June through August is the Southern Hemisphere winter, and Torres del Paine in winter is a different park from the one that fills with trekkers in November through March. The huts close. The refugios reduce their services. The trails are quiet in a way that would take hours to achieve in peak season even if you started before dawn. I have been photographing elopements in Patagonia for long enough to have a strong preference, and my preference is winter. The solitude, the snow on the towers, and the quality of the light in the low winter sun are the reasons I keep going back in the off-season even when the logistics require more planning.

What Patagonian Winter Actually Looks Like

Winter in Torres del Paine means temperatures between minus five and plus eight degrees Celsius during the day, snow on the upper towers and the surrounding peaks, and wind that is consistent with Patagonia’s year-round reputation. The park does not close in winter. The main vehicle roads remain open. The day hike to the Mirador Las Torres is possible with appropriate gear and hiking poles. What changes is who is doing it: in June, a weekday on the trail to the towers involves passing perhaps six to twelve other hikers in each direction. In January that number is six hundred. The ceremony space at the glacial lake, which can feel crowded in summer, is often entirely empty in winter.

Torres del Paine towers in winter with snow covering the peaks and empty trails showing the off-season solitude — The towers in June with snow on the upper faces. The trail below is empty. In January this same trail has hundreds of hikers per day. In winter, the park is returned to what it actually is: a wilderness, not a tourist route.

The Photography Case for Off-Season

The winter sun in Patagonia stays low all day. At latitude 51 degrees south, the June solstice sun never gets higher than about 20 degrees above the horizon. This means the golden hour quality of light that summer photographers get for thirty minutes at the end of the day, winter photographers have for most of the afternoon. The towers are lit from a low angle from around 10am to 4pm, which creates the shadow definition and warm tones on the granite that summer images typically only catch at the extremes of the day. Combined with snow on the peaks and empty trails, winter produces photographs that are definitively different from the summer images that dominate the Torres del Paine visual archive.