Paine Mountains and Grey Glacier

This morning we shift locations, depart the friendly folks at Hosteria Lago and make for accommodations at Lago Grey Hotel to get on more intimate terms with the great towers.

The base of the Paine Mountains live cheek by jowl with Grey Glacier, and the great spiked mountains brood above the lake and the glacier that spills from their left like a beckoning blue hand. This close to the mountains you find yourself stopping again and again to look at the spectacle, the mountain’s razor sharp peaks thrusting into the sky as if straining to perforate it.

This is where we began our kayaking trip the day before, paddling out of the mouth of the lake into the Grey River itself away from the Towers. Today we're moving closer, toward the lake’s shore. Doing this require’s an hour’s walk from the hotel across flat land, unless the weather refuses to cooperate, then it takes longer.

We passed the Darwin Travel Tour Bus as a contingent of Asian tourists emerge walking into the prairie and forest, their umbrellas popping up like mushrooms. Beyond is a sign that reads Mirador Lago and with a cluster of other tourists we trek over a bridge that takes us to the river’s swift waters and through a forest of immense oaks, birch and pine before finding the gravel shoreline and the lake itself.

Here, so near the triumvirate of the towers, glacier, and lake, you stand in a zone where weather defies constancy. We walk another mile across a broad sandbar to get a closer look at the glacier. Far away a single incandescent iceberg bobs in the water at the base of the mountain. The wind blows wet gusts in our faces yet somehow the sun smiles on the towers.

On the other side of the sandbar I hiked up the cliff above the lake to get a better look at the iceberg, but it seemed to retreat the closer I moved toward it. While there I watched dark clouds rapidly forming over the glacier and thought I had better get back to Cyn. At the sandbar, the wind was gaining speed and the mist had begun whipping sideways. We crossed through the gusts back over the sandbar tramping on scree that had been smashed tens of thousands of years ago beneath the icy hand of Grey Glacier. The rain began pelting down as we headed toward the trees, but still a few tourists straggled past us toward the lake. A girl of 12 went by in a white coat so big and round it looked like a giant snowball. A father carried his three year old son on his shoulders and hugged his freezing wife, and a mother with bright blue eyes and blonde hair forged into the storm singing with her husband and two young daughters, “Doe a deer a female deer …”

By the time we made it back to the hotel we were as soaked as Barrier Reef sponges. All the remaining day we watched the rain and wind do its wild work. I was glad we hadn’t chosen this day to kayak and sorry for anyone who had signed up for the hail of watery pellets that were descending now. And where were the children and parents we had passed coming back? The glacier had already disappeared and, as if magician had gone to work, minutes later the mountains did too. Like them, we were soon caped in mist and pounding rain.

This made us grateful for the Lago Grey Hotel. Our room was palatial compared with the hotels we had been sleeping in for the past several weeks; floor to ceiling windows, real water pressure that was instantly hot, sumptuous towels and a bed the size of Connecticut. We showered and devoured a meal of salmon and veggies at the immense restaurant and watched the blackening sky while the rain ran down windows 25 feet high like a waterfall.

Back in our room, gazing at the show outside and imagining our rich amenities, I wondered how human beings of any kind ever found their way here, and survived in a place so unforgiving. Why would they want to? And then I remembered all that we had seen and done the past nine days, and understood the answer.

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