Before getting started, it took us a whole day to get ready. We went all over town trying to find gear to rent that we were happy with and also to stores to decide which gear was better to buy instead. We didn't make it to the grocery store until 9:30 at night and it closed at 10:00. For a town that caters to hikers, the grocery store was a joke. They had a whole isle of wine, but hardly any dried foods. We couldn't find much of what we were looking for and ended up with only three days worth of not the lightest food, which was enough to fill our backpacks to the brim. We stayed up until after midnight packing and then got up early to catch the two and half hour bus to the park.
The first day we lugged our 20 kilogram packs 34 kilometers over eight hours. We finally reached the beautiful campsite nestled between a lake and the mountains and attempted to cook dinner in the rain while being constantly bombarded by mosquito hordes. I could barely walk at that point and was relegated to waddling around the campsite. The rest of the hike didn't get much easier from there, although the mosquitoes did abate. Chile doesn't put much money into the sparsely used back side of the park, so the only food that could be purchased there was candy bars. We didn't have enough food in our packs to dawdle, so we kept the pedal to the metal hoping to reach the spoils of the W before starving. The greatest highlight of the back side was cresting the summit of the infamous Gardener Pass and looking down upon the massive and majestic Grey Glacier. It's a sight that the huge majority of visitors to the park miss out on and it was actually my favorite. They Grey Glacier isn't the biggest in the world, but that day it sure seemed like it might be.
At the end of the third day, which happened to be the most difficult and also the rainiest, we reached the first of the W refugios and it felt like walking into a bustling frontier town after being out prospecting for weeks. Scraggly and exhausted, we were surrounded by W people with smiles on their faces and no mud on their pants. I hurried to the small store and bought all the pasta they had in stock.
The next day, even though we had plenty of food, we went all out because it was a rare sunny day and we wanted to reach the French Valley in before the weather turned bad again. We hiked between ten and 11 hours that day, but it was worth it in the end. The French Valley is one of the strangest places I've even been. It is surrounded by series of different mountains, but each towering beast is of a strikingly distinct species. If you looked one direction, you'd think you were in Yosemite, another direction, the Alps, and the last side had a bit of a unique Patagonia feel.
Our next campsite was on a lake and the winds were extremely strong, so strong in fact that it tore huge balls of water droplets from the lake and drove them straight up the hill and through the campsite. We could hear the gusts several seconds before we were knocked backwards and the tents jumped and lurched as if in an earthquake. We put large stones on top of all of our tent stakes, but even so, in the middle of the night we had to get up and replace two stakes that had been dislodged. It rained and rained, but in the morning, the clouds cleared and a beautiful rainbow appeared, one of the many we were lucky enough to enjoy during our adventure.
From there it was smooth sailing as the hike culminated at Las Torres del Paine, after which the park is named. A very odd perceptual quirk, the rock towers looked quite impressive as we approached them, but once we reached their doorstep, they seemed much more bland and ordinary. I have no idea why this was.
After we arrived backed in town, we enjoyed a scrumptious pizza dinner that we'd been lusting after for days and began to put back on the pounds we'd shed in the beautiful, but brutal Andean wilderness.