Chilean Patagonia Report: The Day The Wind Blew It All Away...

Report from September 3, 2026

I can’t tell you how fired up we were about how magical all the powder snow was on September 2.

We drove up to the mountains the following day, and as we came around the first big turn, we saw the wind…

This was no ordinary wind.

The chute, I’d planned on skiing this day getting blown away. Image: SnowBrains

This was a 60 mph gusting wind that was simply shredding the mountaintops.

This was the kind of wind that doesn’t create cornices.

It doesn’t create wind slabs.

It simply blows all of the snow into the stratosphere, where it sublimates and becomes gas.

It was devastating to watch.

But watch we did, as we tried to figure out how we could still make a day of it.

The best idea we had was that we could go ski that jagged mountain crack that we’d skied a few days ago and hope that the conditions in there were gentler than everything else we could see.

Maybe it was getting gently wind-filled and not wind-blasted?

Well, as often happens in the mountains, we were 100% wrong.

The chute itself had a wind blowing straight up it, swirling around it, pulsing, breathing, pure insanity.

We ended up right there, standing on top of it, and there was nothing left to do but drop in.

Skip went first and crashed on his fifth turn.

Skip and our tracks from the previous day Image: SnowBrains

Then he held it together n0bley in some super punchy wind slab, South American ‘carton’, before finally digging his tips in at the end of the chute and doing a punch front flip.

Needless to say, I was uninspired.

I dropped in with the mindset, “Let’s just get this over with…”