I have spent the last week of my journey in Portillo, Chile, amongst unique company. 5 photographers, myself included, have been shooting in friendly competition for the South American Photo Challenge. It has been an honour and a pleasure to shoot alongside the talented Steve Lloyd, Adam Clark, Gene Dwarkin, and Grant Gunderson, as well as their athlete partners. From ping-pong and reggaeton sessions with Herman Maier and the Austrian team to our clown servers at breakfast lunch and dinner, its an experience none of us will soon forget. Yesterday we received our first pure blue pow day, and I'm sure we all gathered some timeless images of what skiing here in Portillo can be like.

I have made it down to Bariloche, Argentina, my latest stop on a whirl-wind trip of South America ski destinations, accompanied by my Norwegian travel contingent. We have seen blue bird pow conditions in El Colorado, above the smog of Santiago, more of the same at South America's only cat skiing operation, Ski Arpa Snowcats. I happened upon my brother Les there, high in the Andes, an odd circumstance.

With the looming forecast for the pineapple express to slam Whistler on Sunday, we took advantage of the snow that fell during the day on saturday, lapping Blackcomb's high alpine in the storm.

On the third day, we didn't get poached...

Cheddar the Shreddar, slaying it.

Its been a trip of ups and downs. The good news, Kicking Horse seems to be holding the most goods around and we've skied some rad lines; the bad news, we got poached by two film crews in two days. Today, we hiked out to ski the Dog Tooth which rarely gets skied, and on our hike out we got dissed by TGR as they dropped Jeremy Jones by heli to shred the line we had our eyes on. Not to worry, we still skied that line and another juicy.

We did a drop on Rainbow yesterday. The sun came through the clouds as it was rising above the mountains at 8:00am. It was in and out all day long, but we did some great laps up there all day, and skied right to Andre's driveway in Alpine as it was getting dark - just in time for a hot tub and beer.

...except that it was deep, and it was good.

Andre thinks it was deep too.

Idiana Les Lenas McQuaker-Shaker is back after 6 months in South  America. I took a portrait.

I must finally blog about this. Normally Vancouver's Mt Seymour is mediocre at best in terms of snow conditions. I've been up there the last 3 days. Why you ask, with Whistler being so close? Wel,l a combination of scheduling, and the fact that it's the best I've ever seen it by far, and I've skied there for 10 years. I skied about 50cm of light pow through old growth forest yesterday. It was unbelievable, and certainly didn't feel like the local mountains. Today I was up later, with Phillip, and we caught alpine glow. Just sick.

Even since Pat's blog post, there is more snow on Seymour.

Mike taking his first turns of the year

I didn't hit one rock, and we even got to ski in the trees and do secret billygoat line!