Wind

We got our first taste of the big bad Patagonia wind today, on our trek to Laguna Torre. Coming up over the final mounds of boulders upon the glacial lake that was our destination it suddenly picked up something fierce and we spent lunch hunkered behind a makeshift wall of stones we found stacked there, munching on avocado and cheese sandwhiches and watching a bird repeatedly attempt to fly against it, to absolutely no avail. In his introduction to Chatwins In Patagonia, Nicholas Shakespeare notes this:

You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and the jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora. Patagonia may also be described by its climate. The wind that blows with terrible force from October to March - in Chatwins expression, [stripping men raw] - made Antoine de Saint-Exuperys plane fly backwards instead of forward.

But my favorite excerpt from the book is Chatwins own which reading again now that I am here sums up this place perfectly. It is from a letter to his wife that he wrote while here in 1976:

On no previous journey am I conscious of having done more. Patagonia is as I expected but more so, inspiring violent bouts of love and hate. Physically it is magnificent, a series of graded steps or barricas which are the cliff lines of prehistoric seas and unusually full of fossilised oyster shells... In the east, you suddenly confront the great wall of the cordillera with bright turquoise lakes (some are milky white and others a pale jade green) with unbelievable colors to the rocks. Sometimes it seems that the Almightly has been playing at making Napolitan ice cream.

Now that we have tasted of this wind, Staci Jon and I feel a little less naive about what potentially (most likely, inevitably) awaits in Torre del Paine. Also, having hiked a 15 miles to Fitz Roy then 9 miles to Laguna Torre the next day, we feel we have built up some good physical stamina. So there are no illusions here and we like to believe being in El Chalten has helped us get a bit more mentally prepared. But today, we will be sitting on buses all day making our way back to Puerto Natales and looking forward to the rest.