Poetry Under Foot

“Wow” is a typical reaction for a first-time visitor to the iconic granite towers of Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, but for Jacob Brett the exclamation wasn’t in awe, but shock.

The British Columbia-based trail designer traveled to Patagonia to assess the condition of the Mirador Las Torres Trail. Leading right to the base of the namesake towers, the twelve-mile hike is the most popular in Torres del Paine. At the turn of the millennium, a thousand people might have visited the area in a year. Twenty years later, that’s how many hike Las Torres on a busy day. More than three hundred thousand visited Torres del Paine in 2019.

A well-designed trail might be able to handle the exponential growth, but Las Torres was little improved from the cattle and wildlife trails it emerged from. All those boots were digging up the silty soil. Add some of the harshest weather on earth—winds routinely exceed one hundred miles per hour—and the trail