Torres del Paine

We’re at a Holiday Inn at the Santiago airport for the night, en route between the southern and northern ends of Chile. There’s about a month left of filled-in schedule before our spreadsheets go blank, and figuring out what the second half of our sabbatical will look like is the biggest question hovering over us. Alice is trying to figure out if we should go ziplining between buildings or scuba diving in the world’s deepest pool in Dubai (skydiving is off the table, at least for her).

I’m not sure where this comes from, but Patagonia has always felt particularly romantic to me: jagged mountain peaks, gauchos and condors, some notion of being unusually wild and beautiful. A friend from one of our hikes was here with her mom for a 60th birthday celebration, realizing a twenty-year dream. Her mom said it was everything she imagined and more. I feel the same way.

One of a hundred

The view of Lake Pehoe and the Cordillera Paine from our lodge was mesmerizing. I couldn’t help but to take pictures of the same scene over and over again, at each of our lunches and dinners, when we woke up in the morning, as we got ready for bed. But it turned out all of these photos didn’t end up being the same picture at all: the clouds over the mountains changed from minute to minute, the turquoise of the glacial lake from hour to hour. Some of my favorite moments from this week were opening the windows to our room, letting in the Patagonian wind, as we looked out over the lake.

The towers

The trail up towards Torres del Paine’s most famous viewpoint isn’t all that much more interesting than what one could find back home. But making the final turn of the ascent and seeing Las Torres come into view out of nowhere was a spectacular memory. Pictures don’t really capture how huge these peaks are and the drama in the landscape they create. On the way back down, our hiking partners told us their stories from Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and the other places they had been; inspiration for destinations in the next few months or years.

Back from Sarmiento

In many ways, Patagonia looked exactly like how I imagined it would: towering mountains in the distance, hikers making their way through the grassy steppes, thrashing wind. But in a few short days, we also found waterfalls, forests, glimpses of ice fields, and lakes in every shade of glacial blue.

Into the valley

On our last day, we hiked to the British Lookout in the heart of the massif, eight miles deep into the French Valley. Despite the long hours of Patagonian summer daylight, we had to move fast, and we passed more people on the trail than we had ever passed before. At the Mirador Britanico, we sat at the center of an enormous natural amphitheatre formed by the granite spires and glacier-covered mountains around us.

Postcard from Patagonia

Every time we stepped out of our hotel, it was like stepping into a postcard, and I wanted to capture that feeling. Before we left New York, I swapped out my kit lens on my camera with a tiny pancake lens and my aluminum full-height tripod with a little plastic one. We finally got our first use out of that tripod three months later; Alice was hankering for dinner after our nine-hour hike to Mirador Britanico, so it got packed back into my bag pretty quickly.