Mountain smackdown (from "Other-Climes")

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" ... Ha!

Clearly Mark Twain was not very well traveled. Having spent many, many summers in San Francisco, the four of us unanimously agreed that the coldest winter WE ever spent was a summer in Torres del Paine, Patagonia.

We're pilfering some of Elizabeth & Marty's very accurate take (in blue) on our "10 day" trek from their own travel blog (www.other-climes.blogspot.com) in this posting:

We´re back from our ten-day Torres del Paine trek. It lasted, instead, one day.

(Nothing says "welcome" better than a sign in a downpour.)

(Optimism on a bus: Z, Marty, Rebecca)

Short version: The weather was just too horrendous for us. 10 minutes in, and some of us still have some dry garments.

Longer version: We set out in high spirits. Even the dead horse next to the trail didn´t seem like a bad omen. But it rained all day, we all got as soaked as if we were wearing bikinis instead of Goretex, and with the high winds, we each took turns flirting with hypothermia. Just for fun, a few old injuries flared up too. Suddenly 10 flat miles didn´t seem so easy after all.

And -- this was the clincher -- we never saw the mountains. After we got to camp we did get a couple of glimpses of the bases of some of the peaks, but the clouds stayed constant in spite of the equally constant winds.

(2 hours in: hallelujah, a temporary shelter)

Luckily, the camp we reached that evening was a very comfy one, complete with hot cocoa for sale.

(Cozy and warm at the Refugio.)

This fortified us so that we could put up our tents without their sailing into the lake (though Rebecca and Blake´s tent fly made a break for it, actually pulling out most of its stakes!).

(Tents with Paine Grande looming ever cloudily in the background.)

We took off our sodden clothes, and were even able to take showers and cook in an enclosed space (in some weird outfits!). But an easy day it was not. It was pretty demoralizing.

(The cooking dome at Paine Grande campground.)

So we left. We were still at a point where we could take a boat back across the lake and go back -- it was a very welcomed release valve. We got back to Puerto Natales, found a hostel with a puppy, and regrouped.

Now we´re trying to eat our way through 10 days of backpacking food (¨More polenta, Blake?¨ ¨Why, thank you, Rebecca.¨ ¨Perhaps some oatmeal, Marty? Or powdered drink mix?¨) while appreciating being warm and dry.

And we have decided to console ourselves with penguins.

This afternoon we arrived in Punta Arenas, a rather large Chilean city on the Strait of Magellan. Tomorrow morning, quite early, we´ll take a boat out to Isla Magdalena tomorrow to visit a colony of Magellanic penguins! I´m excited.

In a couple of days, we´ll return to Puerto Natales and we may take another crack at the park. Purportedly the weather should be better. We´ll see. It is a place that holds great attraction for all of us. Just think if we were actually able to see this!

(Torres del Paine in all of its glory -- not our photo...)

In the meantime, I´m looking forward to those pinguinos.

For now it's off to see the penguins, then back to the park for round two. This time our plan is to stay in the backcountry for a couple of nights at one campground and do a day hike on the interim day. The weather forecast (though everyone tells us there is no such thing as predictable weather in Torres del Paine) is to be 20 degrees warmer than last week and even a few days possibly without any rain at all.

Despite the foul weather, we did get to see some magical moments:

-- Blake