volcan san jose

Santiago friend JP was pretty excited to ski volcan san jose (5850m) in cajon del maipo after trying with pachi a couple weeks back and retreating from their high camp after some extended cold temps and bad weather. His wife was out of town this week so the game was on. we left santiago with traffic on tuesday night with a car full of unorganized gear and food, in true cascade warrior style for a trailhead bivy. the next two days were stormy and we followed the GPS to a hut at 3200m and then a high camp at 4300m. this was my first night in a tent of the trip, and man they are way way nicer than the bivy sack! the next morning was clear and we eventually got going after missing the alarm and spending an eternity melting water.

there are two common routes up san jose. the ¨normal route¨ climbs snowfields and a small glacier to a col north of the peak and then ascends the final 600m or so on a dry windscoured ridge leading south to the summit. we´d hoped to climb and ski the steeper ¨direct route¨ that ascends the west face to the sumit but without visibility on the approach we stuck to the electronic breadcrumbs of JP and pachi´s previous try on the normal route. To sumarize our summit push lets just say stumbling around at 18,000´ in volcanoe junk scree hours above where you left your skis at the top of the skiable snow is not the most rewarding ski mountaineering in the andes. The summit is a broad plateau with several candidates for highest point. an uncommonly strong wind (for chile) was making it hard to stay upright let alone check the map so we took our best guess and headed fro the highest looking summit. when we arrived it became clear that another one of the dirt heaps was a bit higher but clouds were starting to close in on the summit and we decided to descend. plenty close for me (heck i would have prefered to stop with the snow) but i think jp was looking for an asterisk free ascent so i felt a bit bad about wimping out. i usually don´t carry a gps if i can avoid it and probably as a consequence haven´t learned to trust it as plan A as much as i should. the clouds chased us down as we descended scree fields, some crampon glacier ice and then some tolerable skiing later we were back at the tent and back into the warm calm sun. we slept there that night and skied down to the car the next day.

Not the best ski line or aesthetic peak in my book but it was a super fun trip with a good friend. i like solo day trips but for me spending a few days in the mountains is way more fun with someone to share it with. While we were climbing the sun melted a large pool of water under our tent and JP was kind enough to move over onto it, as his thermarest was twice the size of my miserly foam pad. This brought back memories of a september week in the brooks range with polashenski where my aged tent leaked on his side, and i refused to switch sides (hey, his bag was allready wet, why waste two?).

there is plenty of skiable snow in cajon del maipo (with small penitentes forming the best skiing is around 10-14,000 feet now) but i only have a few days left here in chile and am exploring around the north a bit by bus. i hope the ski gods aren´t watching but figure a few days of sunny beaches won´t kill before returning to winter in snowy WA and (hopefully soon to be snowy) new england.

thanks fo reading!

cajon del maipo

just got back from a week in cajon del maipo, a pretty awesome part of the andes just south of santiago. It is the local playground for chilean alpine climbers with some big glaciers and steep rock faces on awesome peaks between 3500 and 6000m. more importantly the access is easy by andean standards. unfotunately my camera finally succumed to the sheep creek blues and so no pics.

i caught a ride up with nico and jp on sunday morning and we skied the north face of cerro union (3600m) with david, ariel abraham and claudio. many of the peaks around here are unskiable or tend towards the extreme but union is has a variety of aspects to pick from that are not especially steep or exposed. after a a long but pretty valley approach we had perfect corn from the summit and only a couple hundred yards of bare ground hiking back to the car.

after union everybody else headed back to santiago and i set up base camp under a big overhanging boulder and spent the next 5 days exploring the morado valley. the weather was a bit hot and the snow was dangerously soft on the sunny days but i was able to ski arenas and mohai a couple great 4300m peaks with steepish decents off the summit and the full transition from good powder to good corn to deep deep mush on the long decents to my boulder around 2500 meters. i hoped to ski loma larga, a high peak at the head of the valley but after spending a day hauling all my junk up to a high camp i got a bit intimidated by the valley glacier i would have to cross and backed off. the snow was new and windblown (making it hard to tell how many crevasses lurked) and i decided it would be better to have my first experiments with burlier andean glaciers (all the ones i´ve been on so far have been pretty benign) be on a rope with a partner. friday i skied a great narrow couloir from a false summit of cerro rubillas behind my camp and then walked down to banos morales, the end of the road villiage. i camped there with some young french tourists and caught the bus back to santiago in the morning