Idiots at the End of the Earth Ep 15 Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
It's cliché, but true... if you want lots of rainbows in your life you have to be prepared for a lot of rain. Summer in Patagonia is coolish and drizzly days are common. It does make one appreciate the sunny days – and the rainbows.
Sit around with a group of knowledgeable, well-traveled globetrotters in any hostel from Nepal to Napa and talk about “best places” and along with “the usual suspects” like Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat, Patagonia will inevitably come up. All the in-the-know travelers have either been to Patagonia... or are planning to go. It is not really off the beaten path – but at least the path isn't paved!
And for many, the gem of their Patagonia adventure is trekking in the Chilean national park, Torres del Paine. It is one of those last, best places... still remote enough to have real wilderness and adventure, but discovered enough to have adequate infrastructure to support travelers not willing to go completely off the grid. TdP gets about 250,000 visitors a year. Just for comparison, the US Great Smokey Mountain National Park is about the same size and gets 45 times as many visitors.
The Idiots are, by definition, not knowledgeable... and they are more well-used than well-traveled... and they are more globeshufflers than trotters... and their trekking days are long behind them...
but even they eventually became aware that those amazing peaks that Idiot He saw in a dreamy haze on a middle-of-the-night television travel show so many years before were the heart of TdP and an “I want to be there” compulsion drove them to the end of the world.
About the name... Torres del Paine... [ TORE-ays dell PIE-nay] “Torres” is Spanish for “towers.” “Paine” comes from the indigenous peoples and means “Blue.”
What is so special about Torres del Paine? Well... a world's-worst-selfie replaces a thousand words...
About an hour's drive north from Puerto Natales, the pavement ends at the Park Gate. None of the roads in the park are paved and many are narrow and uneven. Travel is slow – and that is a good thing. This has protected the park from being “loved to death” like major national parks in the US. “Pave it and they will come!” The Idiots hope the roads of Torres del Paine are never paved.
At the center of the park is the Paine massif – a cluster of heavily glaciated peaks. The slow approach on gravel is like the dance of the seven veils, every curve revealing a little more while maintaining the promise of still more to come.
Finally the Idiots were as close to the torres as one can get without hiking... and they had a classic Idiot moment. They discovered that the magical peaks that haunted Idiot He for over a decade... the mountains that drew them 10,000 miles from home... the iconic Torres de Paine...
are not the Torres del Paine!
Those sculpted gray peaks with their brown tops are the Cuernos del Paine – the Horns of Paine. The Torres? Well... those are for the next episode!
The formation of the Paine massif started about 11 million years ago. A dome of molten granite pushed up into a layer of mudstone and sandstone. The heat from the granite “cooked” the soft stone layer into a hard, dark metamorphic stone layer that covered the granite, forming a gigantic two-tone “mushroom”.
Fast forward to “only” 2.6 million years ago and the Pleistocene Epoch when Ice Age glaciers carved much of our world into the shapes we see today. The glacial ice gouged away huge parts of the mushroom and flowing water continued the sculpting. The dark metamorphic layer was stripped away from most of the peaks, but the Cuernos retained their “caps” giving them their distinctive look.
Enough science! Let the pictures speak for themselves!
The mountains are not the only thing to photograph in TdP. There are guanacos and intersting plants and miniature landscapes... even a natural yin-yang symbol...
But mostly... Idiot He couldn't take his eyes – and camera – off the mountains...
idiots at the End of the Earth Ep15 Torres del Paine
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