Torres del Paine is a cluster of granite mountains rising 2,500 metres straight off the steppe of Chilean Patagonia, named for its three towers, which are walked to before dawn on the best-known trek in South America. The towers are pale granite pushed up through the ground twelve million years ago and stripped bare by ice; around them stand the Cuernos, the horns, with a dark cap of older rock sitting on top of the younger pale granite, which is the opposite of how mountains usually stack. The classic moment is the towers at first light. You leave camp in the dark, climb the final slope of loose moraine, and wait at the edge of a small glacial lake directly under the three spires until the sun hits them and the grey rock turns orange for a few minutes. Paine is not Spanish; it is the Tehuelche word for blue, most likely for the lakes, which are the colour of glacial milk under grey granite.
The W trek links the towers, the French Valley and Grey Glacier in about 80 kilometres, four or five days with the wind as the main obstacle; the longer O circuit goes right round the back of the massif. Grey Glacier comes down from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field into a lake full of icebergs that turn turquoise in daylight, and a boat on Lake Grey or the shoreline trail brings you close to its cracked blue face. From the shore of Lake Pehoé the Cuernos stand across turquoise water with their banding plain to see. On the eastern side the park opens onto steppe where herds of guanaco graze, and they are why the pumas are here: this is the densest puma population in the world, and the cats have grown used enough to people that sightings are now the point of winter trips, when snow holds their tracks. The bleached grey trunks on the eastern slopes are burnt forest, from two fires started by visitors. In April the southern beech turns red under the granite, and the wind finally eases.