Day 3: to Refugio Los Cuernos

So, this accomplishes the leftmost lower part of the W, then takes in as much of the middle of the W as we think we have time for. We had decided to try to make the 3PM bus back to town on the last day, and we were finding that the hiking times indicated on the map were too fast for us by about 20 percent. We decided to hike some extra this day, along the bottom of the W, so as to make days 4 and 5 a little easier. And we know that today, we’re traveling with full packs again, and it’s the third day of hiking in a row, so we’re going to be slow.

The middle leg of the W goes up into the bowl formed by all the parts of the Paine Massif. There’s a huge glacier in there that you can watch form avalanches on a regular basis (this makes a loud rumbling, so you have time to look, and find the moving snow to look at from across the inside of the bowl.) It also takes you up to see the backside of the Torres themselves. We hiked up about an hour into this (it’s supposed to take 2 – 3 hours). This was far enough for great views of the glacier, and to see the Torres poke up above the closeby ridges. Pretty neat, looking at the towers, but we were more interested in the glacier and the rumbling avalanches, and the really cool river the glacier produces.

The water here is all glacial, and so has that weird pale blue color that rock milk gives things. The lakes, the rivers, all that strange color. The wind blows so hard across the lakes that it kicks up these walls of spray that you can watch travel across the lakes. Often, there are two wind gusts in different directions, so they patterns get really intricate, sometimes resembling little hurricanes. Not just the spray either, as the wave patterns are constantly changing on the surface, as the wind changes direction and strength from one minute to the next. The guy at the hostel urged us to abandon bottled water and just drink the river and lake water. Make sure you’re upstream of any camps, and just don’t worry about it. It all made sense, and I managed to suppress the brief thought that popped into my head: “you know, he says it all confidently, but there’s most likely nobody who’s ever sat in this room who knows more about drinking water than you.” Screw it, I decided, and the water situation got a lot simpler. We didn’t get sick, and the water actually tastes great (cold water always does.)

Campamento Italiano is where we would have stayed (not an actual refugio, just a campground), had we not decided to press on further. We’re really happy we did that, as it’s a really nasty little campground. Don’t stay there if you can avoid it. Toilets overflowing, steep slope to the ground. I expect it’s buggy at dusk. Really cool cable bridge over the river, though, with a few planks missing, and others not looking very safe (and unlike the other trail complaints, if this one fails, someone’s going to die, rather than merely get muddy.)

Pressing on to Los Cuernos: Los Cuernos refers to the “horns” – a particular rock formation in the Paine system. On the way, we found the strangest beach. The trail goes down to a beach made of smooth lake pebbles – maybe an inch or two in diameter – big enough that they hurt to walk on barefoot. This beach is only two or three hundred meters long. The funny thing was that I for some reason was thinking that it reminded me of the beach at the end of the movie “Contact”. A few minutes later, Ev says, “reminds me of the beach in Contact.” I guess we’ve been hanging out with each other and nobody else for too long. It looks nothing like that beach, but it has such an otherworldly feel that it must have sparked the associations in both our minds. The wind is fierce and variable on the lake (this is the closest we actually got to any of the lakes), and we sat for awhile and watched the weird wave and spray patterns racing across.

All the hikers who were backed up here managed to spread out across the beach and separate by 20 meters each, to give the illusion of privacy. You do see a lot of other people on the hike. We’re told it’s not nearly as many as you see going east to west, so that’s a side benefit. One thing we’ve noticed is that there’s a hikers’ etiquette, about standing down for people going the other way on the trail, especially if they look like they’re working harder. Typically, this is: stand aside if you’re going downhill, let the people going uphill keep at it if they want to. At the very least, say hello (here, this is “hola” – no matter what nationality you’re sure they are, hola is the lingua franca here, so say that, at least.) We found that not many other people believe in this. The first few days, we always got out of the way, no matter what. We always said hi. Plenty of people reciprocated at least the greeting, but plenty of others couldn’t even bother a grunt. Not to mention occasionally getting out of our way. By days four and five, we were a lot less willing to stand aside.

I was getting pretty grumpy and tired by the time we got to that beach (I think I was just really dehydrated and low on calories – when we finally got there and I drank a few liters of water and ate something, I felt fine.) We finally get to the refugio, and it’s kind of being run by teenagers who like to sit in the doorway and smoke, so you can’t actually get in to pay your bill (as teenagers will do.) (I figure this must be the place where the British couple was denied refuge.) Here, for our 14 bucks, we got a campsite, but no kitchen privileges. The campsites were rocky and sloped. The whole place did have a killer view, though. We picked our campsite during a rare moment when there was no wind, got all set up, then were cooking dinner when the tent blew away (it was held in place by the one stake we’d managed to drive into the rocky ground.) Okay, this is the only spot left, and it has no shelter from 50 mph winds, let’s try again. So, we redid the stakes by trying everything thing to big rocks instead, and throwing our gear inside. This helped, but it was still scary, and I was expecting a rip in the tent or a snapped tent pole that night sometime. (Despite my bitching about the campsite itself, let me re-emphasize: there has never been a better view from a tent than we had. Ludicrous view of the horns.)

(We discovered a pretty severe rip in the rain fly later, than must have happened earlier in the trip. We told the hostel about it when we got back, and were expecting to have to buy a whole new rain fly – it’s a Eureka tent, so I wasn’t expecting this to be an arm and a leg. The hostel guy took a look, said he’d let me know. He comes to me later with a solemn look on my face, I’m expecting him to tell me I have some disease or another –“It’s a pretty bad rip. I think our guy can fix it, but it’s going to cost. It’s going to be … five bucks. Sorry, man.” This on a tent that cost 15 a day to rent anyway. I suppressed, “why are you telling me this?” and managed, “oh, wow… Okay, well, let’s settle everything up then.”)

This leg of the hike, even though we cut a lot off of it, took us way longer than the guide indicated it should, so we were pretty nervous about making the whole thing and still making the 3 o’clock bus the last day (there’s a 6 o’clock bus as well, so it’s not that big a deal, but we wanted some time to decompress back in town afterwards.) So, we got going as early as we could the next day (this turned out to be about 815, by the time I went running, showered, we made breakfast, and packed everything up.)