After almost forty hours of traveling from Innsbruck via Frankfurt and Buenos Aires to Mendoza and a night in a friend's house, we reached Las Leñas late Friday evening. After eight long months, we were finally back in the best area in the southern hemisphere, perhaps even the whole world on days with fresh snow! The first day was almost completely slept in, because Argentinian nights are long...
Sunday was the first short tour to acclimatize and explore the conditions. After a few seasons here, you're used to some bad conditions, the strong wind and harsh sun work relentlessly, but I've never seen this area like this before. Apart from a few shady gullies where there is something that may have been snow at some point, everything resembles a lunar landscape. The last snowfall was four weeks ago, the temperatures in the valley climb to 20 degrees Celsius during the day and that at 2200m, in the middle of winter.
So the next day we headed higher up. Because the higher you get, the more and, above all, the better the snow, you would think. But after four hours and 1600 meters of altitude difference, I realized that there was a little more snow here, but not better.
Ice again, old and wind-packed snow, plus summer temperatures. The same game for the next few days - a lot of effort and the only reward is heavy legs and sunburn.
After less than a week, slight frustration sets in and we consider alternative plans for the next few months if things don't change soon. And at the moment it doesn't look like it will...
The only rays of hope are the almost daily assado and the knowledge that things can change here within a few days, theoretically. And Las Lenas with fresh snow is the best
freeride area in the world. You can wait a while for that.
And until then, there's still beef, red wine and beautiful women. So it could be worse...
