Skiing with Zach and Cam

After picking up Zach and Cam, and taking care of some of the issues with Hank, we headed to Valle Nevado to go skiing. I was so happy to have Zach and Cam there to ski with me. Valle Nevado is about an hour and half east of Santiago up an incredibly windy road. It was a beautiful day with great spring skiing. After skiing we went looking for a place to camp for the night. We met a group of young Chileans partying; they shared some of their barbeque with us. We found a great place to spend the night in the parking lot of a nearby ski area, El Colorado. The view was spectacular with some incredible sunsets. Enjoyed some hot dogs and old fashions and crashed for the night. We skied the next two days at Valle Nevado, enjoying some great lunches at the truck.

We next went to the Nevados de Chillan ski resort and enjoyed a great day of skiing on some wonderful runs. The area is volcanic like most of the peaks, with some steaming hot spots here and there. We wild camp at a nice quiet spot next to a small river. The small town near the ski area is a nice resort town. We had a great dinner at a restaurant where our friendly waiter treated us to some complimentary pisco sours and a Chilean apertif.

After skiing we drove for a couple hours to a campground on the way to Pucon, and drove the rest of the way the next day. It was Chilean Independence Day. We wandered around town and enjoyed some of the festivities at the park, where a good musician was playing while kids played on the tree behind him. The next day was pouring rain, so instead of backcountry skiing on the Volcan Villarrica like we had planned, we had a lazy day. We went to a nice hotsprings in the mountains, had a great dinner at an Italian restaurant in town, and went out to listen to some good music until late into the night.

Instead of waiting around hoping it would stop raining, we decided to move on towards Argentina. After a beautiful drive over the mountains, we arrived in San Martin de los Andes. The landscapes of north Patagonia in Argentina are interesting. The steep topography and climatic variation results in a diversity of vegetation types. Much of the vegetation looks like the western United States since they have planted a lot of ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, and Douglas-fir. We stayed at a nice AirBnB in town. The owner's son had a friend who was on the University of Utah ski team. The first night we went to an excellent steakhouse, where we had quite a pile of delicious meat. The second night we had a great evening barbecuing at the house . We had a good day skiing at Chapelco, including some decent powder.

On to Bariloche, a nice city on a large lake, Lago Nahuel Huapi, with many different fingers reaching up into the mountains. We had a beautiful AirBnB that was incredibly inexpensive. Bariloche is a major tourist center with lots of hiking, skiing, and mountaineering nearby. It feels very European, very much like the Alps. We enjoyed visiting with a friend of mine, Leo Galo, a fellow forest geneticist who I know from a working group we were in that met in Costa Rica and Oxford, England. Leo showed us the names of two friends of his painted in the main square. They were murdered during the junta in Argentina in 1977.

We were going to go skiing at the major ski area nearby, Cerro Catedral, but after driving there, we found out that most of the upper mountain was closed due to wind, and it did not look like it was worth spending a lot of money to ski at the lower mountain. So we did a short backcountry ski to check out the beginning of the trail to Refugio Frey, where we were planning to go the next day. In the afternoon we went to the Patagonia Brewery, enjoying a beer and the beautiful scenery. On the way back to the AirBnB, we stopped at a food cart to have something to eat. It was another Anthony Bourdain moment. The sausage sandwich, chiripan, was delicious. We also had some barbecued meat. The owner was very friendly; we enjoyed visiting with him.

The backcountry ski trip to Refugio Frey was wonderful. It is an incredibly beautiful place. The refugio was nice but pretty basic. The other people staying there were very nice, especially three Argentinian guides from Ushuaia and three people that worked at a ski area in Austria (a guy from Holland, a guy from Australia, and a woman from Germany). There was also a group of Americans, mostly women. All were incredibly good skiers.

The ski into the refugio was long. It took us about 7 hours. There were numerous creek crossings that required taking off our skis and some scrambling on rocks. The route took us through some beautiful stands of southern beech. The next morning, Zach and Cam took off to ski some nice lines, while I took a break. I headed out with them in the afternoon, but realizing that I had some difficulty doing kick turns on steep uphills, because of my knee and back, I stayed behind while they climbed up a big slope, making their way along a steep-sided ridge, and skiing down a beautiful chute. I was pretty disappointed to not be able to join them. I am not proud to admit it, but I sat on a rock in the valley and cried. It sucks getting old. But I also need to do a better job of stretching and strength training. And I also reminded myself how blessed I was to be there in th first place, among those spectacular mountains.

The next day was a long ski out back to Hank, but it went fine. We got ourselves an AirBnB for a couple nights before heading back to Chile. We stopped for a bit on the pass between Argentina and Chile to admire the stands of Araucaria (monkey puzzle trees). Another night in Pucon, but it was raining hard, so we decided to go ahead and drive back to Santiago, hoping that there might be better weather further north so we could ski a couple more days at Valle Nevado.

The weather did not seem great in Valle Nevado, so we ended up going to coast west of Santiago. Later, after returning from Rapa Nui, I had a couple extra days before flying home, so I headed up to Valle Nevado for some skiing. Camped near El Colorado and enjoyed some more beautiful sunsets looking west over Santiago.