Delta and I started the following Day feeling rejuvenated from our revered day off. The evening before, with a taste for "civilization", we'd spent the evening at the refugio bar dining over a bottle of wine. As we stumbled back to our tents in the dark that night, we suddenly noticed a streak of brightness across the sky.
"Delta, what is that?!" I'd gasped. "Clouds?!"
Turns out, they were the southern lights (aurora australis). Yes - I finally saw the polar lights I've always wanted to see. Streaking across the sky with it's luminiscent, dazzling beauty. We stood gazing at it for a while, before the wintry chill forced us to shuffle silently into the tent. Two hours later, when I crawled back out for my nightly pee-shesh, they were already gone, as though we'd imagined it all.
So the morning of the 12th, we woke up with rested legs, re-energized, and filled with a joie de vivre brought on by the aurora australis. It was a bright and sunny day, a perfect kind of day to visit the glorious Valle Frances. After two days in the relatively more touristy Paine Grande, we were already raring to lose the crowds and return to the solitude of the more remote regions of the park. So we decided to eschew the larger campgrounds and decide to camp instead at the tiny Camp Britannico right at the top of the mountain.
As soon as we entered the Valle Frances, the trail started climbing steeply up the mountains. There were large stretches of rock scrambles that had us hopping precariously from boulder to boulder. Most people do the Valle trail as a day hike, and as we passed others on the trail, I envied them their lightness of foot for not being lumbered with packs.
But we weren't pressed for time, and could afford frequent breaks to quench our thirsts and absorbe the stunning views.
We had just rounded a corner of the mountainside when suddenly we heard a loud roar that resonated across the valley. We'd barely had a second to look at eachother in fright when we saw the source. A rush of wind coming down the valley had collided with a jutting out section of the mountain and turned into a little tornado. It was less than thirty feet high, but spun all around with a ferocious speed, ricocheting off the walls of the valley, and hurling dust and rocks in all directions.
"GET DOWN!!" Delta screamed, and we both threw ourselves to the ground and covered our heads with our hands just in time to have the little tornado pass over our heads. We lay there like that for a few moments, just catching our breaths, and waiting to see if there was more. But it slowly started to quiet down. From the corner of my eye, I could see the tornado go past us further down the valley, bouncing off the walls leaving a showering of dust and rocks in its wake.
Cautiously, we picked ourselves off the ground, weak with the passage of exhilaration and adrenaline. The world around us had settled down, as though nothing had happened. So there was naught to be done but to continue to pick our way up the valley, ears pricked intently for any sounds of further dangers.
By the time we finally reached the top, it was getting late in the day, and the last rays of sunset lit up the magnificent Cuernos. We stood there, gazing in awe at the breathtaking volcanic mountains, feeling rather diminutive in their imposing presence. The clouds swirled powerfully around the mountain peaks, as a constant reminder of the feral power that surrounded us.
Camp Britannico was a tiny flat ground set in a dense outcropping of woods just below the peaks. Delta and I were the only campers there, everyone else having decided it wasn't worth the effort to lug their backpacks up the mountain. Just like we'd wanted, we had successfully lost the crowds.
So we set up camp under the gaze of the mountain peaks, filled our water in the nearby stream, and lavished in the solitude of the surrounding mountains. It was the most beautiful campsite we'd had on the entire circuit, and here we were, having it all to ourselves. At that moment, right there, I felt like I couldn't ask for anything more in my life. It was just absolutely, quintessentially, perfect.
We got an early start to our day the next morning, and after a fortifying breakfast, we packed up and said a said goodbye to our perfect camp spot. The journey back down the mountain took unsurprisingly far less time than it's upwards counter-part, and by lunchtime we were already back out of the Valle Frances and well on our way to Cuernos.
The hike was a fairly easy one, although it involved a couple rock scrambles that my feet then punished me for later. There were a few small rivers that required fording however, which were probably fairly small streams as a norm but which had doubled in size and force with the meltwater of the previous two hot days. Suddenly, the streams started posing a hurdle to reckon with. A couple times, we had to walk up and down the river for a while, trying to find a suitable crossing points. At other points, we had to just bite our lips in tenacity and rock to rock in a more precarious crossing than we would have otherwise preferred. But all in all, we were lucky enough to get across without incident and relatively unscathed.
As we approached Camp Cuernos, the wind started picking up again and whipped around at a ferocious fifty miles an hour. Several times, we were thrown off balance and had to steady ourselves with our poles to keep from being swept over. The lake right by the campground seemed to have a layer of mist hanging over it, which we soon realised was just a film of water that the wind was whipping up right off the surface of the lake. It moved in waves towards the land in approaching walls of water rushing through the air. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, as with almost every other phenomenon of nature in the park. 
When we went to set up our tent, we noticed several torn ropes and fragments of fabric from previous tents, in instances where the wind had just ripped poles or ropes right off the tent. Quite nervous about losing our tent too to this ferocious gale, we started collecting all the largest boulders we could find. Every available corner or stake in the tent we then bolstered with the largest rocks around. When we were done, we took a step back to sit and admire our art. Here, before us, was the most arduously and securely staked tent you would ever find. And, I'm proud to say, our efforts paid off. Despite all odds, our little two-person tent survived the feral Patagonian night.
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