Hot Tubs and Couloirs - Portillo Chile at its Finest

doglotion09/23/09 @ 09:02AM0 commentsShare
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3:30 pm Sep 7 - It's late into the best sunny pow day of the season... but we're not skiing. After 8 hours of driving in search of snow, things are getting ugly. Rejected en route to Portillo (road closures from snow) and no chance of El Colorado (road collapse from mudslide!), we found ourselves 9/10's of the way up a dirt road to Laguinillas family ski resort, but with two tires buried in the mud.

Yep, we're stuck and digging. And we're not getting out until the only 2 trucks at the ski hill that day come to our aid.

6:30 pm Sep 9 - We're lounging in Hotel Portillo's huge hot tub, drinking beer and looking up at our bootpack that led to almost 4000 feet of seemingly endless knee-deep fluffy pow down the infamous Super C Couloir. Does it get any better? Not a bad recovery from the mud incident.

For years we've been eyeing up Portillo, one of Chile's oldest and most fabled ski resorts. Powder Magazine articles... oldschool freeride videos... tales of backcountry insaneness - all making the trip ever more tempting. So with 5 feet of rumoured storm snow and only a few hundred kilometers between us, we weren't letting this one get away. Portillo tried to shake us, but it couldn't loose us. After perseverance and a few morning attempts at the zig-zagging highway over the Andes, we finally made it, and hell yes it was worth it.

Spazzing that we'd missed the first bluebird, windless pow day after the storm, we chucked our ski boots on and sprinted for any lift we could find, hoping and praying yesterday's skiers had left a few tracks for us. But a few powdery laps in, something fishy was happening and we weren't so freaked out afterall. There was still powder, lots of it. There was still untracked lines, lots of them. And there was, wait for it, nobody in front of us in the lift lines, ever, the whole 3 days!

Was this for real? Were we skiing 1.5 sunny days after the 2nd biggest storm of the season, and still had this many lines to play with? And that was before we finished the day and found out the hot tub, sauna, and gourmet dining hall were all waiting for us down at Hotel Portillo, wedged right smack in between some of the gnarliest ski terrain you could ask for. Todo, we're not in North America anymore. And I like it.

9:30 am Sep 9 - The recent storm has blanketed the lake with a solid layer of snow and ice, so Patrol has just officially opened the Lake Runs for the first time in 2 weeks. We think we know where we'll be spending our morning.

1:00 pm Sep 8 - We're staring down the barrel of our first Portillo special 'slingshot' lift. Yellow hardware rope and a metal bar link 5 Poma surface lifts together. We grab on, clench our groin muscles, and hold on while the lift rockets up an increasingly steep face faster than your average skier would even ski comfortably. Pure awesomeness. No wonder there's so few skiers up in the alpine.

5:00 pm Sep 9 - After 2 hours of bootpacking above the lift, we're standing on top of the Super C Couloir, soaking in the landscape (including a glimpse of Aconcagua), ignorant to just how epic the run down is about to be.

Portillo Chile - Resort Details & Resources

Links

Accommodation

If you've got some coin to throw down for a luxurious ski vacation, stay right smack at the base of the resort at Hotel Portillo. To save some coin but still milk all the amenities of the hotel, you can go for the Inca Lodge option, but be sure to upgrade to the dining hall at least once during your stay. Mmm mmmm goodness.

There's pretty much nothing else up at the resort. Your only other option is stay in Los Andes, about an hour down the road at the bottom of the pass. Apparently it's a neat town to check out on a down day, and a good place to base from if you're thinking about catskiing at Ski Arpa.

Other Portillo Ski Videos

James Katz's flick of some local rippers right after the 2nd big storm of the season.

Helmet cam footie of our Super C Couloir lap. Good times...