volcan pt 2

over the next few days we settled into a routine of ski a day, travel a day scouting for good empenadas and cheap lodging as we went. I stayed out of the planning so it mostly happened over my head in spanish. It was fun not knowing if we were about to stop for a hot meal or throw tents up in the bushes somewhere. One time we were bouncing up an impossibly rutted 4x4 track through the woods at 1 am when we suddenly turned into a friends lake house complete with private rooms and kitchen staff to prepare the meals. The night before we skied Lonquimay a friend Pachi showed up at midnight seemingly up out of nowhere at our campsite in the woods. Though traveling with 5 people with ski and kiting gear in a smallish hyundai suv took some artful packing, pachi was a great addition to the trip. She is a mountain and skiing guide in chile and antarctica with an impressive mountaineering resume and could answer all my questions about future adventures.

The snow on lonquimay was pretty bad but there is a large flat area there with good winds (well a little weak during our visit) and we did some kite skiing, or in my case practice slamming the kite into the snow again and again until it broke. Llaima was my favorite peak, crazy steam and fumes on the scenic summit and perfect snow. i played deaf to shouts of foto foto foto and skied nonstop until there was no more to be skied. Villarica is a popular guided climb (the most climbed summit in in south america? chile?) and has a justifiably awesome summit crater. supposedly you can see lava inside but all i got was a lungful of acrid smoke. a far cry from the dormant volcanoes in the northwest US. When we descended to the top of the ski area on villarica at 6 pm the groomers had just finished laying perfect corn corduroy pistes. i dread the day that karma debt comes due. Osorno is a beautiful peak, much more glaciated than the others, rising from sea level to 10,000 feet above a big lake. The weather gets worse as you travel south and we had to wait a day for the skies to clear enough to give it a try. the coastal air coats the peak with ice and while trying to stomp a skin track into hard crust i pulled a binding toepiece from my ski. The timing for this mishap was as good as it could get, on our last peak before returning to santiago. In the end everyone else had to downclimb much of the route due to hard ice so the inconvenience was small.

will update this with some better pics from nicco, my camera was suffering some ghosts of a packrafting trip earlier in the summer and i didn´t take many pictures. there are some on the link at right.