Torres del Paine is named for three granite towers standing 2,500 metres above the steppe of Chilean Patagonia, and the walk to their foot begins in the dark. You grind up a last slope of loose moraine to a small glacial tarn directly beneath them, and wait. If the sky holds, the first sun strikes all three at once and holds them deep red above you for a few minutes before they fade to grey. It refuses more often than it grants, though the weather turns inside an hour here and a dull dawn can open by mid-morning. Beside the towers stand the Cuernos, the horns, stacked the wrong way up: a cap of older dark rock sits on the younger pale granite that pushed up underneath. From the shore of Lake Pehoé they stand across turquoise water with the banding plain to see, and at a still first light the lake doubles them. Paine is not a Spanish word. It is Tehuelche for blue, most likely for these lakes.
The W trek links the towers, the French Valley and Grey Glacier in about eighty kilometres, sleeping in mountain huts between the legs. Its middle leg is the one no day visit reaches: in the French Valley avalanches come off the walls and boom down the slope all afternoon. At the far end Grey Glacier drops off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field into a lake of floating ice. The bergs turn turquoise in daylight, and a boat or the shore trail brings you under the cracked blue front. The eastern side is different country, open steppe with guanaco herds grazing across it. They are why the pumas are here, and why the cats hunt in the open and often by day, in the densest population of them recorded anywhere. Finding a puma is not about studying the ground. You watch the guanacos instead: heads up together, a stiff stare all in one direction, then the sharp bleat that means a cat is moving.