This Makes No Sense At All

I've been quiet most of Feb and March. A sprained ankle slowed down my local hiking activity, and then got wrapped up with the trip to Torres del Paine. A side note re the sprained ankle. I was doing a training hike, with a 30 pound pack, hiking poles and a gps. I was holding both hiking poles in one hand, while looking at the gps in the other hand, all while walking down a muddy bank to a stream ford. A bad combination. Once my center of gravity got far enough out, there was no stopping the fall, though my ankle tried. I landed in the mud - head to toe, and bounced back up. No immediate pain, but by the time I had walked the six steep hilly miles to get out, I had substantially unmatched ankles. After a week with an ace bandage, and then an ankle brace, it felt fine. It made one change in our Patagonia trip. We have been using trail runners for hiking shoes for about five years, but this trip I used my boots, just for extra ankle insurance. We did a similar trip last year, and I...

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...