Torres del Paine: O-Circuit - Day 4

My Experience

Part of today is reaching the highest point of the whole track, Paso John Gardner. When we leave camp, it’s raining slightly. Not too much but enough to get soaked while we're walking.

The higher we get the more the rain turns into snow. Once we reach the tree line everything around us turns white with more coming from the sky. Some markers for the path are barely visible. Darryn later tells us that he followed our footprints because he could hardly see any markers.

We must’ve picked the perfect day to cross this pass. We will later find out that the hikers, who crossed the day before, as well as the ones who did the crossing the day after us had super nice sunny weather. Mesmerising views of mountains and the massive ice field inclusive.

You get a glimpse of our views from the videos. We can see for 50m ahead, at the most. We only realised that we’ve crossed the pass already because we felt that we were going downhill instead of up. We keep walking without any breaks because as soon as we come to a halt we get cold quickly.

Once we reach the tree line on the other side snow becomes rain. All the white around us disappears into a rainy, green autumn forest scenery. Beyond the trees we can soon see a huge blue mass shining through. My mind was writing it off as a huge lake at first, not giving it any more thought.

The closer we get, we realise that this huge mass is a glacier: the Grey glacier. Part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the second largest adjacent ice field of the world outside of the poles. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this. It leaves me speechless, overwhelmed, utterly humbled, full of gratitude. I'm hiding it but the sudden rush of emotions waters my eyes a little bit.

With good weather this spectacular site is already visible from the John Gardner pass, including beautiful mountain ranges surrounding it. We had zero visibility at the top. But since we had absolutely no idea what was around us and went into all of this without any expectations, we also had no idea that it would even be possible to see the glacier from up there.

Until the hikers we meet in Camp Paso show us pictures from their crossing the day prior to this one. It does feel a bit like a slap in the face at first, looking at their pictures. But in the end it was good exactly the way it happened.

The crossing was still kind of cool, reminding me very much of the first day. This time without our ridiculous mistakes and, believe it or not, a bit of fun.