Skip to content

Torres del Paine W-Walk – The three Towers – Day 5

It’s the last day of the W-Walk and the highlight of the day will be the “Torres del Paine” itself, those three towers which gave the national park its name. While most people visit the towers on a day trip from the “Hosteria Las Torres” the walk from the “Torres” campsite up to the viewpoint is only one hour. This gives you the opportunity to get up early and be at the towers when the sun is rising.

First I was planning to walk up to the viewpoint for sunrise and set my alarm for 6am. However, the wind outside my tent changed my mind. There were strong gusts of wind during the whole night. They were so loud that I woke up from them a couple of times although I usually have a very deep sleep. I was a bit scared a tree will fall down on my tent so exposed was it here on top of the mountain. When waking up at 6am I thought there is no way I’m getting up and walk in the dark and strong wind like this. Probably I get blown away and nobody will ever find me.

When it became daylight I got up and had a look around. The wind was indeed quite strong but the sound of it was even worse than the wind itself. I left my backpack in the tent and made my way up to the viewpoint. While being up there I was running into two handfuls of other people. Two Spanish guys even came here for sunrise and said I haven’t missed much since its cloudy and the sun didn’t come out. I’m really wondering if the three towers are actually a good spot to take sunrise pictures at this time of the year. The sun is not rising behind the towers but on the opposite side of the valley. There it was covered by other mountains until 9:30am or so. The two guys were already waiting a couple of hours just for the clouds to disappear and the sun to come out to get a perfect shot of the mountains. They were already half frozen and jumped around to keep warm. I joint them waiting for an hour or so but then I gave up since there were more and more clouds coming.

Back at the campsite I packed my tent and started to hike down to the “Hosteria Las Torres”. On the way I met a few people from my travel group. The guards had warned them to come up here because of the strong wind but I told them it’s actually not too bad and they should continue to the viewpoint. In total maybe only a third of our group went up the mountain today. The others were too exhausted and preferred to have a lazy day drinking coffee in the hotel.

On the last meters of the trail I slipped and fell down. Unfortunately this ripped two holes into my rain trouser and I was not amused about it since it’s the second day I’m wearing them and they shouldn’t rip that easily. When I’m back in Germany in the middle of April I will try to claim a guarantee case on them.

Since I more or less only needed to walk down today I was the first one finishing the W-Walk.  Actually only five people walked the full W and two the full circuit. The rest was doing either no hiking at all or only day trips. I arrived at the “Hosteria Las Torres” around 1pm and spend the time waiting for the others by cleaning myself a bit, changing cloth, having some lunch in the restaurant and talking to other people chilling out there.

When everybody else was down in the late afternoon we drove to the ferry to pick up Ross and Stuart who did the full circuit in the Torres del Paine National Park. Afterward we went back to the base camp at “Lago Perhoé” where we had a nice group dinner in the associated cozy restaurant and exchanged our adventures of the last days.

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

You may use basic HTML in your comments. Your email address will not be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS

301 Moved Permanently

Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.