Bariloche

Fabian Lentsch, up-and-coming freerider from Austria, spent his summer in the winter of South America. In the second part of his rider blog, read about his days in Bariloche with Eric Zeller, Leo Rauch and photographer Jonas Blum and an attempt to climb 6,000 m.

Fabian Lentsch is a freerider from Innsbruck and Austria's up-and-coming talent. He is spending this summer in the (almost) endless expanses of the South American Andes with his friends Leo Rauch, Eric Zeller and photographer Jonas Blum. He has summarized his summer freeride adventures in a blog.

At the beginning of my trip to South America, the situation is bleak. The north is drying out and the south is sinking into the mud. At least the base in Bariloche is usable and it's not the first time I've had to sit out bad weather here. I'm good at waiting and drinking tea and otherwise all I need is a little faith in God that it will eventually get the necessary few degrees colder and one day you wake up and there's a meter of snow on your doorstep.

Arrival

It was snowing hard as the huge, blue bus ran the gauntlet over the pass between Chile and Argentina. In Bariloche, it was snowing harder, and with stiff backs and heavy bags, we dug in for the night at a hostel. Grande flakes of snow fell in slow motion all night and when we woke up, town was caked and no-one could move. The sky had relieved itself of 1 meter of snow and we weren?t going anywhere- that is to say, the ski hill was shut down, and when it did open, we weren?t leaving until we had skied every centimeter of it.
We never made it up the mountain that first day. And nor did some friends that just arrived from Canada. Their skis had been lost in transit and all they had was what they were wearing.

The tourist center of Patagonia is San Carlos de Bariloche, both in summer and winter. Argentinian school groups and Brazilian package tourists are impressively present: they always appear in packs everywhere, recognizable by their uniform look in borrowed winter clothing.