Patagonia begins where comfort ends. The wind that scours the Magallanes region is not a metaphor - it is a physical presence, a persistent adversary that can knock you sideways on an open ridge and turn a gentle downhill into an act of will. Trekkers call it 'the Patagonian handshake.'
The W Circuit in Torres del Paine National Park takes five days of walking across terrain that shifts from steppe to glacier moraine to lenga beech forest. The towers themselves - three granite columns of impossible verticality - are best seen at dawn when the light turns them pink and then orange and then the blinding white of morning.
The Grey Glacier extends 270 square kilometres into the park, its face calving blocks of 10,000-year-old ice into the lake below with a sound like distant artillery. Walking on it requires crampons and a guide who reads the ice's surface - the blue crevasses can be 30 metres deep, their colour a blue so deep it seems manufactured.
Sleep in the park's refugios: communal bunk rooms with wood stoves where hikers from a dozen countries compare blister treatments and share chocolate and argue pleasurably about the best coffee in Punta Arenas. The food is simple and enormous. The wine is Chilean and very good. Outside, the wind does not stop.