As I promised in the last entry, this one will be about our adventure in the Torres del Paine National Park. This park is located in Chile, which is a country bordering Argentina to the west. See if you can find Chile on a map! Look for the very long, skinny country along the very south western border of the South American continent.
Torres del Paine means "towers of blue". The name comes from the huge granite towers that you can see throughout the park, and these are surrounded by giant blue glaciers. We spent 8 days backpacking in the park and completed a circuit called the "Q". It is called this because on a map the route is shaped like the capital letter Q.
On our first day we walked through a large, beautiful valley as we approached the towers. As we were trekking, a gaucho and his group of horses came running past us. A gaucho is someone we might call a cowboy. Like cowboys, they live in the countryside and ride horses, often tending to flocks of animals. Unlike cowboys in the western United States, however, they dress in very colorful clothing and often wear brightly colored scarves and chaps. We were lucky to see this man pass by because there aren´t many gauchos around anymore!
A few days later, we woke up very early and walked up a steep boulder path in the dark to watch the sunrise on the towers. We were tired and groggy but it was worth the difficult climb.
After a couple more days of walking we came over a tall mountain pass and on the other side saw the enormous Glaciar Gray, or Gray Glacier. It is one of the largest in Patagonia and seemed to never end! Our campsite was right next to the glacier so we spent our evenings sitting on the rocks looking out over the massive sheet of ice.
One day we decided to do some exploring near the glacier and we found an ice cave! This one formed as a river coming down from the mountains above washed into the glacier and melted out a large hole. To get into the cave we had to climb down a small waterfall made by the river. We got soaking wet but it was one of the most amazing and beautiful things I have ever seen! Here is a picture of Nathan and me in the cave (look how blue it is inside!) and another of me climbing back out of the cave.
We saw so many other beautiful things on this hike too but I can´t fit all the pictures here!
Now we will try to do some more treks down here in southern Patagonia before we start heading back north. If we`re lucky, we might get to do the southernmost trek in the world!
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