Südamerika

Finally back in Argentina: the land of wine and asado. Our journey by bus from Nevados de Chillan to Las Lenas took a whole three days.

The time had finally come: on Thursday, August 14th, I was finally on the plane from Frankfurt to Santiago de Chile. After 14 hours, Chile greeted me with summer temperatures and sunshine. But wait a minute: I actually came here to ski ...

At last!!! The suffering is over! After three continuous weeks of frustration due to terrible conditions, snow finally fell!!!

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.

Winter 2011, which at least in the Northern Alps never really got going, is over, is history, or rather: simply ticked off.
PowderGuide.com is taking a summer break from May 1 to October 31, 2011.

Canyons, mass tourism, big cities and lifeless deserts - after the first part of the Peru report, the Andean peaks and world-famous Inca sites beckon in the second part of the four-week trekking travelogue.

We cross a long plateau and are then as close to the mountain as the truck can take us. Now, with heavy backpacks on our backs, it's an hour and a half up and down 5000 meters through a moraine landscape. During a break, a discussion begins which results in Peter leaving his skis behind, while Brigitte and I decide to take the skis with us to the bitter end, even if we might have to carry them back down the mountain, although it is not yet clear whether and how a descent is possible at all.

After everything that could go wrong went wrong, the gods finally smiled on us and dumped 30cms of fresh, breathless powder on Termas de Chillan on Tuesday night. We woke up to a foot of dry snow piled on the bannister on the deck, and immediately the trials and tribulations of the past week were out and the electric energy of a pow day was in. Yeah!!!

To recount the joys of traveling, I got stuck in the Lima airport for 2 days after I thought my flight was at 1.40pm rather than am. You would think I would know to check that by now, but I didn`t. Some things never sink in.

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.