You have decided that you want to hike the famous W in Patagonia. Your friends and family may think you are crazy, but do not worry – the W is an excellent trail for beginners! This Beginner Backpackers Guide will help you plan your hike on the W in Torres del Paine!
What You Need to Know: The Basics
The Trail: The W got its name because it is shaped like the letter “W”. As simple as it sounds, I didn’t know this when I started planning our trip. This is helpful to know because there are parts of the trail that can be hiked out and back, resulting in less time that you need to carry your big pack. As a beginner hiking the W in Torres del Paine, the less time you need to carry your heavy pack, the better!
Planning Required: You need a reservation for all of the campgrounds in Torres del Paine. This means that you need to do some planning in advance (at least 6-months in advance for high season travel!) Unfortunately, you can’t show up and expect to find places to camp. This trip requires planning, sorry spontaneous travelers! This is trip is a planners dream (a.k.a me). Be on the lookout for our post detailing the three websites that you need to stalk to book your campgrounds.
Water: The rivers in the park are glacier fed which means the water is perfectly fine to drink and refreshingly delicious! As beginner we loved hiking the W because we passed many streams and did not need to add water weight to our bags. We only needed to carry one water bottle between the two of us, as long as we stopped to fill it up at every stream crossing.
Bonus Tip: Attend the Three o’clock talk in Puerto Natales the day before your hike at Erratic Rock. We learned a lot of valuable information during this hour long free presentation. One helpful tip we learned is that garbage bags are the best form of waterproofing your pack. An unfortunate reality of doing this is hike is that you’re going to get wet at some point. There really is no way around it unless you’re truly blessed by the travel gods. Your rain cover alone will not be able to withstand the Patagonia winds. Erratic Rock has a “free” box to help reuse items from other hikers instead of buying new and producing more waste. We were able to grab some garbage bags and a small butane tank for our stove.
Our Itinerary – 4 Days, 4 Nights
Day Zero: We took the 11:30am BusSur transit from Puerto Natales to Pudeto. This bus stops at Laguna Amarga to first get your park ticket (~20,000 CLP per person).
The advantage of being on the 11:30am bus is that it is less crowded than the popular 7:00am buses from Puerto Natales.
Once we arrived in Pudeto, we walked to Salta Grande to see an impressive waterfall. It is about a 15 minute walk from Pudeto to Salta Grande. Warning: It can be extremely windy.
We had some more time to wait until the 4:15pm ferry to Paine Grande, so we enjoyed tomato soup and tea in the small café at Pudeto.
We boarded the ferry, dropped of our bags and then paid for our tickets. (20,000 CLP per person). The ferry drops you off right at Paine Grande. We checked into our campground and looked for a spot that was protected from the wind. We did the best we could securing the tent as we would be camping here for two nights. Word to the wise, your tent is right next to other campers. Unfortunately, there are groups who like to stay up and be a little loud. Bring either ear plugs or earphones that are comfortable enough to sleep with. You will thank us. This will also help you sleep through the strong winds.
Day 1: Hike from Paine Grande to Glacier Grey and Return to Paine Grande
18-mile hike, 9-hours
Okay this may be your longest day of hiking, but the big advantage is that you only need to bring a day pack! Our camp was already set up camp at Paine Grande for two nights, so we carried our light day bags out to Refugio Grey.
The hike to Refugio Grey is beautiful. As you hike along the water the views of the glacier get better and better. It takes about 3-hours to reach Refugio Grey. When you are about halfway there you will get to a lookout point where you can see the Patagonia ice field.
We hiked out an hour past the campground and we were able to see a picturesque suspension bridge. This bridge is technically part of the “O” trail, but we recommend seeing the bridge because it was a highlight of our trip. Be sure to plan extra time to add this into your hike!
We returned to Paine Grande and enjoyed the amenities of a hot shower, power outlets, and WiFi while cooking our dinner in the kitchen. Paine Grande was our favorite campground on the trail – who would have thought there would be so many amenities while camping?!
Day 2: Hike from Paine Grande to Italiano Campground, and then hike to Britannica Viewpoint
2-hour hike with big pack, 5-hour hike with day bag = 7 hours total; 13-miles
It was time to pack up our gear and move to the next campground. We were a little tired from our first day of hiking, so we were happy that only 2-hours of our day were spent hiking with our big packs! The hike from Paine Grande to Italiano is stunningly beautiful, but it was also the busiest part of the trail that we encountered. It seems that we left Paine Grande at the same time as a lot of other hikers!p
After crossing what was possibly the scariest bridge in the park, we set up camp and got our day packs ready for the hike to the Britannica viewpoint.
The hike up to the view point takes about 2-2.5 hours. This part of the hike has some of the most elevation gain that you will experience on the trail, but do not worry its not too bad and you are only carrying a light day pack. The viewpoint at Britannica is supposed to be stunning, but unfortunately it was cloudy and started to snow when we arrived.
We hiked back to the campground in the rain and geared up for one of the coldest nights of our trek. Italiano Campground is a free campground and doesn’t have any amenities compared to Paine Grande. This is probably your more traditional style of camping, but we were missing the amenities of Paine Grande. There is no running water and no warm building where you can cook your food. We had to huddle in a small shelter to cook and packed our own toilet paper for the make shift toilets. Our stay at Italiano also happened to be New Years Eve. We shared a little wine for the occasion and boiled water to put in our Nalgene bottles to keep warm!
Day 3: Hike from Italiano Campground to Chileno Campground
7-hour hike with big pack, 11-miles
Our third day on the trail was a big day – 11-miles with our big packs. We got an early start in Italiano and packed up our tent. We didn’t eat breakfast and started hiking toward Frances Campground. It only takes about 30-minutes to reach Frances. We highly recommend stopping here to eat breakfast and use their bathrooms. Frances may have the NICEST bathrooms you have ever seen while camping.
After breakfast we continued hiking to Cuernos. Cuernos is another popular campground to stay at. It took us 1-hour to hike from Frances to Cuernos. We stopped at Cuernos to rearrange our packs once we realized that my bag was considerably heavier than Chris’s pack. (eye-roll)
Cuernos to Chileno is the longest part of the trek. There is some elevation climb immediately after leave Cuernos. About 2-3 hours from Cuernos you will reach the shortcut to Chileno. This saves you a lot of time on your hike to Chileno so make sure you don’t miss it. We didn’t pass any other hikers on the shortcut, so we worried that we were going the wrong way. The worry was unnecessary since it is nearly impossible to get lost on this trail!
When you are about 6-hours into the hike the elevation starts to increase. We were thrilled when the shortcut met up with the other trail that started from the Hotel las Torres. At this point we knew we were close to our final campground, Chileno. There is one turn on this trail that is very memorable because you can see Chileno in the distance – it was an unbelievably rewarding feeling.
We arrived at Chileno around 2pm. There was plenty of daylight left so if you have the energy to set up camp and take the hike to the Torres del Paine viewpoint. We opted for a hot shower instead!
The Chileno campground has wooden platforms to set up your tent on. They gave us a bucket with a hammer and nails to hold our tent to the platform. We were unluckily assigned the platform at the very top of the hill. Getting to our tent required some effort!
Another downside of Chileno is that cooking isn’t allowed there. We recommend packing food that doesn’t need to be cooked or splurging to buy the dinner at their camp. Our dehydrated food didn’t taste all that great after trying to hydrate it with warm water compared to using boiling water.
Even with a few downsides, there are some big advantages to staying at Chileno. This was the closest (open) campground to the Torres del Paine viewpoint during our trip. Which makes it possible to hike to the viewpoint for sunrise, which was exactly what we planned to do!
Day 4: Sunrise hike from Chileno Campground to Torres del Paine, then hike back to Torres del Paine Information Center
3.5 hours with day pack to Torres del Paine view point, 1.5 hours with big pack to Information Center = 5 hours total, 11-miles
We started our sunrise hike at 3:30am, which in hindsight may have been a little too early for the early January sunrise. It took us about 1 hour and 45 mins to reach the Torres. As we climbed, we thought we were going to luck out with a clear sky and excellent sunrise. Unfortunately, our luck and the weather changed drastically. By the time we were above tree line it started snowing. We were in a complete snowstorm by the time we reached the viewpoint and there was no view to be seen.
We had packed plenty of warm clothes and a space blanket in our day packs. We ended up waiting in the snow for 1-hour before deciding to head back to camp. It took awhile to start feeling our fingers and toes again. Even though we didn’t see a sunrise or the torres, we really enjoyed the sunrise hike and it was worth it for the experience. We made it back to Chileno around 8am and fell asleep for a few more hours in our tent.
After our morning nap, we packed up our gear and headed back to the trail to hike to the Hotel las Torres. The hike took about 1.5 hours and it was entirely downhill. We encouraged the other hikers on their way up and enjoyed some good people watching as we saw people trying to hike to the viewpoint in jeans and sandals. The hike to the Mirado de las Torres can be done in one day from the hotel Las Torres. This is a great option if you don’t plan or have enough time to hike the entire W.
The weather had cleared once we reached the hotel and we had some celebratory drinks and french fries in the hotel. Many people take the 1:00pm bus back to Puerto Natales, but we booked ourselves on a 2:00pm bus. This gave us extra time to relax and to take a nap at Chileno after the sunrise hike. We had plenty of time and could have made the 1:00pm bus easily, but we enjoyed some relaxing at the hotel and information center. We also highly recommend paying for the shuttle that will take you from the information center to Laguna Amarga. This would be a long walk along a dusty road and it was totally worth it to pay the 3,000 CLP per person.
Once back in Puerto Natales we showered and attempted to do some laundry in our hotel room (We stayed at the Puma House and highly recommend it!). Then we shared a pizza dinner at Base Camp – a great way to wrap up the W!
