Navarino VIII: The Feral Swampbeast returns to civilization

Part VIII in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part VII: Blizzards and Beavers. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

My morning view

Although it was cold when I woke up on my final day of my hike, the sun was shining. Having slept a fairly solid 9 hours I was ready for my only early start. I had woken up with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” stuck in my head for no particular reason that I could think of, and so began my day singing out loud in my best gospel voice, alone in the mountains, like a true crazy hermit. After a final breakfast of runny oatmeal while my sleeping bag and tent dried a bit in the sun, still singing, I was ready to go and was on the trail by 8 am.  And this time there was a trail, at least way markers that were more often visible than not for the first few hours.

She's alive!!

Despite the trail, and despite the singing (or maybe because of it?) I was moving slowly. My cold had moved to my lungs and I was wheezing and short of breath, and with my sinuses completely plugged, breathing was hard (and you can imagine how good the singing actually sounded). I would get out of breath walking downhill, when usually I can charge up hills with a pack without too much problem. But I had all day, and although the distance I had to cover was comparable to some very long days I had had, the good weather, spectacular  views, and presence of a trail made me hopeful that I could made good time for a change even at a slow, steady pace.

The hike was beautiful, and the snow lent everything a certain additional air of solitude and romance, but I was very cold and my feet were soaked all day, which they had also been most of the previous days, but the cold made it especially hard. And, of course, I couldn't escape the beavers and once again landed in beaver terrain. Beaverland turned into bog again and my path continued through miles of swamp. I could smell my own feet with each step, which by now smelled distinct from and significantly worse than the bog water in which they had been incubating all week.

Footprints in the snow at the end of the world.

I crested the small pass that marked the longitudinal backbone of the island and suddenly I could see the ocean again, the Beagle Channel. I had returned to vistas where I could no longer say “no humans as far as I can see”. With mixed feelings, I was returning to civilization: looking forward to warming up and drying out my feet and resting off my cold, but very reluctant to leave the delightful solitude I had so much enjoyed. I felt like some feral thing, emerging stinking and filthy from the bogs and peaks and blizzards of the wild south and skulking warily into the habitat of other humans.

And civilization met me that early afternoon with dusty dirt roads and swarms of black bugs that got up my nose and in my eyes and down my shirt and everywhere. And I emerged from the road in the woods into the wood-smoky air of Puerto Williams, simultaneously relieved and reluctant.

My first stop when I returned to Puerto Williams was the info center to ask where I could book a plane ticket, since I needed to meet my friends for my birthday trek in Torres del Paine in a few days. She looked at me and suggested instead that I take the long ferry to Punta Arenas, commenting, “I can see from your face that you have had…an experience. It seems you need time to rest.” I later saw what she meant. I was windburnt, had dark circles under my eyes, bleeding scratches on my face, and matted hair decorated with sticks. And then there was the stench coming from my feet.

View of the Beagle Channel from a crest in the trail

I stopped by the DAP office to ask about the plane anyhow, the ferry would get me to my friends too late. All flights were full for a week, contrary to what I had been told before I left that I should just book when I returned from my hike. But they said to come back in a few hours and check for cancellations. I thought that was a fine idea, maybe I’d have better luck after a shower.

Next I stopped by the Carabineros to register my safe return. The officer on duty seemed surprised when he checked the records and saw when I had left and heard where I had been and asked me about it, saying he had never been out there, or even past the Cerro Banderas. I showed him some photos (my camera having successfully mostly dried out) and told him a bit about the trip. He commented about all of the others who had turned back that week because of the weather and wondered how I got on. “It was cold, wet, and snowy,” I said, “but beautiful. Incredible.” As I was there, two more guys—one a seasoned Pacific Crest Trail distance hiker—showed up. They had also given up on their trek due to the weather and lack of trail.

I walked out feeling like a warrior queen, trailing broken hearts and taking swigs from a flask full of tears milked from her conquered enemies. Although to be fair I had also not finished the Dientes circuit. But give up, tuck tail, and return to town? The thought had honestly never crossed my mind. With the exception of the fall in the swamp, at no point did I feel scared or in over my head. I had only wished I had more time to go back and finish the circuit after my wander to the south. I wondered what it would have taken for me to have actually returned early. A legion of pumas chasing me down off the pass, I decided. Or running out of food. I need to learn how to hunt and clean an animal, I decided, thinking of the beaver. Or a wet sleeping bag that I couldn’t dry out.

Church in Puerto Williams

Finally I returned “home” to Patty’s. I stripped off my gaitors and boots and socks at the door, walked in, and was met by a giant hug from Patty. It was like coming home to mom. “The best time of my life,” was all I could say. Despite the cold, the wet, and the rain, it really had been. “Mira!” She responded with a grin. She saw that I had fallen deeply, madly in love with the island that she, too, loved.

I started to unpack and was about to take a shower when I met my roommate for the evening who appeared in the door and asked if I wanted a beer. Beer. Ohhellzyess I wanted a beer. A cold, glorious, delicious beer (Austral Yagán—a very good dark beer). So I sat, sipping and delighting in the beer, looking like a wild creature and smelling worse, chatting for an hour with Fernando about life, careers, and adventures.

And then I finally showered, clumps of hair coming out as I tried to shampoo my matted head. I put on clean clothes, brushed what was left of my hair, and even put on mascara. And just like that I went from feral swampbeast to domesticated human, but a domesticated human who had been reunited with her strong and independent heart and fiercely wild soul.

I cleaned my stuff, re-packed, and then had dinner with an older Canadian couple who had cycled all the way from Bolivia to Punto Arenas, including the entire length of Argentina’s legendary Ruta 40. The food and shower and beer having made me feel like a new person, I decided to go out to the Club de Yates for a beer—just one beer, to check in with people, I told myself.

Panorama of the Club de Yates

I ended up staying for much longer than one beer, chatting and laughing and dancing until 4 am with the other wild souls who had also been drawn by the gravity of the romance of adventure of the end of the world to land at that bar (and the entirety of the Chilean navy posted in Puerto Williams…as the only woman at the bar, I was popular that night).

Poor Fernando, who also showed up, was obligated to escort me home (I bullied him into staying later and later for round after round of beer, because I’m a terrible person and a despotic drunk, and also had no idea how late it was). The skies were stunning, with the light just coming up and turning the clouds an eerie pastel.

On the walk back to Patty’s Fernando and I shared the stories of our lives: our dreams, our passions, the lessons we had learned from our adventures that had brought us to that night.  When we tucked into our bunks in otherwise empty hostel, the conversation had turned to our love lives, and he said, “You are an interesting person, I think you will find someone very soon.” 

I laughed and replied that the challenge isn’t finding someone. It’s finding someone who enriches your life instead of tying you town and eating your soul. 

There was a long silence followed by a quiet yes, and we fell asleep.

Or rather we both laid there staring at the ceiling for a while absorbed in our own silent conversations, mine between my heart, which the minute I made that comment ached to find that someone, my head, who countered that it seemed relationships are having another person tie you down and eat your soul, and my soul who wrapped its wings around my head and my heart and said quietly “Sssh, it’s okay now, we’re okay now.” And, reassured and agreeing that, indeed, everything was okay, very much more than okay, (and my soul, being fierce and wild, was not about to be eaten without a good fight) the three of them snuggled into the squishy sack of exhausted flesh that was my body and I fell asleep with a smile.

THE END

Navarino VI: Bushwhacking North

Part VI in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Navarino Part V: Bahia Windhond or the day I stood naked at the end of the world. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

Some of the remnants of the snow patches around the tent after breakfast.

I woke up after sleeping for eleven hours feeling decidedly under the weather. I had a headache, sore throat, full sinuses, and felt absolutely exhausted. But I got up and opened the tent door to find patches of snow around the tent from the storm overnight.  I made myself a sad breakfast of runny oatmeal (next time: pack more oatmeal) mixed with trail mix and honey, packed my pack, and headed back along the shore of Lago Windhond toward the refugio.

Lago Windhond

I walked slowly along the lake, stopping often to empty my sinuses and observe and note the changes in the rocks along the shoreline, but still made it back to the refugio in three hours and change. It was cold, but I made a sort of lunch with crumbly packaged wheat pita bread (having exhausted my supply of the much tastier and more robust fresh Chilean flatbread), butter, and a mystery pate smear. The treat, however, was the garbonzo mash, and I ate half of what was left. The flavor, garlic, and salt was just what I was craving.

I was back on the trail by shortly after 3 pm after having left my name with the others in charcoal on a wall inside.

Signature

I turned on my MP3 player for the first time on the trip—which had miraculously also survived the swim in the Death Swamp three days prior—for an energy boost. This time I followed the trail (which was mostly intact and visible at the refugio) instead of going through the bog I had come in on. It felt good to be on a trail, knowing I’d finally make good time again. Even if “trail” meant largely sparsely-spaced sticks in a different peat bog with the occasional boot print from the guys who had come through several days prior to reassure me that I was on the right track. For a good hour, I was moving fast.

But beavers. Beavers, goddamned beavers, who once again were the bane of my existence having absconded with critical waymarkers in a confusing beaver-y area. After trying in vain to re-find the trail after crossing the beaver zone, I gave up and started to reluctantly climb the ridge the map said the trail climbed—the ridge I had avoided on my way down to the refugio three days earlier. The beavers and winter storms had turned the previously forested ridge into a labyrinth of fallen trees.

Domain of the Beavers

Here’s the thing about a labyrinth of fallen trees: it’s a jungle gym. And climbing a hill over logs, attempting to crawl under logs, balancing on slanted logs to climb over other fallen logs, shimmying up logs too slippery or narrow to confidently walk on—all with a pack—once again progress slowed to a literal crawl. What would have taken maybe 20 minutes with a good trail took over two hours of ducking under, crawling over, and falling into trees. 

It reminded me of a passage from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which I had been reading on my borrowed Kindle, about a side trip he made to climb Mount Tarn (on the coast south of Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego), just 200 km to the NE of where I was on Isla Navarino:

“We went in boat to the foot of the mountain (but unluckily not the best part), and then began our ascent. The Forest commences at the line of high-water mark, and during the first two hours I gave over all hopes of reaching the summit. So thick was the wood, that it was necessary to have constant recourse to the compass; for every landmark, though in a mountainous country, was completely shut out…So gloomy, cold, and wet was every part, that not even the fungi, mosses, or ferns could flourish…it was scarcely possible to crawl along, they were so completely barricaded by great mouldering trunks, which had fallen down in every direction. When passing over these natural bridges, one’s course was often arrested by sinking knee deep into the rotten wood; at other times, when attempting to lean against a firm tree, one was startled by finding a mass of decayed matter ready to fall at the slightest touch.”

The hill was muddy so even when I had ground (versus fallen trees) to walk on it was difficult. More than once I slipped and fell, each time grateful that the branches and sticks were just enough out of the way that one didn’t end up through my eye. After my fifth slip with branches alarmingly close to my face I became so certain that this climb was going to lose me an eyeball that I amused myself for the next hour of the following slog by trying to figure out how I would deal with the inevitable loss of an eye.

Would there be much blood? There are blood vessels in the eyelid, but to the eye? Could I just get by with sticking some gauze in my eyeball-less socket and call it a night? Maybe I could save the eyeball (assuming I could find it in the mess of logs and bushes and mud) and maybe it could even be rewired or something? But what if it was one of those blood-gushing injuries? Then I’d have to light a fire, get a stick glowing hot, and cauterize my own eye socket. That did not sound fun, but I mentally prepared myself for the possibility. At least it hadn’t rained since morning and there was relatively dry firewood around, so I probably could take care of business without having to move too far from where I fell. And once I cauterized my eye socket and made it back to civilization then I’d have to wear an eye patch because glass eyes look weird. And if I had to wear an eye patch then I should probably just go all out and dress like a pirate because people would be less weirded out by someone with an eye patch if they just imagined I was a pirate than they would be a normal person with an eye patch or a glass eye. Or definitely less weirded out than by a person with a puckered stick-cauterized vacant eye socket. And isn’t that a sad statement on our treatment of people with disabilities? And on my train of thought went.

It looked like this for hours.

Incredibly, I made it two hours later to the top of the ridge with both eyes intact, the only injury a puncture wound in my right hand. Better than having to cauterize my blood-gushing eye socket with a red-hot stick for sure. Sure enough, at the top of the ridge I found the trail again, although it looked like I wouldn’t have been much better off if I had found it at the bottom of the hill judging by the trees blown down in the “trail” at the less storm-affected ridge top.

By that time it was almost 7 pm so I started looking for a place to camp, especially since snow was starting to fall. No sooner had I found a spot and put up my tent than a full-on blizzard started, coating my tent in a two-inch blanket of snow as I tried in vain to start a fire for half an hour in order to melt snow for water. I shook the snow off the tent-turned-igloo, scooped it away from the zippers with my once-again-wet feet, and let my trusty camp cooker do the snow-melting job. I was trying to save gas with the fire, but oh well, I still had plenty of gas to last the final two nights, I hoped.

My campsite, just minutes after setting up the tent.

So I melted myself some snow and the resulting water was half sticks and leaves but tasted wonderful (and was clear vs. the weird red of the water the previous two days), and I even managed to cook myself a feast of multi-colored pasta with butter, my second package of tuna, some more mystery seasoning, and pumpkin soup again with the leftover water. All cooked by setting the stove outside in the snow and hiding in my tent, periodically thumping snow off the tent, reaching an arm out to check on the progress of the cooking, and retreating again for a few more minutes. The cooling of the gas can from the loss of gas while cooking caused the can to freeze solidly to the ground, and I was unable to pry it off of the ground, so left it in the snow overnight to deal with in the hopefully warmer morning.

Meanwhile, snuggled up in my sleeping bag, I planned a route for the morning. I decided to cut down to the valley I had just come from since with all this snow I didn’t think continuing on this trail up into the mountains was wise. I plugged my phone in to my spare battery bank to charge since it was getting low on juice and I might need the map and GPS on it. I was in the habit of keeping all of my electronics in my sleeping bag in order to keep the batteries warm and preserve their charge. Great idea in theory, but of course I promptly rolled over on the whole charging setup, broke the tip off the charger, and that was the end of that. No matter, I had managed to get the battery up to 70% first and had already plotted my GPS waypoints, so as long as I didn’t screw around with the phone too much in the coming days I figured I’d be okay. Still…dumb.

Then I settled in for my coldest night yet.

Snow sure is pretty though.

Continued in Part VII: Blizzards and Beavers

Navarino Part III: Paso de los Dientes and Descent into the Swamp

Part III in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part II: The hike begins. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

The night had been rough due to the wind and rain. 

I felt like I had been rained on all night since every time a drop of water would hit the tent in the right place hard enough (which was often), a tiny bit of spray would hit my face through the tent. I woke up at first light at 4:30 am to puddles of water inside the tent from condensation and a very damp sleeping bag (my most prized possession—my 0°F down sleeping bag—is wonderfully cozy and warm, but the minute it gets wet it becomes worthless as an insulating layer, so the damp bag was not just annoying, it was potentially dangerous). The inside walls of the tent were dripping wet and I spent a good twenty minutes sopping up the puddles with my little camp rag, wringing it out on the ground outside through the bottom zipper, soaking up more puddles, wringing out the rag, wiping down the walls, wringing out the rag, wiping down my sleeping bag and sleeping mat, wringing out the rag, and starting over in what felt like a hopeless case of bailing water out of my tent. Exhausted, discouraged, and frustrated, I went back to sleep. I woke again at 6 am, repeated the process, went back to sleep, and finally woke up for good at 8 am.

View from my campsite after Night 1

After another wipe-down of the tent, I cooked water for breakfast (oatmeal with generous scoops of honey, as well as some cookies and a half-moldy mandarin—you take what you can get in Puerto WIlliams), checking the water periodically through the bottom zipper. The sun came out briefly, cheering me up significantly and giving me a chance to partially dry out my soggy tent and sleeping bag while I made lunch (Chilean flatbread, which holds up well to a beating and tastes fabulous, some slices of packaged salami, smeared with butter and avocado) and studied my maps and trail guides. My goal that day was to cross over the Paso de los Dientes and head down a side trail to the north shore of Lago Windhond, some 13 km to the South as the crow flies. By the time I had eaten and packed and hit the trail, it was already 11 am.

The first snowfield, the tops of the peaks I'd skirt in a blizzard later in the day peaking out over the top.

The trail from the frozen lake climbed steeply up a creek bed at the north shore to a wide white bowl that was another frozen-over lake buried in a thick layer of snow. From the bowl of snow, the trail continued up a shallow snow-covered ridgeline. The sleet started almost as soon as I began the climb and turned to increasingly heavy snow as I continued, postholing through the deep, crusty snow all the way to the top of Paso de los Dientes, the first of the mountain passes of the Dientes circuit. By the time I arrived at the top of the pass, I was in the middle of a blizzard. Visibility was poor at best and there was no trail as any signs or cairns were buried in snow. But I can read a map and a compass and when I repeatedly ended up at places that, at least in the limited visibility looked like they were supposed to, I felt pretty confident that I was on track. Every once and a while after carefully picking my way across a steep snowfield that fell down into the end of my field of view or scrambling along slippery, rocky ridges I’d come onto an unburied cairn, confirming my choice of path.  However, due to the snow, the hike had taken a full three hours instead of the hour and a half I had been expecting.

Me in the Dientes in the sleet.

The views, I’m sure, would have been spectacular. I had heard that on a clear day from the pass you have stunning views of the mountains and ocean in all directions. As it was I could barely occasionally make out the outlines of the massive peaks that I was skirting.

It was still beautiful though.

I descended from the pass past more frozen alpine lakes and the snow turned back into rain and the cairns marking the trail gradually became visible again. I reached the turnoff for Lago Windhond (marked by a little arrow and LW spraypainted on a rock in a boulderfield). Scree gave way to peat at the end of the descent as I approached the beaver-dammed lake at the other side of the pass. In theory, there was a trail (I was in possession of a map showing a trail and even GPS waypoints all the way to the north end of the lake). But I kept losing the trail as the area was a maze of fallen logs and the beavers had run off with, it seemed, all the trail markers (which at this elevation were red stripes painted onto tree trunks). My GPS signal kept cutting out due to the heavy cloud cover, so was little help in finding the trail. Studying the map, I decided to continue straight on past the lake and through the bog instead of fighting through trees up ridges—the route the map showed—without a clear trail. At least in the swamp I could see where I was going.

Beaver damage along the shores of a lake south of the Paso de los Dientes

It was relatively good going along the side of the lake with the exception of some fighting through bushes until I got to the bog. It was like that scene in Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam and Gollum pick their way through the Dead Marshes, an absolute maze of soggy spongy ground snaking around eerie-looking holes (hereafter called the Death Swamp) that, I would soon find out, would happily pull you in and keep you there forever. I was soaking wet after the hike through the snow, and was not getting any drier slogging in the rain through the mushy bog, often slipping knee or even hip-deep into soft spots in the moss. It was like walking on a giant soaking wet sponge, complete with holes to fall into. Progress in the Death Swamp was extremely slow and, in the freezing rain, I started to lose my happy. And that was when I came across a line of water as far as I could see in either direction, too wide to jump across, even if it had been possible to get a running start in the moss. It was either attempt to hike around—wherever around was, which as far as I knew could be all the way back to the beginning of the bog—or choose my steps well and attempt to wade through.

Figuring I couldn’t possibly get any wetter at that point and may as well wade, I stepped…and immediately sank chest-deep into the muck.

The Death Swamp. Looks innocent enough in this photo, but beware!

My now waterlogged backpack rapidly became heavier as it started to fill with water and pushed me deeper into the mud, which seemed to have no bottom. I tried to stay calm, remembering horror stories from childhood about people struggling and drowning in quicksand because of their struggles and wondered if this could be similar as I tried to swim my way through the viscous goo to the other side. When I reached the bank, there was nothing solid to grab onto. Only sponge, and I was still chest-deep in mud with a heavy pack pinning me down.

After frantically smearing my hands around for a bit and realizing I wasn’t going to find anything to grab onto, I dug my arms as deep as I could into the moss on the bank to serve as anchors, and pulled on all of my climbing muscles to heave myself partly up so that my chest was on the bank and then, holding my chest up with my arms which were slipping out of the moss, I swung a leg up, and face and belly buried in the moss I wiggled, slowly, miserably, up out of the bog. It felt like ten minutes but in reality I was probably only in the water for less than 30 seconds. Still, it was more than long enough to get very, very wet, and enough to scare me. Dying in an avalanche while doing some epic splitboarding? Fine. Dying by hypothermia because I couldn't crawl my way out of a stinky hole in a swamp? Significantly less fine.

The hole that tried to eat me alive, trekking pole stuck partway in the mud inside for scale.

I threw off my drowned pack and unzipped my jacket as water poured out of it. My camera had been tucked away inside my jacket, and it had been submerged. My pockets, too, were full of water and I emptied those, wondering if any of my stuff: camera, cellphone that I had been using as my GPS, chargers, water treater, etc. would ever work again. I tried to dry things out as best I could by wiping them off with my undershirt, patches of which had managed to stay dry, but the patches were small and the rest of me was just as wet as the equipment, so I wasn’t able to do much good.

But mostly I was worried about my sleeping bag. Down bags are totally worthless when wet, and it was cold out, and if my sleeping bag was wet it was going to be a very rough night. As it turned out, however, the bag was fine. I had stored it in a plastic garbage bag and that had kept the water out of it. Same with my thermal camp clothes which I had also stashed inside a garbage bag inside my pack. My electronic stuff was maybe fried, but at least I’d be warm and dry that night.

Raindrops falling in pools in the forest. Photo taken while I was still un-miserable enough to enjoy the beauty of the rain...and while my camera was still working.

Shivering, sopping wet, hungry, and without a means of catching a GPS signal with soaked equipment and heavy cloud cover, I gave up on WIndhond and decided to head for the woods on the horizon in an attempt to find a somewhat sheltered, not-waterlogged, somewhat flat place to pitch my tent for the night. I walked as fast as I could (mostly to warm myself up) across the bog, focused on stepping on safe spots and praying for no more long uncrossable lines of mud. About an hour later, at around 6:30 pm, I made it to the woods. In the first semi-level spot I found big enough to set up my little tent I dropped my pack and attempted to build a fire, no easy task given the downpour and how hard I was shivering. Miraculously, I succeeded, and as the fire grew I hung my clothes and soggy boots on branches around it to try to dry them.

I was shaking hard from the cold, too hard to get my tent out of its bag. Remembering stories about the island’s natives who had preferred nudity to clothing because the place was always so damned wet and wet clothes are colder than bare skin, I stripped naked next to the fire. I felt immediately warmer. The natives were right, standing next to the fire with the rain falling on my bare skin, I was far warmer than I had been all day, and was able to stop shivering long enough to set up my tent.

Campsite. Yeah, camera wasn't working too well after its swim in the Death Swamp.

I could see steam coming off of my boots and clothes and hoped that the flux of water out of my clothes via steam was greater than the flux in by rain dripping in through the trees. Item by item as my stuff went from soaked to merely soggy, I tossed things into the tent. There’s nothing quite like snuggling with wet gear, but I didn’t want stuff to get any wetter.

As I arranged things in my tent I suddenly smelled smelly sock…smelly sock…SMELLYSOCK! I bolted out of the tent and saw one of my socks on fire. I snatched it and the other clothes items away from the fire, but it was too late for the socks. The toes of one had burned clean off, and there were large scorched holes in all the others. Shit. I had brought my only two pairs of good hiking socks, planning to switch them out each day and wear one pair while the other dried, and now both were burnt. I had brought one other pair of thinner socks, and although the thinner socks were much harder on my feet and I had meant them as dry camp socks, they would have to do.

My sad-looking campsite the following morning.

I didn’t even bother to cook dinner. I ate the rest of my open pack of cookies, my second sandwich that I had been too wet to eat before, and a few handfuls of cold Garbonzo mash instead. It was damp in the tent but at least I was out of the rain. My phone hadn’t died during the swim, but I still wasn’t getting a GPS signal. Still, after looking over the maps again I thought I had a pretty good idea of where I was and figured I was within an hour or two of the refugio that supposedly existed at the northern end of the lake. If I could make it to the refugio in the morning, I could hang out there and dry my stuff. Although I had heard that the place was infested with giant somethings—the Spanish word wasn’t one I had understood sounded like some sort of rodent but could be mosquitoes. Also, I had seen a few fresh-ish footprints of a group of three or so men on the way down from the pass earlier that day so it could be infested with humans as well. Being alone I was even less keen on seeing a group of unknown men than giant rats or mosquitoes. So as I curled up in my sleeping bag wearing every item of dry clothing I had (including, thankfully, my down jacket) I prayed for a dry day, at least a day without any more dunks in the Death Swamp, and that the refugio would be empty when I arrived.

Despite the wet, I fell asleep early and slept well that night, no doubt completely and utterly exhausted.

But I survived, and the story continues in better weather: Navarino Part IV: Refugio Charles and Lago Windhond