On an unseasonably clear and blue day for April, our flight silently drifted over the crop of snow covered mountains.  The huge mass of snow seemed to trail its way down and in-between the peaks for miles and miles.  It shined up at us with bright lightbulb whites, and hummed with deep polar blues.  Striations and corduroy lines streak the top of the snow like untouched groomers before the first chair.  Our plane continues to descend lower over this new landscape at the edge of the earth and we watch, mesmerized, as the snow continues to etch it’s way through the landscape until suddenly it comes to a halt at the end of a lake.  It takes another moment to wrestle the reality that this mass of snow is actually a giant mass of ice.  We’re gazing down at our first Patagonian glacier.  And we couldn’t wait to get closer. 

Down here, at the edge of the world, God and Mother Nature are having a little more fun.  The daylight has a crispness to it that adds extra contrast to everything.  The sky feels bluer, and the leaves are richer shades of earth and fire.  Sunlight warms us like a sip of hot tea. Something so small as pebbles on the ground cast an impossibly long shadow.  Time slows down, or moves backwards; we’re not sure and it doesn’t matter.  Patagonia is dramatic and intense.  It lives just outside the grasp of the normal rules of everyday civilization.  And we haven’t even left the staging area yet.  This we come to know, just walking the sleepy streets and waterfronts of Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales.  

That first morning instead of the smell of freshly brewing coffee or crisping bacon, glacially cold air from the top of Torres sliced through an open window to jolt us awake.  Laced with each gust were geysers of steam from a horse’s nose poking his head into the room.  In the early dawn light outside, fields of grass and strings of hiking trails were covered with a thick icy frost that would stick with us well into the afternoon.  After a gruelingly long uphill slug, which we refused to admit was actually only half over once we reached the top; our summit at the Torres del Paine that day was a religious experience.  The three towers erupted out of the mountainside like an altar on the far end of a milky candied blue lake.  Pilgrims are scattered among the rocks offering prayers.  Their camera lenses flashed like candles being lit in the naves.  A silent reverence blankets the basin while the wind plays hymns off the rock faces towering around us like organ pipes.  Just then, snow begins to fall.