The ski season is coming to a close here, and we still had a couple of passes left for a local ski resort called Valle Nevado. So, we decided to pull the boys from school on Thursday and Friday of last week and go skiing. We wanted to make the trip during the week for two reasons. 1. This is the closest ski resort to Santiago, so it gets very crowded on the weekends, nobody likes that. 2. The drive to the ski resort is not for the faint of heart, especially in our big van. You begin by following a river valley up into the mountains, but at some point you begin the main ascent, and it is 40 hairpin turns on a not wide enough road. So for every turn, if another car is coming, the car that is descending has to stop and wait for the ascending car to get around the hairpin. In an SUV, it would probably feel fine. In the van, it feels daunting. Drew has made this drive before, and he said it was super stressful alone. With a copilot it was better, as I could look out for oncoming cars for him while he was navigating the turns. Choosing to do the drive on a weekday made it far easier as well. Sometimes if there is alot of traffic, the police will intervene, forcing it to flow in only one direction. This is what happened to Drew his first time. He wanted to make the drive on a Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend so he could ski on Monday, but they had stopped traffic going up from 2pm-8pm, and were only letting people come down. So he had to wait at a traffic stop for hours, luckily he had the amenities of the van to do this, and then make the drive in the dark. Yesh. For drivers who aren't that brave, there are companies in Santiago that will drive you from the city up to the ski resort and back, for like $30. And they drive in Mercedes Sprinters, just a touch shorter than our van. The google maps drive time says an hour and a half. It took us two solid hours for sure.
Spring skiing is definitely fun in Chile. It was 80 degrees in the city when we left, so up at the ski resort it was a balmy 50 degrees in the afternoons. We were skiing in t-shirts with one thin layer over top and were sweating. The snow would turn to absolute mush by the afternoon which was fun for the boys. It allowed them to ski some steeper terrain, a blue and even a blue/black (which here they label as a red diamond), without the fear of getting out of control speed-wise. The mashed potatoes slowed you down severely. Turning in that much slush though definitely wore me out. We skied 5 hours both days and my legs were toast by the end. So would it be everyone's cup of tea? No, definitely not. Did we have fun? Yes.
Another interesting thing about skiing in Chile in general is that many of the resorts are entirely above the tree line. The tree line in the Andes around Santiago, which has a Mediterranean climate, is around 2,400m, or 7,800ft. In comparison, the tree line in the Rockies is somewhere between 10,000 - 12,000 ft, so much higher. Valle Nevado's base was at 9,900 ft with the summit getting up to just over 12,000 ft. So the entirety of this resort is above tree line. It feels like you're skiing in endless bowls. Just white as far as the eye can see. Due to this being the end of the season, all of the official runs had snow coverage, but many of the in between areas did not. But, I can imagine after a heavy snow with everything filled in, it would be super fun because the amount of available terrain would seem endless.
That high but flatish peak behind the boys in the pic below is El Plomo, which gets up to 17,800 ft. It's the tallest peak close to Santiago. Drew has a dream to climb that while we are here, and I believe that 3-day hike would actually begin from somewhere close to the ski resort. We'll see if he pulls that off. He needs a hiking buddy. Any takers?? On the other side of that range is Argentina.
On this map, you can see our house in Santiago, Valle Nevado, Cerro El Plomo, and finally the Chile/Argentina border.
We weren't allowed to camp overnight in the main parking lot of Valle Nevado, so we drove down a couple of curves and camped in an auxiliary lot. On our two minute drive back up to the main lot the next morning, we saw this beauty. It was actually our second one of the trip! Fox in Spanish is zorro, which always makes me laugh. You're saying all the years we were watching the Zorro movies, our only connotation was hot, masked guy while everyone else in LatinAmerican was thinking "Fox Man." jajaja
Until next year, ski season!
