Las Torres
Las Torres del Paine (Towers of Paine) are one of the marquee features of Patagonian trekking. This view was actually the one that caused Sarah to conscript us all to go on this particular adventure. We never saw to top of the tallest tower, which is the one furthest to the left in this picture. I've seen plenty of photos, though, where you couldn't even see the bottoms of the spires. Plus, though the hike is nothing to sneeze at, I thought that most of the accounts I'd read were overblown. It's a day, but it was not anywhere close to the hardest thing I've hiked.
2 Comments:
Very nice capture! Quite intriguing! This looks like a man made body of water (with all that loose gravel around). Or is that the natural erosion of the rocks? I like the way the sunlight itself has seemed to have eroded and rolled into the water. Where exactly is this?
Most definately not man-made! Torres del Paine is a national park in southern Chile. This lake is the glacial runoff from the glacier below the spires (it's the end of summer in this photo, so the galcier has melted back quite a bit). The ground up rock in the water from the glacier is what gives it that blue color. All the rock and gravel was dropped from the glacier when it started receeding. This is called a morraine. The morraine forms a natural dam behind which is the lake. Many glaciers end with a little lake like this. They even have a special name for this kind of lake: a glacial tarn.
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