AFTER four hours of strenuous hiking, we had only just reached the bottom of the Torres del Paine. You can see the three granite monoliths from seemingly a hundred miles away (and on just about every postcard of Patagonia), but the full magnitude of their facades was revealed only after the last turn on the mountainous trail. We sat down, panting, and looked across a glassy, marble-green lake at the summits, reaching more than 9,000 feet into the sky. Despite their size, being so near to them felt strangely intimate.

Patagonia, the roughly 490,000-square-mile area at the southern end of South America shared between Chile and Argentina, had been on my wish list for more than 20 years. Encompassing the southern reach of the Andes and stretching toward the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, it contains windswept countryside, spectacular glacial lakes and mountain ranges. I had first learned of it through Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” (1977) in high school. His description of the “rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the salt pans” drew me both to the place and in no small way to the profession of travel writing itself.

Then recently, the news that Chile was trying to put together one of the most impressive and far-reaching networks of private and public parks in the world made it even more appealing. And last year two luxury resorts opened on the Chilean side of Patagonia, something that hadn’t happened in a decade. I knew the time had come.