that I heard the air through its feathers, a sound like somebody tearing very expensive paper. The lenga forests, red with autumn, and the glacier at the top of the valley shedding pieces of itself with a noise like a building falling in another city. Grey Glacier at dawn, blue in a way that blue is not supposed to be.
On the last morning I got up at four and went back up to the towers, alone, in the dark, because I am not proud. The wind had dropped. The cloud had gone. When the light came, it came from the side, and the three towers went from black to grey to the colour of a struck match, and I sat there with my bad knee and my remaining water bottle and I did not take a photograph for a long time, because I did not want to be looking at the screen. That is the whole story. There is nothing more to say about the wind.
A sound like somebody tearing very expensive paper.
Except this. It came back on the walk down, from behind, and pushed me the last kilometre to the refugio like a hand between the shoulder blades. I chose to take that as approval.
