Finally, after 20 years

Some of you may recall that in the (northern) summer of 1988, after high school ended, I came down to Chile to visit my family and to ski. I remember I borrowed a bag from my friend Reid to put my skis in, and down we came.

Except that it was one of the driest antipodean winters on record, and so there was no snow. I even extended my trip by a couple of weeks in the hopes that some of the white stuff would fall. Nuttin. My skis and I went back to Toronto without having touched the Andes, and Reid's ski bag had several more frequent flier points.

Then, several years ago I moved down here, brought my skis, this time bought second hand from Dr Harry Palter, and everything else, looking forward to a lifetime of skiing the Andes. Then I realised that the road up to the slopes is, to quote John Lennon, Long and Windey and not in the best shape. Every winter a few cars discover that it's a long drop over the edge.

So my fear got the better of me and I never went.

Until last week.

I took a day in which I have no classes, picked up a friend, bit the bullet, bought a nice pair of Spyder ski pants since I couldn't find my old ones, and went.

The road wasn't so bad, although I was glad I was not driving. It was certainly less gravelly than I remember, and since it is early in the season, there was no snow on it. About half way up there are stands where you can rent chains for the tires, and then a bit later there's a checkpoint where the police stop to ask if you have chains. We said yes.

The first resort on the road is Farellones, but there we were headed to El Colorado, which is about 1 km further up hill. At Farellones there was no snow, but just past it small puffs of dirty snow started appearing by the side of the road.

Next problem: El Colorado is about 10000 ft above sea level, so some people feel a bit dizzy when they get up there. Fortunately I didn't, and I was so psyched by a) the nice, warm sunny day, b) that I had survived the trip up, and c) to go skiing, that I wasn't really thinking about the altitude. But as you will see from the pictures, the altitude means that there are no trees. So it's a bit wierd to find this small town composed entirely of nice chalets, a few small apt buildings, and no trees. Also wierd that the different runs are basically marked by poles sticking in the ground, which are pretty easy to miss. You can see the tree line here:

The crowd was mostly high school and college age -- not sure why they were not doing in school -- and affluent. I have never seen so many SUVs in my life. But the place is so big, and the weekday crowd was sufficiently small, that you only really encountered them at lunch, when we bought two rather tasteless cheeseburgers (with tomato and avocado) and two drinks (inlcuding one pisco sour, of course) for about 30 bucks!!!

I am told that El Colorado is like that, mostly young people who go for the day, whereas La Parva is more exlusive and Valle Nevado caters more to foreigners. Since they are all only about an hour from Santiago, I will have to check them out.