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