The End of the World
and Why It's Worth Going

Getting to Patagonia requires commitment. The journey from Montreal involves at least one long-haul flight to Buenos Aires or Santiago, a connecting flight to Punta Arenas or El Calafate, and then a drive through a landscape that gradually strips away everything familiar until what remains is wind, space, and sky in quantities that reorder your sense of scale. By the time you arrive at the edge of Torres del Paine or stand in front of the Perito Moreno glacier, you have earned the view in a way that a short-haul trip never requires.

This is part of what Patagonia gives you. The journey is not incidental — it is preparation. The remoteness, the effort, the gradual recession of the ordinary world behind you — all of it readies you for a landscape so extreme and so beautiful that people who have been there often struggle to describe it accurately. Not because it is indescribable, but because description implies a category it belongs to, and Patagonia belongs to no category you have previously encountered.

The Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia contains three granite towers that rise nearly 2,800 metres from the steppe — vertical, improbable, and so consistently dramatic that photographs of them look like they have been enhanced. They haven't been. The towers are genuinely that vertical, that colour, in that light. The park around them contains glaciers, turquoise lakes fed by glacial meltwater, condors riding thermals above the ridgelines, and guanacos — relatives of the llama — who regard the human visitors with aristocratic indifference.

The W Trek

The park's famous W Trek — named for the shape it traces on the map — is a four-to-five-day circuit through the park's most dramatic terrain: the Valle del Francés, the Grey Glacier, and the base of the Torres themselves. It is physically demanding and logistically complex. It is also one of the great hiking experiences in the world. The campsites — some basic, some with proper lodges — are booked months in advance. The weather changes with a speed and violence that requires respect and proper preparation. And the landscape, consistently, day after day, exceeds anything you brought to it in imagination.

Torres del Paine — the granite towers that have defined Patagonia in the imagination of every traveller who has reached them.

The Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park is one of the world's few advancing glaciers — it grows at roughly two metres per day, pushing into Lake Argentino, periodically calving house-sized blocks of ice into the water with a sound like a cannon. You can watch this from a series of elevated walkways directly in front of the glacier's face, and the experience is completely unlike anything else available on earth.

The scale defeats comprehension in the way that all truly enormous natural phenomena do. The glacier is five kilometres wide and sixty metres tall at its face — taller than a twenty-storey building, and that is merely what is visible above the waterline. The blue of the interior ice, when a block calves and the interior is briefly exposed, is a colour that has no equivalent in the palette of everyday life. It is the blue of compressed centuries, of ice that has been forming since before the first European set foot in the Americas.

El Calafate and the Argentinian steppe

The town of El Calafate is the base for Perito Moreno and the surrounding glaciers of Los Glaciares National Park — a small town on the shores of Lake Argentino that exists almost entirely to service the national park. The steppe between El Calafate and the park is part of the experience: flat, wind-scoured, vast, populated by rheas and guanacos and the particular quality of light that open landscapes produce in the late afternoon. Do not rush through it.

The Carretera Austral is a 1,240-kilometre road that runs through Chilean Patagonia from Puerto Montt in the north to Villa O'Higgins near the southern ice fields — a route through some of the most remote and beautiful landscape in the Americas. It was built by the Pinochet government between 1976 and 2000, through fjords and rainforests and mountains, and large sections of it are still unpaved. Driving it requires time, patience, and a vehicle with good clearance. It returns everything you bring to it and more.

The towns along the route — Futaleufú, known for whitewater rafting of legendary difficulty; Puyuhuapi, where a hot spring opens directly onto a fjord; Cochrane, the last proper town before the road runs out — each have the particular character of places that exist at the edge of the inhabited world. The people who live here chose to, and it shows in the way they engage with visitors: direct, generous, curious, entirely without the transactional quality of people whose livelihood depends on your presence.

Left: Perito Moreno — the face of a living glacier advancing into Lake Argentino. Right: the steppe — Patagonia between the mountains, vast and unhurried.

On my last morning in Torres del Paine I woke at 4am and hiked by headlamp to the mirador above the towers. The stars were still out when I arrived — the Southern Cross visible above the southern horizon in the way that nothing northern prepares you for. Over ninety minutes, the sky moved through every shade of darkness to grey to the first pale light, and then the sun cleared the horizon to the east and the towers lit up: first rose, then gold, then the raw grey-orange that is their natural colour in full light.

There were four other people at the mirador. Nobody spoke. The wind had dropped, which in Patagonia feels like a gift. The condors started their morning circles above the ridge, catching thermals that don't exist yet from the warmth of the rock as it heats.

I understood something then that I had been circling around since arriving in Patagonia: that the world's most extreme places are not hostile to human presence. They are simply indifferent to it. The towers were here before us and will be here after. The glacier advances and retreats on its own schedule. The condors ride thermals that have nothing to do with our plans or our timelines. Being in Patagonia is being reminded, usefully, that you are a guest in something very much larger than yourself.

That reminder is worth the journey. It is, in fact, the journey.

Go when you're ready for the world to be larger than you thought it was.