TORRES DEL PAINE NATIONAL PARK, Chile — This is an astounding place.

It is challenging, it is baffling. It is constantly changing.

The morning rain was horizontal when I asked Claudio, manager at Hosteria Las Torres, if he knew the next day's forecast.

His reply: "Nobody knows."

Later the same day, there was bright sunshine. At my own hotel's front desk, I asked Marco, the clerk on duty, if days here normally started out cloudy, then cleared in the afternoon.

His reply: "Nothing is normal."

It may not be normal, this expanse of wonder called Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, but it certainly is beautiful. More than anything else, it is spectacularly beautiful.

The large windows of the Hosteria Pehoe dining room overlook Lake Pehoe. Beyond this impossibly blue lake, the blueness broken only by whitecaps raised by the park's infamous winds, are the Cuernos del Paine.

Los Cuernos del Paine — the Horns of Paine — are a mountain cluster. To photograph these peaks, which rise 8,530 feet, is to take hundreds of photographs knowing that no two photos of these mountains taken from the same place will be alike. This is not hyperbole. It is fact.

Clouds drape them, frame them, envelop them, expose them, the changes happening as fast as you just read. It's the winds. You'll be eating your eggs at breakfast, camera by your side, and all at once the sun will catch a particular cuerno just right, and you'll grab the camera and race outside and snap that photo and stand there in the wind and watch in awe, knowing the moment was, indeed, a moment.

A Torres del Paine story

Rodrigo Aguilar, my young guide, and I were going to give this little hike a second try. It is not a major trek as Torres del Paine treks go — just a few hundred yards to a waterfall called Salto Grande, then maybe a mile to a viewpoint on Lake Nordenskjold.

We'd tried it once. The wind against us was so nasty that after reaching the waterfall and snapping a photo, I declared this entire enterprise "silly" and insisted we return to our vehicle.

Two days later, remorseful at having wimped out, I told Rodrigo I wanted to try it again … and he obliged.

Maybe 100 yards beyond the beginning, the wind grew so fierce that we had to back into it. A gust caught Rodrigo's glasses and sent them sailing 20 yards back toward the car.

He recovered the specs, declared them scratch-free, and we marched onward, facing front now, heads down into the gale.

When we looked up and could see the waterfall's mist, the wind turned vicious.

This trail is covered with black pebbles, bits of volcanic rock the size of birdshot. Those bits of birdshot were now being lifted by the wind and hurled at our faces.

"I have never seen such a wind in my life," Rodrigo said.

Rodrigo Aguilar, a second-generation Torres del Paine guide, was not having fun.

We continued for a few more yards, once again walking backwards, the sting of the shot penetrating three layers of protective fabric.

I looked over at my guide.

"This," I screamed at the poor kid, over the howl of the wind, "is stupid."

Rodrigo screamed back: "It's up … to you."

"That's … enough," I yelled.

This time, we hadn't even reached the waterfall. Back in the car, in the calm, I looked at Rodrigo. Rodrigo looked at me.

"That," said my guide, "was a religious experience."

His guess at the wind speed: 85 mph.

There are defined circuits — trail routings — trekkers use to explore Torres del Paine. Trekking for miles and hours on rugged trails is about the only way to see the actual torres — the towers — of the Rio Paine.

Odds are fair to good, however, that when you get to the point when you can see them in their entirety, they'll be enveloped in cloud or you'll be battling face-zinging rain, or the sun will frustrate photographers by being in precisely the wrong position.

Patience is required

This is a park that yields all its charms only to those with patience and strong, steady legs.

But there are walks, not all of them crazy-windy — and there are lakes, and there are rivers and meadows and wildflowers, and there are llama-like guanacos that practically pose, and nandus, ostrich-like, with their chicks. We would even spot a huemul, an endangered deer, elusive as the puma but photogenic only to a scientist, or to another huemul.

And there is Glaciar Grey.

The excursion boat loads outside the Hosteria Lago Grey. It is, indeed, a gray lake.

There are icebergs floating near the dock, and the 50 passengers who paid $73 for this experience take pictures of these blue bergs even before the boat sails.

The day, too, is gray, and squalls frustrate those who dare walk onto the deck as the boat eases from the landing.

Sara Petri, the boat's naturalist-guide, is 34, from Sweden, and looks exactly like the actress Liv Ullman, which brightens the grayness. She had arrived in the country only months earlier with a tour group, went home, came back.

"I fell in love with a Chilean guide." When he proposed — the day before — "I said ‘yes' in all the languages I know."

I asked about the rain: "Normal weather here?"

She flashed that Ullman half-smile: "Nothing is normal in this park."

The boat is motoring along. From time to time, through the windows and the rain, we spot more icebergs, bigger now, and those of us with the proper outerwear tentatively move onto the deck, take our pictures while protecting cameras from the rain as best we can, then step back inside.

"The water," Petri says into her microphone, "starts out gray, and as it moves the sediment dissolves and settles. That's why these lakes — Lago Nordenskjold and Lago Pehoe — are bluer. They still contain sediments, but they've settled."

Soon the rain lets up and more of us are on deck, and the icebergs now are of a size and variable shape that makes everyone still using film cameras regret wasting shots on those relative ice cubes back by the hotel.

Then: an iceberg that — well, remember, in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the appearance of the mother ship? The ship that made the rest of the spaceships look like freckles?

That is this iceberg.

And then, there is the glacier itself, which begat all these icebergs.

It is impossible to adequately describe, in words, the scenic glory of this place: Glaciar Grey up-close, the bergs, the surrounding snow-and-black mountains.

Now, everyone — cold rain or not — is on deck.

Sara Petri's words, in English, for all this: "‘Wow.' That's the only word I can say."

In our few days in Torres del Paine National Park, we made no great treks. We saw the tips of the torres only through gaps in the cuernos and had to be satisfied with that. Other visitors trekked and kayaked and camped. Some hired horses and played gaucho.

It was finally time to leave Torres del Paine.

And as we drove one last time along the gravel road, winding between mountains and hills and past the guanacos and nandus, to the left in a shallow valley was a small lake.

In that lake, framed by mountains newly dusted with snow: hundreds of pink flamingos. Bathed in brilliant sunshine.

Flamingos.

Here, nothing, nothing, is normal.