atagonia's wind may be unlike any other. We got blasted, again, midway into a tranquil hike to Lago Sarmiento. My guide, Natalie Grabinsky, and I were following a quiet trail in the scrubby steppe, blessed by sunshine, in the shadow of the glacial Andes. Descending a rolling hill, we came upon Sarmiento's shoreline--a white ring of coral ledges that resembled a moonscape. The water was uncommonly blue.
        This peace would be fleeting, as fury could be glimpsed in western skies. Within minutes, a howling, waterlogged gale transformed Sarmiento's surface into whitecapped turbulence. We were barely able to scramble into rain gear that had seemed unnecessary baggage when departing an hour earlier. To be sure, Chile's Torres del Paine National Park is no place for loose-fitting caps. Halfway through our journey, we had accepted a basic fact of life: If there's no wind, it's not Patagonia.
        These gusts were different from anything I had ever experienced. Our Lan Chile flight's descent into Chile's southernmost city, Punta Arenas, felt like riding a bicycle down an escalator, albeit with the frigid Magellan Strait churning below. (Farther south, sailors dub the treacherous winds off Cape Horn the "Roaring Forties.") We had assumed on arriving that the gusts would be temporary but we woke to them every morning and walked in them each day, all week. Although they moderated briefly a few times, they always revved back up.
        Yet we acclimated. One afternoon, my wife returned from a drenching horseback ride along the Patagonian steppe, smiling. She said it was like a cleansing session. "Surrounded by mountains, you feel you are in this immensity, this pampa grande," she declared.
        We even managed deep nightly sleep as gusts gathered beneath the Andes on the other side of Lake Pehoe and slammed into our room's picture windows. The Explora Hotel's lenga-wood structure creaked and sometimes felt like a ship rocking at sea. Miraculously, the double windowpanes survived the assaults to offer remarkable morning views when the clouds lifted off the mountains.

        Returning to the Andes

        What drew us to this land of gauchos at the bottom of the hemisphere? Toting our seven-month-old baby, Emma? And what makes us want to go back?
        We were returning to the Andes after prior memorable trips. In recent years, we'd driven through Argentina's Mendoza vineyards to the base of Aconcagua, the hemisphere's highest peak, and skied in Chilean resorts La Parva and Valle Nevado, only an hour's harrowing drive from Santiago.

* The Explora Hotel, a refuge from the wind.

        Moreover, we'd read plenty about Torres del Paine in advance. A passage in a popular travel guide to South America's national parks described its ensemble of glaciers, jagged peaks, beech forests, lakes, and Andean desert as "spellbinding ... setting standards of sheer sensory impact against which all other parks are thereafter measured."
        We couldn't disagree. From the north, facing the Explora Hotel, we looked across Lake Pehoe's whitecaps to the Paine Massif. Dominating the right side of the canvas were three duotone peaks dubbed Los Cuernos, or horns. Their pinkish-gray granite rose into black sedimentary spires peaking at 8,530 feet. On the left loomed the 10,000-foot Paine Grande, with its beard of hanging glaciers. These summits may seem unimpressive compared to the forty-five 20,000-foot peaks of the northern Andes, but, as our hotel was only 200 feet above sea level, the vertical impact was dazzling.
        Torres del Paine (TOR-ehs del PIE-nay) is one of thirty national parks that make up 20 percent of Chile's territory. It was designated parkland in 1959 and was named a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve in 1978. Annual visitors have grown steadily from a mere 5,000 two decades ago to possibly 80,000 this year, with most coming between December and February.
        This is hardly crush level. California's Yosemite Park with 760,000 acres (slightly larger than Torres' 600,000 acres) was choked with 3.6 million visitors last year, or 45 times more people. Still, Torres' resource-strapped rangers struggle to maintain roads, trails, and campgrounds.

        Natural oddities

        With four microclimates--steppe, Andean desert, deciduous forest with beech trees and some cyprus, and alpine--Torres packs abundant and accessible nature into a concentrated area. Our arrival in the quiet week before Christmas coincided with early summer, when delicate lady's slippers, porcelain orchids, and mudbush bloom. The lagoons teemed with newly hatched black-necked swans, Chilean flamingos, upland geese, and ruddy ducks.
        Ostrich-like rheas and hares scampered in cluster grasses and low shrubs, and spindly legged guanacos grazed everywhere with their wobbly, newborn chulengos. Several thousand of the three-hundred-pound cameloids, relatives of the llama and alpaca, roam the park. On our first morning, we came upon herds right by the roadbed, unintimidated by our van or a Nikon-flashing mammal.
        In a faint mist, we began a seven-kilometer hike to the Blue Lagoon by following a sheep farmer's perimeter fence up a modest hill. Soon, we came upon a dazed chulengo entangled in the barrier's horizontal wires. Two adult females looked on, distressed. They hissed as our guide and a guest struggled to free the baby and lay it on the ground. It was maimed in the rear hip and couldn't stand. There was little hope. In time, the adults would move on, and the carcass would be consumed by the park's condors or perhaps a fox.
        The desperate scene set a somber tone for the hike. Sure we were in the wild, and stuff happens. But this tragedy was man-made. The adults leap the fences effortlessly, leaving their young to try, futilely, to ram themselves through.
        Our guide, Pedro Moita, explained that pumas are guanacos' natural enemy, but they only eat their own kill. During a recent winter, 70 percent of newborn guanacos scientists collared for research had been preyed upon by the park's fifty pumas. These stealthy mountain lions are also the bane of sheep farmers, who flout protective laws to hunt them.

The icy bay was framed by a sheer granite cliff, soaring mountains, and blue sky with wisps of feather and UFO-shaped clouds.

        "To see a puma is a gift of nature," another guide, AndrÄ Labarca, exclaimed the following morning. AndrÄ, 24, is an extreme mountain climber who thinks nothing of sleeping nights in a cot rigged on ropes off a cliff. He was leading us on a gentler outing, a hike to Grey Glacier. From the trailhead, we crossed a river on a swaying suspension bridge and walked through a beech forest. AndrÄ spotted a red-tailed austral parakeet perched on a branch overhead; it seemed an unlikely species for this frigid habitat, I thought.
        Soon, the forest canopy ended, dropping us onto a sandy shore abutting a turquoise bay, filled with floating, blue-streaked icebergs. Their color came from oxygen that has been trapped in the ice for thousands of years. These shards were merely chipped teeth from the glacier behind them. The icy bay was framed by a sheer granite cliff, soaring mountains, and blue sky with wisps of feather and UFO-shaped clouds. AndrÄ told us that these cloud formations appear when winds aloft exceed 200 MPH. This seemed entirely credible, since more temperate gusts at ground level left us bent over trying to cross the mile-long beach, with sand flying in our faces.

* Whispy clouds form in winds exceeding 200 miles per hour..

        We reached a hilly moraine and hiked a sheltered trail to a lookout whipped by gales. Kneeling in a rocky bunker, we found captivating views of the jagged tongue of ice rolling out from the mountainous horizon, guided by a U-shaped valley of rocky jaws. The scene could pass for terrain from another planet, yet it was an earthly wonder--a tentacle of the South Patagonia Ice Field, the planet's third-largest glacier. Although it's receding ten feet a month, it still covers 6,560 square miles. We learned only later of human drama far out on the ice field. A research expedition had been pinned down in tents for over a week by gusts that were too strong for their scheduled helicopter evacuation.

        Refuge from the wind

        When planning our travels, I was wary of staying at the four-star Explora Hotel, fearing that the pampering lodge would temper our experience of the raw Patagonia. Perhaps it did, but that wasn't always a bad thing. We knew, too, that bringing Emma to the tip of the Southern Hemisphere would be an adventure itself. We learned that few other guests have journeyed here with nursing infant, car seat, stroller, baby backpack, Pampers, jarred food, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
        We accepted, as well, that Emma's nursing and general comfort would dictate a certain pace for our daily excursions. From the hotel's outings, we chose to forgo trophy seven-and ten-hour walks to alluring destinations like the scenic French Valley. Fortunately, there were numerous other options. Although less grueling, they didn't skimp on scenery or adventure.
        One unexpected benefit of those half-day outings was returning to hotel warmth and lunches of risotto with porcini mushrooms, smoked salmon platters, or some exotic pasta.
        As for day care worries, Emma was received like a celebrity wherever she went: the reception desk, the restaurant, the indoor pool, or the outdoor hot tub. There was something very Latin in their loving embraces. Even the detail-oriented general manager, Claudio Molina, became a marshmallow, earning the nickname "tio Claudio" by carting her around during cocktail hour. At mealtime, the chef always offered Emma special purees of carrot, potato, and pumpkin.

* Baby Emma was received like a celebrity.

        For all of Explora's refinements, including Barcelona sheets, English china, and attentive service, the atmosphere was gentle, informal, and cozy. When entering off the front boardwalk, there were private lockers for outdoor wear, comfortable couches in front of picture windows, and a smiling barman eager to dispense pisco sours.
        It was definitely unconnected, too. Reaching the Explpra required a six-hour van ride from Punta Arenas through brown, red, and gray Patagonia, on unpaved roads for the last two hours. On arrival, there was only a costly satellite phone. We relished being incommunicado, even as some guests suffered pangs of E-mail withdrawal.

        World-class guides

        For over a century, Patagonia has attracted the hearty, restless, and disenfranchised. Its first adventure chronicler may have been British traveler Lady Florence Dixie, who wrote about her journey in an 1880 book, Across Patagonia. Now, over sea bass and Don Melchor vino (a label from the hotel owner's vineyard near Santiago), lead guide Anne Patterson related her story of jettisoning an illustrator career in London in 1991, coming to South America, and discovering Torres.
        A soft-spoken, slender, sensitive woman, Anne subsisted for two years in a ranger's cabin with his wife and four screaming kids. She slept on the floor and volunteered for park chores. Nearly a decade later, there's no hint of park burnout. Indeed, with companion and coguide Jeremy Salter, time off means pitching a tent halfway up a mountain, or riding off to visit gauchos in the middle of nowhere. "These gauchos have nothing, but they invite us in for dinner and give us a place for our horses," Anne related. "They never ask where we came from, where we got our horses, what we are doing there, or why we speak perfect Spanish. And they think we are crazy because Jeremy and I are vegetarians."
        As we dined, rain splattered against the wraparound windows. It was almost like chatting in a car wash. Anne regaled us with weather tales: stories of guests blown over on trails, horses spooked and throwing riders, moving cars lifted off the gravel roads and overturned, and heavy rains releasing boulder avalanches, crushing climbers. Even local gauchos can be victimized. Most never learn to swim, and periodically someone is washed away when crossing a swollen river on horseback. "They are petrified of rivers, but they have to herd their animals," she explained.
        The conversation turned to weather again the following morning, even while enjoying a sunny hike with only a moderate breeze. We had dressed Emma in layers, applied No. 50 sunblock to protect against the growing hole in the southern ozone, and loaded her into a backpack carrier with a water bottle.
        Our guide, Kristina Schreck, an athletic, blond woman, had been a managing editor at a U.S. outdoors magazine. When it folded two years ago, she entertained thoughts of entering the New York publishing rat race but instead succumbed to Patagonia wanderlust. Following her heart seemed right. During a break in our hike to gape at the scenery, Kristina pointed to the dot of a refugio on the far shore, at the base of the soaring Cuernos. When coming to the park the previous year, she had managed this climbers cabin, which offers bunks and hot meals. It's part of a network of huts along a hiking circuit that has given the park a world-class backpacking reputation.

Explora guides may be youthful, worldly, informed, and bilingual, but they aren't chatterboxes on the trail, by design.

        When I asked her about her experience at the refugio, her answer hardly surprised us. "It's so windy, you can't believe it. It's just amazing," she began. "Storms race across the lake, creating minitornadoes. They can send two-hundred-foot sheets of water onto the shore. They can knock you over, especially with a backpack."
        Kristina recalled one brutal night when people couldn't put their tents up. "I found one woman in the campground crying, saying she couldn't go on. That night seventy-eight people slept in the refugio, half of them on the floor." She said the shelter had accumulated an impressive collection of broken tent stakes.
        From this fabulous lookout, we hiked onward in silence, which wasn't unusual. Explora guides may be youthful, worldly, informed, and bilingual, but they aren't chatterboxes on the trail, by design. "The idea," Anne had told us earlier, "is to evoke natural curiosity and allow for plenty of silent contemplation, so you can listen to the wind."
        Todd Shapera is a freelance writer based in Pleasantville, New York.