Torres del Paine and El Chaltén in February - Example Timeline | Boromlia
Torres del Paine and El Chaltén in February 2026: sixteen days across the Argentine and Chilean sides of Patagonia. The W trek needs bookings on three separate portals and none of them talk to each other.
Three Websites, Three Accounts, One Trek
There is no single booking system for Torres del Paine and there never has been. Park entry comes from CONAF, the state forestry body, on its own portal. Every bed and tent pitch inside the park comes from one of two private concessionaires, Vertice Patagonia on the western and northern side and Las Torres Patagonia on the eastern and central side. Las Torres used to trade as Fantástico Sur and finished the rebrand during 2025, which means a large number of guides still send you to a website that is no longer the booking site. Vertice opened its calendar for the season on 10 April 2025. We were on it that evening with three separate accounts and two laptops.
The Cheap Beds Go First
Las Torres opened its own calendar in May. The counter-intuitive thing, which the forums are right about, is that camping sells out long before the refugios do. A full-equipment pitch at Las Torres, with the gear provided, was listed at about USD 140 a head a night for the 2025-26 season. A refugio dorm bed with full board started at about USD 185. The camping went inside a few weeks. The beds were still there months later. We ended up with a mix, which is what most people end up with, and it is not a mix anybody plans.
Four Departures a Day, and That Is the Whole Timetable
The Pudeto catamaran crosses Lago Pehoé and lands at Paine Grande. It runs four times a day in summer and takes half an hour. We booked it the same week as the beds. That turned out to matter.
Why There Are No Argentine Prices in This Timeline
Best to deal with this at the start. We flew into El Calafate on 6 February and everything on the Argentine side was paid in pesos. Quoting what we paid would actively mislead anyone reading this, because the peso moves faster than a travel diary can. The official rate was around ARS 1,520 to the dollar in early August 2026, months after we got home, and it was nowhere near that in February. So every Argentine figure below is what the operators and the national parks authority list now, in August 2026. Those are theirs. The Chilean numbers are the ones we actually paid.
Eighty Kilometres of Route 11 to the Ice
Provincial Route 11 runs about 80 km west out of El Calafate and ends at the walkways, an hour and a half with one stop. Entry to Los Glaciares costs ARS 45,000 for foreign visitors, a figure set by resolution on 6 January 2025 and still in force in August 2026. Argentine residents pay 15,000 and residents of Santa Cruz province pay 5,000. In high season the gate runs 08:00 to 18:00 and you can stay on the walkways until 20:00. We were there at 09:20, which was early enough to have the lower balcony almost to ourselves for twenty minutes, and then it filled.
The Fifty Per Cent We Found Out About Afterwards
Argentina gives you 50 per cent off a second entry to the same national park within 72 hours of the first. You buy it online straight after the first ticket, or at the gate by showing the previous stub. For a foreigner the second day costs ARS 22,500 against the standard 45,000. Nobody at the gate mentioned it and it is not printed on the front of the ticket. We read about it in a fee table on the drive back, having already used a full-price entry that morning and having put the second glacier day a week later, well outside the window.
Crampons, and the Only Way Onto the Ice
You cannot walk onto the glacier on your own. Both options are concession trips: the shorter Minitrekking, about an hour and a half on the ice, and Big Ice, which is most of a day and carries an age limit. The operators list them at ARS 464,000 and ARS 654,000 in August 2026, transfers included. The crampons are handed out at a hut on the shore and strapped over your own boots by a guide who does it a few hundred times a season. He redid mine twice without comment.
A Day of Laundry in El Calafate
The ninth was a laundry day. We ate lamb in the evening and walked out to Bahía Redonda, where there were flamingos and a great deal of wind.
La Leona, Halfway to El Chaltén
The bus north is about three hours: Route 40 north out of the Calafate turnoff, then Provincial Route 23 west along Lago Viedma. Every bus stops at La Leona, an old roadhouse on the Río La Leona where the coaches queue up and everyone buys the same cake. Fitz Roy appears at the far end of RP23 a good half hour before the town does, which is unusual and slightly unfair to every other mountain.
October 2024, When El Chaltén Started Charging
The Fitz Roy trails were free for decades. Ticketing arrived in the northern zone of Los Glaciares in October 2024, so the season we walked was only the second one with it running. The northern zone is online only. No cash is accepted at any of its three access portals and there is no ticket booth to argue with. You buy on the national parks web portal or you scan the QR code at the gate on your phone, which assumes a signal that El Chaltén does have and the trailheads mostly do not. Same price as the glacier zone, and one entry does not cover both zones on the same day.
Twenty-Five Kilometres, and the Last One Straight Up
Laguna de los Tres from the village is roughly 25 km there and back with about 1,200 m of climbing, and the lagoon sits at 1,170 m under the Fitz Roy massif. The guides say eight to ten hours. They are being honest. Most of it is a gentle forest walk that lulls you completely. The last kilometre climbs about 400 m up a loose slope and takes an hour on its own. We passed people coming down at three in the afternoon who had started at six and were no longer speaking to each other.
Poincenot, Free, First Come
The camps on the Fitz Roy side are free and cannot be booked. Poincenot is the busy one, in the trees below the final climb, with composting toilets and no reservation system of any kind. Río Blanco is smaller and sits closer in under the wall. After ten months of booking portals for Chile, walking into a campsite and simply putting a tent up felt faintly illegal.
The Day the Wind Won
Laguna Torre was the plan. We got as far as the Capri turnoff and went back. Nothing about it was dangerous. It was relentless, and neither of us could hear the other from two metres away. We spent four hours in a bakery.
Cerro Castillo, and the Fruit Bin
The bus from El Calafate to Puerto Natales is five to six hours with the border sitting in the middle of it, Cancha Carrera on the Argentine side and Cerro Castillo on the Chilean. Everybody gets off, twice. Chile's agricultural service, SAG, inspects bags here. Fresh fruit, meat, dairy, honey and nuts in shell are all prohibited going into Chile, and fines start at around CLP 200,000. There is a bin before the desk and using it costs nothing. The queue in front of us surrendered a startling quantity of Argentine cheese. We had eaten ours in El Chaltén, which was the single best-planned thing we did all trip.
Cash Before the Trek
The refugios are pre-paid and effectively cashless, but the card readers inside the park depend on a connection that comes and goes, so the standing advice is to carry CLP 40,000 to 80,000 a head as a backstop. We drew it in Puerto Natales near the Plaza de Armas, on the second machine we tried. Worth knowing after ten days in Argentina: Chile has one exchange rate. No parallel market, no blue dollar, nothing to work out on a phone calculator before paying for anything.
15:00 at Baquedano 955
Erratic Rock has run a free briefing on Torres del Paine at three in the afternoon, in English, every day since around 2006. It lasts about an hour and it is open to people who are not staying there. Everything in it is a week old. Our own research was three months old and it showed. What we took away: the current state of the trail up the French Valley, and confirmation that the catamaran timetable we had booked against in June was still the timetable.
A Full Kit for Five Days
Erratic Rock and Rental Natales on Bulnes both rent gear. A full five-day kit runs about CLP 80,000 to 120,000 a head. In peak season you reserve it weeks ahead. We took poles and a bag.
07:00 Bus, and a Passport at Laguna Amarga
Buses leave Puerto Natales for the park at 07:00 and 14:30 in summer and cost around CLP 25,000 return. Laguna Amarga is about two and a half hours in. Our entry ticket was CLP 48,500 a head, the foreign adult rate for a stay of more than three days under the system that ran until 30 April 2026. You buy it in advance and show it at the gate with a passport. The rangers can and do ask to see a confirmed booking for every single night of your itinerary. From 1 May 2026 CONAF moved to tickets sold by section of the park, replacing the old length-of-stay pricing. That change had been set for 1 January and was pushed back in December 2025, and prices under it were still not published anywhere official when we last checked.
The Sign Is in Three Languages, and One of Them Is Hebrew
The fire signs at the entrance are in Spanish, English and Hebrew. The park sees far more French and German visitors than Hebrew-speaking ones, so the third language is not a courtesy. Two fires explain it. In February 2005 a fire in the Laguna Amarga sector, started by a Czech visitor who was later convicted and deported, burned around 13,880 hectares. On 27 December 2011 a second fire near Lago Grey, traced to an Israeli backpacker burning used toilet paper, burned around 17,600 hectares and became the largest in the park's modern history. CONAF puts full canopy recovery at 50 to 100 years. The Israeli government pledged restoration funding afterwards, reported at around USD 1 million, and Chilean investigative outlets later disputed where a share of it ended up. How much of the park that represents depends on which figure you trust for the park itself. CONAF and UNESCO material gives 181,414 hectares; several tourism sites give 227,298. We could not reconcile them and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Which is why nothing burns here now. No open fire anywhere, no smoking outdoors, gas stoves only inside the roofed cooking shelters, used paper packed out.
Base Torres at 06:40
We slept at Chileno, an hour below the viewpoint, which is the entire reason to pay for Chileno. A dorm bed there with full board sits in the region of USD 185 a head, more than we have ever paid for a bunk and a bowl of soup, and indefensible anywhere with a road. The last 45 minutes is a boulder field in the dark. We were at the mirador at 06:40 with about forty other people, all silent, all facing the same way. The towers went orange for maybe eight minutes. Then the cloud came in and stayed for the rest of the day.
Turned Round Below the Británico
The French Valley is the middle arm of the W and the first thing people cut when the weather goes. We reached the Francés mirador and started up towards the Británico, then stopped about forty minutes short because the cloud had closed over the cirque and there was visibly nothing to see at the top. Going down was the right call and it still annoys me. The hanging glacier on the west wall of the valley calves while you stand there watching it, which nobody had thought to tell us, and that turned out to be the better thing anyway.
The 18:30 from Paine Grande
This is where the June booking paid off. The catamaran across Lago Pehoé runs four times a day in high season, at 09:00, 11:00, 14:00 and 18:00 out of Pudeto, with returns from Paine Grande at 10:00, 12:30, 15:00 and 18:30. One way was around CLP 32,000. In February it sells out. Two people at the Paine Grande dock had no booking for the 18:30 and there was no seat for them. The alternative is walking the long way round, which costs a full extra day. Ours was a printed sheet of A4 in a freezer bag, and it was the only piece of paper we carried the whole way round.
Grey, After Perito Moreno
Nobody warns you that seeing Perito Moreno first spoils Glaciar Grey a little. Grey is a wider face and a colder one, with icebergs drifting down the lake towards the beach, and you stand a long way off it. There is no walkway. There is no roar of a calving front twelve days fresh in your memory. It is a better walk and a lesser glacier. We sat on the moraine beach for an hour and the wind moved one berg about ten metres while we watched.
Back on the 07:00, and Where All This Came From
Out to Pudeto on the morning bus and into Puerto Natales by half past nine, with a flight north the same evening. Sixteen days, two countries, one land border and three booking accounts we will probably never log into again. Where the numbers come from: Chilean park entry and the May 2026 section-ticket change from CONAF's own announcement and from the operators' 2026 pages; Argentine park fees from the national parks resolution of January 2025 as published in the current fee tables; refugio, bus, catamaran and gear-rental figures from Vertice Patagonia, Las Torres Patagonia, the Lago Pehoé catamaran operator and two independent Patagonia trekking guides. The fire history rests on CONAF estimates and contemporary reporting, and the people involved are left unnamed here on purpose. Photographs are Wikimedia Commons files standing in for ours, which are still on a memory card in a drawer.