Conditions Report
words & photos by Casey Earle
Although the powder was skied off all the nooks and crannies for our day trip on Monday, Portillo certainly has a nice base, and the weather was unbeatable. Sunny and warmish, it was great cruising the groomers and the Va et Vient lifts were fun as always. Tio Bob’s still serves up great burgers, camarones al pilpil and the beer is cold. Perfect day!
The sun was hitting hard and some powdery avalanches were bringing down the prior weeks snowfalls. Here the Roca Jack with a couple of snow waterfalls on the slopes beyond:
The view of the lake and hotel was superb:
On the opposite side, riding the Plateau chair, you get a good view of the two chutes off of Tio Bob’s restaurant:
And there is the staple of chilean beers, at the top of chute 1:
What better place for a beer?
And how about a swim?
The Garganta run, also accessed from Tio Bob´s:
Going alone on the Las Vizcachas Va et Vient:
The main drawback of Portillo, is the traffic on the road in. I thought the backlog of trucks from the 9 day closure would have been cleared 3 days after reopening, but it wasn´t. What should have taken 2 hours from Santiago took almost 3, even with lots of scary passing of creeping trucks on the 2 lane snaking road. Going down was just as bad. Here they are lined up a couple of km from the border complex:
Guess this is the price of globalization. In the background, the peak to the left is the Cerro Santa Elena, a cool scramble in the summer up to 4,800m, and there must be some nice skiing below the peak at the Cristo Redentor pass to Argentina (3,800m) which is a dirt road accessed from the road past customs and before the tunnel.
