Blown, Wet and Happy

Back in Puerto Natales, Chile after a week of hard core trekking in Torres del Paine. Seriously, other trekkers were impressed- we averaged fifteen miles per day through the overall nastiest weather we´ve faced in South America. As the first day turned from cool and cloudy to pouring rain with a strong head wind ripping across the ten miles of grassy pampa, Sam and I both appreciated our Southeast Alaska conditioning. The next day, we took a local´s recommendation for a rest-day to hike up Valle Francais, and though we didn´t get the token valley vista due to cloud coverage, we did get to hear and see a chunk of glacier break and crash down a mountain, leaving a snowy cascade. Our origional plan was to take nine days for the trek, but after two cold days of solid rain, we decided we´d be happier eating more and sitting around camp less, so we replanned for longer, but fewer days. Of course, it was also that very night that the onset of the evil came, first to my body, a day later to Sam´s (possibly giardia?), so neither of us wanted to eat much for a couple days (very alarming behavior for the two of us!), and weren´t quite our usual, energetic selves, but we kept a quick pace through lenga (southern beech) forests and daisy fields, past turquois lakes and numerable glaciers, over rocky hills and the famous John Garner Pass. After the pass, we spent the day hiking alongside Glacier Grey, a shockingly massive electric blue plain, zebra-striped with crevasses, which is part of the third largest ice field in the world. That same day, I took a scary dip in a raging, swolen river, and Sam was almost blown off the side of a mountain, and instead into some prickly bushes, which came close to taking out his eye. Still, we laugh in the face of danger (and are very thankful for our well-being). The sun shone bright as we finished The Circuit last night, and all of this morning as we hiked out of the park, we had the clearest veiws of the magestic, jagged peaks and towers for which the park is named. Rain, a touch of snow, and southern Patagonia´s signature gale-force winds discouraged many of our photographic opertunities, and now Purto Natale´s computers, in general (we´ve tried several), are discouraging our photographic postings. Nothing, however, could discourage us from enjoying this amazingly unique, rugged, beautiful land! Now that I´ve exhausted most of my landscape adjectives, I leave you to help Sam with a post-trip barbeque. Tomorrow we´ll try to get a ride northward, headed now for weather that feels more like the summertime that they say it is down here. Being constantly surrounded by natural beauty on all these treks is getting overwhelming... We might need to consider taking a vacation....