Photo trips are hard work. Freerider Gex Rathfelder found this out (once again) on his last trip to Chile. He was on a photo trip in the South American winter with photographer Michael Neumann and gives us an insight into his travel diary here. Seemingly endless travel hardships and poor snow conditions - circumstances that will nevertheless result in beautiful images that will eventually appear in a book entitled "Endless Winter".
On a beautiful sunny morning, I got on the train and headed to Frankfurt to board the plane - a "cheap" flight for a mere €1,430. Once I arrived at the airport, I first went from Frankfurt to Toronto. The plane departs Frankfurt at 5pm and after sitting on the plane for more than eight hours, you arrive in Toronto at 7:25pm local time. Crazy world.
Four hours layover, another eleven-hour flight, another disgusting meal, another desperate attempt to sleep and another boring movie. Tired but happy, we land in Santiago de Chile. Luckily, it's not just me who ends up in Santiago, but also my ski bag. Okay, so everything has gone well so far. Quickly through customs and then off to the exit.
I should have been met there by Michi and his wife Kati. Their plane from Paris should have landed a few hours before mine. The plane did land, but unfortunately without Michi and Kati. As it turned out a few hours later, they wouldn't be arriving until the next day. Something must have gone wrong in the travel planning that hadn't taken place. Well, we have a book with us and there's also internet at the airport. This makes the wait a little more bearable.
A full 24 hours later, the whole group is sitting in our Toyota SUV. There are four of us: Michi, Kati, myself and Roman Rohrmoser, who had come to Chile earlier to spend a week in El Colorado, a ski resort near Santiago, with the K2 Backside Team, including Pep Fujas and JT Holmes. As snow is forecast in the south, we first take the Ruta 5, the Panamericana, on which we drive about 500 kilometers to the south. After five hours in the car, we leave the well-developed Panamericana. The roads get progressively worse and at some point we are driving on a muddy gravel road littered with deep potholes. As the day is almost over, we no longer drive to the ski resort but straight to the MI Lodge, our camp for the first night.
Skiing in Chillan
After a visit to the hot tub, a good dinner and a quiet night, we woke up the next morning to constant rain. As it hadn't snowed for weeks, we were in no hurry to get to the ski resort and so we spent the day looking for new accommodation and watching the rain fall.
It rained non-stop all day. If this was snow up on the mountain, the next day would be promising. The next morning, we were on skis for the first time. However, it was a few degrees too warm during the snowfall, so instead of powdering through deep powder, we struggled through heavy, damp fresh snow while a mixture of sleet and snow pelted down on us. As only the bottom lift was open, we had no choice but to ski a little in the forest, take a few pictures and hope that it would snow nicely further up. When we were completely soaked, we went back to the hotel to warm up again with a visit to the sauna...
As a warm front was supposed to move over the Andes the day after tomorrow, all our hopes were pinned on tomorrow, which was forecast to be cloudless. Well, let's hope...
A few hours later, Michi wakes us up. It's light again, but instead of sunshine, there's just thick fog wafting through the valley. Well, it'll be fine. It could be sunny up on the mountain. So we get out of bed, have breakfast and then head up. As we don't want to spend a lot of money on day tickets and then poke around in the fog, we take the car to the top station of the first lift and buy our tickets there, as we think the weather has the potential to clear up.
Then we take the chairlift to the top and lo and behold, there are already the first gaps in the clouds and so we shoot down through the Andean powder. That feels good, that's exactly why we're here... Oh yes, not quite. We also wanted to take a few photos.
After satisfying our first hunger for powder, we set off in search of photo spots. There is a big mountain face in the ski resort that is very easy to reach and also very photogenic in the morning light. So it's no wonder that everyone who visits the area to take photos or film first tries their luck here. This led to the funny situation where Michi had to make himself comfortable on the opposite slope between the filmers from the Level 1 team on the right and the filmers from the Oklay team on the left.
At some point in the afternoon, we realized that today would be the day for a sunset shoot. Of course, the other teams smelled a rat too, so everyone did what they could within their budget. The Oklay boys climbed into the snowcat and headed for the summit, i.e. the volcano. Snowboarder Travis Rice dropped off on the crater rim in his RedBull helicopter and Roman, Michi and I hiked to our spot, which we thought was the best.
It remains to be seen whether the equation: bigger budget equals better film and image material is really true. For our part, we were more than satisfied with our yield.
The next day, we spontaneously decided to switch camps - Corralco was to be our destination for the second shoot.
Back to the roots: Corralco
Another 4 hours in the car - we reach Corralco, 200 kilometers south of Termas de Chillan.
If you're skiing by car in Chile and you change ski resorts, it's always like this: First you have to head west out of the mountains onto the 4-lane Panamericana highway. Then it's a relatively quick drive either south or north, in our case south. Once you are at the level of the ski resort you want to reach, you leave the Panamericana and head east into the mountains on smaller and increasingly deteriorating roads.
At some point after 390 kilometers, the last of which are on a nasty muddy track that is supposed to be a road, we arrive at the Corralco ski lodge. As we wanted to make the most of the last daylight, we quickly threw our luggage into the rooms and then immediately put on our ski gear, skins on the darkside and off we went towards the sunset.
But somehow our timing wasn't the best today. We were simply a few minutes too late. And so we had to watch the sun go down without being able to get into position beforehand.
As we wanted to get back in the car in the afternoon to drive to Pucon, we were content to cruise around the ski resort a little. The ski resort is far away from any tourist crowds and so the few guests consist of a few locals and a few soldiers who are happy that their volcano climb is being called off today due to too much wind.
Back at the lodge, we are in for a nasty surprise: the weather forecast for tomorrow has deteriorated considerably in the last few hours. Rain is now forecast for tomorrow. So change of plans. We save the detour to Pucon and prefer to spend the bad weather day by the sea. This also saves us a 13-hour night drive from Corralco to Portillo. We now do this in two stages. We want to complete the first stage today: From Corralco we drive to Valparaiso, a city by the sea on the heights of Santiago de Chile, Valparaiso is considered one of the most beautiful cities in Chile. But somehow it seems as if our luck has run out: Although we drove the whole way through the sunshine at around 20°C, the coast is shrouded in thick fog and it is unpleasantly cool. Instead of a sunset by the sea, there was only a half-motivated stroll through the town. So much for our day by the sea...
