Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine (1 of 3)

It’s been a long time since the last post, because I was in Torres Del Paine national park. I was there volunteering with an association called Agrupación Medio Ambiental Torres Del Paine. There was too much there to tell and I have little faith in the internet connection here, so I decided to make more than one post.

One is about park itself, one about the work with AMA, and one about the wildlife. That should work.

The hiking was incredible. We worked cycles of eleven days on, four days off. I myself worked two of the eleven day cycles, and hiked for four days. I also hiked in the evenings, and we did one early morning hike to the top of Cerro Paine Chico (in the back of the picture below). The yellow flower is Mullinum spinosum, and the red is Rumex acetellosa. This is a typical burned lowland.

The ascent of Cerro Paine Chico was our early morning hike. We started at 0120 and climbed by flashlight, and summited at 0510. This is a photo of another volunteer, Elias from Spain, at the top of Cerro Paine Chico with a nice view of the famous Torres Del Paine. The Cerro Nido de Condor, and a small piece of the Monte Almirante Nieto.

On my four days off, I did a nice hike to some parts of the park that I hadn’t yet seen before. This is a photo from my favorite part, the Valle Bader. From left to right, the mountains in the picture are the Cuerno Norte, La Mascara, La Hoja, and La Espada. The best part of the Valle Bader is that I didn’t see a single other tourist in there.

And this is the view coming down from Valle Bader, with the Lago Nordenskjold and a “fosforito” shrub in the foreground. A very nice place, and the Cuerno Este side has no trail at all.

This is another one of my favorite parts of the park – a small, easily accessed, and little-seen area to the South of Guarderia Laguna Amarga. Over there, I found interesting plants, rocks, animals, and even cave paintings.

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