Skiing, Driving and Luxury: “All for a Price” - part 1
Los Andes is a big wine town. To drive the valley is similar to motoring Napa Valley north of San Francisco complete with posh wine tasting rooms, country villas and motels. Although it was dark upon arrival and much of the towns hotels were booked, so we took lodging a bit outside of el centro, a short walk to the central plaza revealed a beautiful working class pueblo. Erin is on the wagon, but Greg and I had no problem getting through a couple bottles of the local juice. Tasting wonderful to my inexperienced pallet and served by at our table for $8 a bottle, complaint was hard to come by. The food was quite good as well. Our waiter Marco Antonio (Marc Anthony) kept us in stitches through the meal and closed by insisting we have a taste of a local amaretto to settle the meal.
“It’s good for the digestion,” Marco insisted.
“But what will it do to my head,” I asked. He shrugged and we sipped our short glasses into the fogginess that is my head this morning.
So I wake in La Valle de Aconcagua, but it is overcast and I cannot see the crowning jewel of the Andes. Aconcagua is the highest peak in the Americas and the southern hemisphere at 6,962m/22,841ft. During our whole stay we will be denied a vista of the mountain. Our little town Los Andes is dominated by agriculture. Semis carrying all of the goods of the valley que in endless streams up and down the town’s main drags this morning. Walking to the café down the street, the big rigs dominate the streetscape. Little commuter cars, light trucks and horse drawn buggies, some four horses wide, dart in and out of the congestion.
Thanks in part the previous nights libations we move slow and Erin takes the helm at the wheel. It is a day of getting situated. Accommodations are booked out at the ski area so we find some lodging just down the pass and make reservations via phone to return to Valle Navado in two days were we will stay the remainder of the trip. Even with the frustrations of running around, we are all glad to see a small but reasonable swath of Chile during our short week together here. Mostly though we are very excited to get our skis on the snow.
“The vertical relief here is staggering,” Greg comments as we assemble our gear in the parking lot at Portillo.
When You first arrive at Portillo the scale of the mountains make the ski-area seem small, but once out on it's slopes you realize the size of the mountains here and the huge vertical drop of this place. The ski area has an inbound vertical drop of 860m/2800ft. Additionally, the number of skiers on the slopes is so few that a snow storm a week earlier will still leave fresh powder to be found in bounds (take both meanings here). The powder here is as light or lighter than anything found in the Wasatch during a February storm.
It’s Wednesday morning and we prepare up for a tour into the Andes. We step into our skis, all styles represented; split board, rondenea and telemark, and walk past the historic lodge out onto the thick ice of Laguna del Inca (Lake of the Inca). The surface elevation of the lake is 2590m/8500ft and it slices at least a mile into a valley rung by 5000m/16500ft. and higher peaks whose shear rock walls pour down into the ice of the lake. The walls of the valley are broken by avalanche chutes and wide bowls of snow. At the end of the lake the massive valley opens to 1500m/5000ft slopes of snow pitching from subtle fifteen degree slopes at the valley floor to death-defying big mountain sixty degree headwalls high at the valley summits. The landscape is punctuated by soft ridges and open bowls that will draw the snow lust out of all back country tourers.
The dangers of the snow pack here are no small change. At the extremely high altitude the snow stays dry and cold and seldom has an opportunity to consolidate until late spring when even these high peaks loose all but the smallest traces of snow and ice from their slopes. Left only with the blue jewels of the glaciers that crown the south slopes of the highest summits here. When storms come through the white out is absolute. There are few references from witch to find direction beyond gravity. There is no vegetation and rock outcroppings become lost under a fine new layer of powder. The natural hazard, a cliff edge or avalanche chute, can come up on the backcountry traveler in these conditions with no warning.
Portillo, however, receives a tremendous amount of sun and tourists planning a trip of a week or more are likely to encounter some brilliant days. The snow pack does not consolidate and the sun and wind create ice layers in the pack, so weak bonding between the layers can create great hazards. Varying aspects or exposures can have substantially different snow composition. It is extremely important for backcountry travelers, especially downhill riders, to thoroughly examine the slopes they plan to carve.
The lake froze hard in the morning and I skated half the distance at a dizzying speed on the dead flat ice. I’ve seldom been on frozen ice and the novelty of the experience thrilled me. I poled and pushed off my toes like an Olympic biathlon racer leading the way to the next station. At half way, however, my lungs and energy collapsed from the altitude (and my lifestyle, I am no Olympic athlete). I stopped my sprint for the distant slopes and finished the crossing in a slow kick and glide.
From the far shore we dawn our skins and start ascending the seemingly endless valley. With only the exception of tracks from a few previous skiers, as far as we can see into the whole range we are alone. We chose what seemed like a modest slope up the west side of the valley and were soon to learn first hand, as I’ve all ready mentioned, the daunting scale of the Andes.
On the ascent, what looked from below like a short boot pack up to a modest ridge ascending to the valley crest (or near it; as the valley crest required mixed climbing equipment) turned into a sixty degree climb up through mixed loose and soft terrain. Just before gaining the arête the bottom of the snow pack disappeared and we broke through into the melted out, but fortunately small cavity between the snow and the rock underneath it. The daunting sensation of the massive valley was fantastic. At the top of our ascent we looked over the multiple decent routes from our perch some 800m/2600ft above the lake. I won first tracks and the open field of snow embraced the edge of my ski like lovers meeting at the hotel bar on the other end of the lake. The turns snaked past rock outcroppings, through a narrow chute and out onto the broad low angle snow fields of the valley floor. It is a top ten, hell - a top five day (it felt like number one while it was happening)!! What more can a snow rider ask for.
After rejoicing in the elation of our decent we took out back across the now almost uncomfortably soft surface of the lake for the lodge at the other end. We spent the last few hours of the day darting around the inbound slopes of Portillo and reveling in our journey.
The lodge is a rustic old building initiated in the 1930’s but delayed by World War II until it was finished in 1949. It offers executively priced and serviced while somewhat rustic accommodation. It is like returning to the resort experience of the 40’s and 50’s, but with modern lift and ski hill infrastructure. There is a 5 person surface lift designed by Poma in 1966 specifically for Portillo to avoid the substantial local avalanche dangers, which all but destroyed the area in 1965. The lifts haul skiers at nearly a waterskiing speed up steep chutes to access many of the higher parts of the ski area. It is a bit of a comedy to watch the whole group disembark this crazy apparatus in one fell swoop. While Portillo has little of the glitz of the modern ski resort it truly maintains all of the class of skiing’s resort past.
