The climb up Valle Frances was long and difficult, and I think depending on what time of day you ask, Lucy might or might not call it at all worth it. The first mirador was that of Glacier Frances, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as the mountain behind it which was literally crackling with activity. It’s surfaces were home to smaller glaciers, and massive cornices that were more than happy to occasionally slip loose, filling the valley with thunder. It’s funny, though.. The sound is huge, and you look up and see a little puff of white. I guess that distant little puff is from a chunk of ice the size of an office building.

The whole scene is that much more incredible when you realize that with a 45 degree turn of the head, you to from a turbulent world of ice and rock, to lush green and blue views of placid lake Nordernskjold.

The mirador at the top of Valle Francis / Mirador Britanico was superb. A wraparound diorama of several different kinds of geological processes, like some kind of display case in a museum. Cuernos, Torres and Glaciers. This is a place of extreme geological turmoil, still playing out in the slowest of motion – the painted walls showing evidence of buried streaks of molten rock broken away to show its now hardened veins which reach like claws into the surrounding mountains – many types of rock converging in one strange storm of stone. Evidence of glaciers now gone, leaving remarkably smooth and elegant curves and transitions from vertical walls to the valleys below.

And then there was the long walk back down the valley and on to Refugio Paine Grande, ending a painful 11 hours on foot.

The final point of the W is the mirador to Glacier Grey. Another long out and back hike – 14 miles round trip along Lago Grey in the wind and the drizzling rain. Actually. We had remarkable weather the entire trip. We were extremely lucky that our only short spell of bad weather was really not that bad at all. After all, Patagonia is known for terrible and shifting weather. We ran in to a friend from Chaltén at refugio cuernos, our shared halfway point. They’d been hiking the opposite direction, from west to east, which had them in rain and wind and fogged out views the whole time. We talked to another girl this morning who just got off the hike who reported that both the Torres del Paine and the upper Valle Frances miradors were completely whited out with clouds. We were extremely fortunate to have little more than spitting morning rain for the entire hike, and miraculous views of every major feature of the hike. Even cold, wet and windy glacier grey seemed to be almost improved by this change in the weather. The little icebergs birthing off the glacier into the tiny bay below, drifting off and slowly, slowly melting away in this private little pocket of forever.

The hike ended for us, as it does for many, with a 30 minute boat ride across Lago Pehoé and then the long 3 hour bus ride back to Puerto Natales. After having such an immersive view of the park, of this personal universe of rock and water, we saw it from a distance as a whole. It was the actors returning to the stage to bow, no longer in character. We could see it all, the valley where we started, the towering cuernos, Valle Frances… It seemed so small from a distance – and I think that there lies the power of Torres del Paine: The drastic diversity of experiences, of its views, of it’s lessons in eternity in rock and in water, and all of it in a tiny, restless little crumb of earth.

And as we drove home, the sun set for hours, through herds of hundreds and hundreds of grazing guanacos…