Torres del Paine in October carries two separate reputations: the crowds who arrive in January barely recognise the mountain from the weather window that arrives in late spring, when the queues at the hiker's hot springs are two days long and the campsites resemble weekend festivals. I walked the W Trek in the second week of October to confirm a different rumour: that the shoulder season offers the same granite towers, the same electric-blue glaciers and the same burnt-orange pampas but in a different register of silence. The refuges were thirty percent full. The ferries ran on time. The wind was still formidable — it always is — but the park service staff were willing to sit and talk at length about the changes they have seen in the ice since the eighties. I booked six months ahead and still found premium bunk spots at Chileno and Paine Grande, the two chokepoints on the central circuit.
