This Makes No Sense At All

Thought it might aid some future trekker if I just list things as we learn them. It is now early Dec 2008, and we have reservations into Santiago, Chile for March, and back home from Buenos Aires. Now we have to fill in the in between. We got the start and end locations from a friend who visited Chile and Argentina last year, though he wasn't trekking Torres del Paine. Some other friends did do the trek about 15 years ago, so we started by borrowing all their old guide books and maps. Since then we got our own Lonely Planet Trekking in Patagonia , and a recent Torres del Paine Trekking Map . Since I'm going to keep updating this post, to keep all the Patagonia info in one spot, and try to keep a change log here: Change log: 12/14/16 *** very important*** all campsites now require advance reservations, for example at this date, all of January is already reserved. See Campsite Reservations post below for more details. 12/2014 *** important *** Any US citizen entering...

We finished the California part of the Pacific Crest Trail with this trip. Nice hike, though the altitude starting at the high end gave me a reaction somewhat like mild hyperthermia - headache the 1st day and sluggish and slow thinking the second. At a PopTart break, I was so beat, I grabbed a 2 minute nap in the trail: The section south from the northernmost crossing of the Kern River could use some trail maintenance. I really hate having to crawl under a tree with my pack on, but it is not quite as bad as pushing or pulling it thru. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a wolverine in the upper part of Cow Creek. Susan spotted it first, and asked if it was a bear cub. With that long bushy dark tail, it did not compute. We watched it run straight up the slope from the creek, about 60 feet away. Dark brown and golden brown with a fringe of sunlit hair on the sides. We weren't fast enough to get the cameras out, so another undocumented sighting. We tried the SticPic a ...

I'm sitting here thwarted because once again nature has cancelled our attempt to finish the one 50 mile piece of the Pacific Crest Trail that we have yet to complete in California. It's just a short segment from Kennedy Meadows to Cottonwood Pass, and when we finished our 250 mile segment from Agua Dulce to Kennedy Meadows on May 19th, our plan was to come back and do the Cottonwood Pass stretch on June 6, after the snow level had dropped sufficiently. Well, several days after we got home there was a big storm, and the Cottonwood Pass area got several feet of fresh snow instead of melting off. So, we rescheduled once again for June 22. We were all packed up and ready to leave, but checked to see if firefighters were still letting pct hikers go thru the small fire just north of Kennedy Meadows. That fire became a monster overnight and has gone from about 300 acres to 3000+. Wildfire Today: Clover fire approaches Hwy. 395 Hikers are barred from the pct, though they can detou...