A few more pics...

I ended up finding out that there was no problem getting a bus to Santiago on Sunday, so I spent one more night in Las Trancas. I was a little bummed that I didn't get to go skiing that day since I was planning on leaving early, but I still had a great time hanging out with some of my friends. Here are a few last photos:

Overlooking Las Trancas, Termas de Chillan in the background


The valley at sunset

Does Scottish Ben have a drink problem?

Perhaps this chav does, too.

Termas de Chillàn

Matt drops in from the refugio

A tour up the volcano

Matt was on the second train and was soon reunited with his luggage. We had an otherwise uneventful night and barely made the bus for Las Trancas, the village about 10 kilometers from the Termas de Chillàn ski resort.

Truth is stranger than fiction: no sooner had I written an entry on chillin' in Chillàn than we found a great hostel named Chil'in. http://www.chilin.cl/

It's a dog's life at Chil'in

Gregory and his wife have had the hostel for a few years now and the place is exceptional.

The mountain is also exceptional. We arrived a few days after a dump of fresh snow and have been seeking out pockets of powder ever since. The north-facing spects have been turning into beautiful spring corn by midafternoon.

Termas de Chillàn has a huge variety of terrain, with long runs through trees and high alpine bowls. After two days of skiing, Matt and I have barely scratched the surface.

Matt hitching a ride in the back of an army truck

Rose and Adam in the back of a pickup on the way down

Unfortunately, yesterday was my last day of skiing for this trip. The access to the mountain is by hitch-hiking and I need to catch a 3 PM bus, which is a tough pull, so instead I'm just chillin'.

Get it? Ha ha.

What an exceptional trip. I really can't imagine NOT coming back...

Matt, Prior poster boy

Chillin' in Chillán

Matt in happier times, waiting for the subway in Santiago

I know, it's a lame pun and almost as tired as "Chillin' in Chile," but I just had to write it.

Chillán (prounounced: chee YAWN) is a cool, medium-sized town about 5 hours by train south of Santiago. Matt (from Yukon) and I decided to leave Portillo because he was tired of Portillo and I was excited to see more of Chile--despite the fact that we awoke this morning to absolutely bluebird skies at Portillo.

We packed our bags and began practicing the ancient art of bumming a ride. My experiences in this regard have been excellent in Latin America thus far. It seems like all the random rides and buses coordinate perfectly to make for a customizable journey. That's how Matt and I got to Chillán today...almost. Here's how it went:

10:30 We carry our bags to the road in front of the resort. They wave their thumbs at a car and a truck passing, no luck.

10:32 A van is leaving the parking lot. Tim asks, "¿vas al Santiago?" The man answers, "no, a Los Andes." We know there are frequent buses from Los Andes to Santiago.

11:30 We are driven into the bus station and dropped off next to the bus leaving for Santiago. At what time? 11:30. No time to waste, get on the bus and get going!

1:00 Bus terminal in Santiago. Carry bags to the metro, go one block to the Estación Central, where the train leaves for Chillán.

1:15 Estación Central, buying tickets for the train. When does it leave? 1:30. Just in time.

1:20 We're on the train, bags in the back, ready to head for Chillán. Matt goes to get a snack.

1:30 The train pulls out of the station without so much as a warning whistle. Where's Matt?

Yep. Matt missed the train, and I now have all of his earthly possessions (his backpack and snowboard bag). We have no way of communicating, I didn't even know his last name until I looked at his luggage tag, and now I'm in Chillán, a city of about 100,000 people with no idea how to find him.

I figured that Matt might just run to a bus, as the next train was 5 hours later. But which bus terminal would I meet him at? There are two in town, about a half-mile apart.

I left Matt's bags in the jefe's office at the train station. I went down the street a ways to the hostel we had talked about briefly. Would Matt remember? He didn't even have a map or guidebook! The hostel was full. I went down the street further and found another one.

With my wobbly Spanish, I returned to the train station and tried to explain my predicament to the man in the tourism office. He didn't have any great ideas for me, which wasn't too surprising. Everyone I talked to asked, "why don't you call him?" I suppose cell phones can be pretty useful.

However, while in the tourist office, two of the train attendants stopped by to talk with me. They contacted one bus company and asked if an American had bought a ticket to Chillán. No luck. Then they called the train again, which previously had said that Matt hadn't gotten on the 5:30 train. Evidently there had been a mistake--Matt is on the 5:30 train and will arrive in Chillán tonight at 10:15.

I'm about to head over to the station to meet the train.

I hope Matt is there!

Portillo is OK

Matt showing how it's done in the Portillo backcountry

OK, so Portillo isn't THAT bad...I woke up on Tuesday to clearing skies and went for a tour across the lake with some snowboarders that I met in the lodge.

Matt, from Yukon Territory, Canada, has a split board and tons of touring experience. The other snowboarders had snowshoes and little to no touring experience. Thus, Matt and I spent a good part of the tour waiting for the others.

Leaving the lodge for the long trip across the lake

It wasn't until we toured for a few hours that we really began to appreciate the size of the Portillo valley. There are no trees to give a sense of scale, so one can't tell if the mountains are 1,000 or 4,000 feet high on either side of the valley. It turns out they are closer to 4,000 feet.

Matt touring in the valley of the giants

The sun was hot and we were worried about making it back to the lodge for feeding time (lunch), so we hung a left and started climbing. Matt set a vicious skin track up a rib leading to a rocky face. I set track across the face. It was steeper than either of us had anticipated, and with the sun softening up the snow it was a bit scary...falling with skins on and your heels unlocked is no fun.

The other two snowboarders, Yumi and Alan, couldn't follow up the steeps so they took a right and followed a gully with a slightly lower angle.

We made it over the steep section and continued up the ridge above. I did my best to keep up with Matt's impressive standard by settingt the track straight up the hill but I eventually had to start switchbacking. My lungs and legs aren't used to setting track at 11,000 feet!

We climbed for about 1-1/2 hours, gaining by my estimate 2,000 vertical feet. I think we were about halfway to the ridgeline. The terrain in the valley around us was fantastic--you could spend a week back there and never run out of lines.


The sun had gone behind clouds again by the end of our climb, so the snow was a bit stiff as we descended. Matt is a certified gnar schralper, so he had no troubles at all setting clean arcs with his snowboard down the face. I followed with my typical timidity and promptly buried a tip and dug my face into the snow.

It was a great run.

Portillo is a great place to ski if the weather is good.

R & R in the hot tub after a long day of skiing

Portillo sucks

Possibly the strangest lift you'll ever take: the 4-seat high-speed poma

I´m in Portillo, which according to everything I´ve read is the most famous resort in Chile--Lonely Planet lists it as one of their ¨must visit¨ spots--but I have to say I´m underimpressed.

I got here by taking a share-taxi (¨combi¨) from Los Andes to the little town of Rio Blanco, then hitching. I got a ride from Martin, a Santiagan, his sister and her two daughters. I spent the afternoon skiing with Martin.

Does it look cold and windy? Think again: colder and windier.

On my first chair lift ride I looked at the guy next to me and did a double-take. It was Ted, who I met in the hostel in Santiago. I knew he would be at Portillo, but it was really funny running into him on my first run.

Ted enjoys some of the finer views from a Portillo chairlift

The scenery is beautiful and I can imagine if the weather were better it would be great skiing, but the problem is that the weather hasn´t been nice. The weather has been typical, from what everyone tells me, of the Andes: cloudy and windy.

This makes Portillo a fairly lousy resort. The skiing has been very scratchy (icy). That means that we´ve been confined mostly to groomers, of which there are exactly two (that´s right, 2) that are of any length. At least at other resorts there are multiple groomed runs to cruise around on when there isn´t good snow.

That having been said, it´s still been fun skiing here. Later in the day it´s been a bit warmer, which makes the one run that goes down to the snowline a bit warmer and carvy.

I spent almost the entire day (10-5) yesterday doing a long traverse from the top of the lift, walking across the highway, and traversing some abandoned railroad tracks behind the Chilean army depot (the border is about 1/2 mile away) to get fresh tracks on the nicest snow I´ve found--nice corn snow at about 30-35 degrees for about 500 vertical feet. I got the traverse and hike wired to the point where I could do a run every 20 to 25 minutes.

Jennifer from Juneau schralps the sweet spring slushies

Other aspects of Portillo are great. I´m staying in the Inca Lodge, which has about as much room as a passenger plane. There are four beds, a narrow hallway, and a closet. But I can´t complain: The price for skiing, sleeping, eating four meals per day, and using the hot tub and everything else in the hotel is one inclusive price of $70 per day.

Luxurious Inca Lodge accomodations

There is also a cool social scene around the hotel, unfortunately there are enough of each language group that there is less intermixing, though I have been practicing my Spanish whenever possible. I've been eating in the diner mostly with a group of Americans from Syracuse and a couple of women from Japan.

Yumi carves the last bits of the Lake Run

Portillo attracts mega ski-bums. A few people I´ve met are approaching 200 days of skiing every year, and I took a run yesterday with a woman who is traveling with Rainer Hertrich, who has skiied more than 1,000 days consecutively--and he´s still going. We saw Rainer from the lift, cruising along with parallel turns on his telemark skis.

Brian and Alan at feeding time in the scum-class lounge, Portillo

I might go for a ¨beauty tour¨ today, which is what my friend Jon calls it when you go skiing on something flat because the backcountry is worthless. There is a beautiful, though frozen, lake at the resort and I´m talking with Matt, a snowboarder from Yukon Territory, about skiing to the end of it and on up the valley. There won´t be much skiing but the views should be interesting.

The S-curves below Portillo at night, trucker's delight

Away from Santiago

I managed to get out of Santiago today, I´m in a little town on the way to Portillo ski area called Los Andes. It has the feel of many other Latin American towns I´ve been in, from Ecuador to Mexio. Santiago felt a lot different.

Super Sketch, the budget version of Super 8

My hotel is super sketchy in the way only some hotel rooms can be. Imagine the worst hotel room you can. Now take the blood stains off the wall, you´re getting a little too imaginative. OK, there, that´s where I´m staying.

I had a great experience today on the way to the hotel. A garrulous and half-drunk man greeted me from a propane truck, so of course I stopped and started talking with him. Before I knew it, I was checked in to the hotel and sitting in the propane truck. Victor had his grandson (son?) Alejandro on his lap and I was sitting in the center seat next to Victor´s nephew, Marcelo.

Victor, Alejandro, and Marcelo

They gave me a quasi-official tour of the town, made more interesting by the fact that everyone (except Alejandro, who is nine years old) was quaffing Cristal beer, one of the local favorites. I have a feeling that drinking and driving is illegal in Chile but the folks in Los Andes probably drink a beer or two in the car quite often.

I managed to reach my conversational (and drunk driving) limit fairly soon and managed to talk the boys into dropping me off at the hotel.

The rest of my night was uneventful, as I spent some time hanging out in the central square and had a beer and ¨"completo," which is Chilean for "fancy hot dog."

North to...?

Wow... I just had the best first day of skiing I can remember in a long time.

I awoke to perfect clear blue skies on Friday morning. I took the subway to the end of the line, then walked a few blocks to the bus plaza. A ride up to the local ski hills is $14.

The ride took about one hour and I bought a ticket to El Colorado, the cheapest and most basic of the Santiago city resorts. The ski hill is completely treeless and doesn't have a huge variety of terrain, but that was perfecty OK as it had just snowed about 6 inches of fresh powder.

The view of El Colorado from the road

I spent the morning skiing with Arnaud from Belgium, then he went in to ski with his girlfriend. I spent the afternoon skiing with Ricardo, a Santiagan who knew the mountain very well and showed me a few stashes of powder that hadn't been used up.

Ricardo tests the fluff

An interesting observation of the ski scene: most Chilean skiers don't appear to like skiing powder. The majority of the skiers stuck to the groomed runs. Mind you, I'm not complaining...

I've decided to head out of Santiago in search of a little less urban feel. There is a hostel at El Colorado, but the ski areas there feel very big-city and I want a little more mellow place to hang out. I'm also trying to travel on the cheap side of things, too, which complicates how far I can travel (not to mention I only have a week left) and which resorts I can afford to ski at.

So the decision I need to make this morning is whether to head north and a bit east to ski Portillo and Penitentes, or whether I should head south for the volcanoes of Chile's Lakes District.

The volcanoes beckon, but I think north will win since the skiing there is closer.

We'll see--

Valle Nevado, a neighboring ski area

Santiago

The Andes from Los Condes, Santiago

Santiago is a very big, smoggy city. It's winter here. One can see the snow-capped foothills of the Andes from the streets of Santiago.

The people are very friendly but their Spanish is very difficult to understand. In general, there is a lot of slang and rapid speech--it confuses the heck out of me.

Globalization Coming Soon

'Nuff Said

My Left Foot

I went to the doctor last Friday because my foot had been hurting for about four days...the pain was bad enough that I couldn't bear weight on the ball of my foot, much less walk.

X-rays revealed that it wasn't a stress fracture. I'm now on Celebrex (yes, the old-man-arthritis medicine) and my foot is better.

I consulted with a foot and ankle specialist today. His verdict: I bruised the joint capsule, leading to inflammation. His recommendation: get some new shoes and don't wear flip-flops for a while.

I'm a little disappointed that I don't have to rush into the hospital for an emergency amputation. On the other hand, I'm relieved that I can travel to Chile tomorrow for a week of skiing and not worry about ruining my outdoor recreational future.

Tow Skiing The Side Streets Of Cali Without Snow

Snow skis, a car, tow rope, black top, and no snow. The perfect combo for another face plant. I'm glad I'm headed for Chile (September down there is perfect spring skiing) in three days!

Making a sweet floor rack for your skis

Our house had enough sets of skis that stacking them in the corner just wasn't practical anymore. Here are step-by-step instructions for how to make your own sweet floor rack for your skis (or snowboards).

What you'll need:

-two shelving boards: 1" X 12" X however long you need for all your skis (I used 2 48" boards to hold 7 pair of downhill and cross-country)
-about 10-12 feet of 2" X 2" (actual dimensions 1-1/2" X 1-1/2")
-drywall screws
-four 5" angle brackets

-power driver
-drill bit set
-tape measure

Total time: about two hours, including cleanup

This project was great for me, as I used mostly scrap material from around the house. The shelving boards had been left by the previous tenants, though you can buy them for under $10 at any hardware/lumber store, and the 2X2s were all scraps from a project I'd built for Genya. The only items I had to buy specifically for this project were the angle brackets, which cost about $1 each.

First, measure and cut a number of 2X2 dividers the same height as your shelving boards:
Measuring...and cutting
Next, you'll need to spend some time measuring your skis and figuring out how far apart to place the 2X2 dividers. The tails of most skis are not wider than 4-1/2 inches, so I used this as a measure. I made one slot 6 inches wide in case I ever get some really fat powder boards. I made two slots much narrower for my cross-country skis.

Measuring the ski slots

Then use a drill bit (about 1/8") to predrill holes throught the shelving and into the centers of the dividers. Secure the dividers with 1-3/8" drywall screws. Hold off on the bottom outside corners, as this is where you'll attach the angle brackets at the end.

predrilling and driving screws

Now the other shelving board can be screwed on to the dividers.

Finally, attach the rack to two 2-foot-long 2X2s with the angle brackets:

And you're done!


Note: You might want to put some sort of padding underneath the rack so your ski tails don't scratch the floor. (Thanks Sven!)

Hello

My first post--now no one can say I haven't blogged.