The Paine Circuit begins.

Nate and I postponed beginning our circuit for a day in order to hike to the base of the Torres del Paine, the sheer rock towers that give the Parque Nacional de Torres del Paine its name. In a fit of possible insanity, we decided to make a special effort to see the torres at dawn, when they are especially picturesque. To that end, we spent our first day hiking to a campsite an hour from the base of the torres, where we spent the night. We had planned to rise at the almost reasonable hour of five am, and make a quick trek to the look out point, but an overeager fellow trekker convinced us that we would be too late. To really see the torres at dawn, she said, we would need to rise at four am.

The next morning, as we hiked through the darkness with her, the extent of her overeagerness became apparent. While the days are long in Patagonia, they are not that long, and the sun does not rise at four. Also, it is very cold before the sun rises. We made our dark, cold way to the base of the torres, where we had plenty of time to enjoy pre-dawn views and practice our night photography. When the sun did finally rise, the views were, as promised, spectacular, with the rising sun briefly illuminating the torres with a striking orange glow.

We spent the rest of our long second day trekking ten kilometers to the start of the Paine Circuit, and reaching the starting point in time for lunch. After a well deserved hour of rest and stretching exercises, we set out for Puesto Seron, where we planned to camp next to an old puesto, a shelter that had been used for occasional overnights by workers on the ranches that surrounded Torres del Paine before it had been made into a national park. The walk to Puesto Seron was long but lovely, through fields filled with daisies. We arrived in the early evening, tired but mostly intact. While our bodies had made it through the long day, some key equipment was not so resilient. Nate's boots (loyal companions for ten years and three continents) were showing their age, as the heel and sole of one boot had begun to tear apart. We made some short-lived experimental repairs involving medical tape, but the future of our expedition seemed doubtful until a kindly park ranger supplied us with three precious, ancient tubes of super glue. We drained two of them, in a desperate attempt to keep the sole of the boot united with the upper portion. With one tube of super glue in reserve, we decided to press on the next morning to Lago Dickson.

The route to Lago Dickson took us over grassy foothills covered with thorny calafate bushes and mogotes. From the hills we got spectacular panoramic views of the light blue Lago Paine and the Paine range. We also had our first glacier sighting, and our first encounter with the fierce winds of the park. We also encountered for the first time several of our fellow trekkers who would be completing the circuit at the pace as us: a quiet, fast walking Chileno who carried two backpacks, one on his back and one on his front, and two rather dapper Frenchmen, who spent hours preparing cafe au lait each morning and took lengthy and elaborate smoke breaks on the trail.

At the end of an exhausting day, our first sight of the Lago Dickson campsite was most welcome. We climbed a morraine to see the campsite far below us, on a peninsula surrounded by a lake floating with icebergs calved off the Dickson Glacier. We spent a mostly peaceful night there, interrupted only by the occasional whinnying of a herd of horses pastured nearby, and by a group of Chileno college students, who lugged a giant bottle of whiskey out to Lago Dickson, where they offered around whiskey on the rocks until the bottle was drained. Sufficiently well-liquored, they proceeded to swim in icy Lago Dickson. One assured me later that they had only done it to get pictures of themselves swimming with the icebergs. -EMW