Day 6 - August 20, 2009

Phrase of the day: último día en Farellones = last day in Farellones

I don’t think today could have been anymore perfect. We scheduled a shuttle to pick us up and take us to Valle Nevado.

This is Valle Nevado. It is known as one of the most modern ski centers in Chile mostly due to its diverse mountain terrain and speedy chair lifts. This is a hilarious statistic because there are still T-bar and Palmer lifts everywhere—just not as many as most of the other ski resorts. Because of the big dump a couple days ago, the road and most of the chair lifts for Valle Nevado weren’t able to open until this morning. You know what that means; it’s going to be an epic pow day!!

Since we are now on South America time, the shuttle showed up over 30-minutes late; to be expected. It takes about 30-minutes to get to the mountain and we – Amberley, Rich, Cliff, Mark, and I – meet up with Derek and Sue at the ticket office right away. These are people that I have met at my hostel in Farellones and we have all become great friends over the last week.

Finally, around 10:30am we are all on the first chair lift; luckily it is a Thursday and the mountain is not very crowded.

We head up the Los Andes lift with one thing in mind – Powder! After scoping out the best places to go, we decide to traverse off to the left and hike for about 10-minutes up a ridge where the snow has yet to be touched. Amberley, Rich, Mark, Sue, Derek and I made it to the top; we lost Cliff somewhere along the way. You know what they say, "There are no friends on pow days!"

This is Amberley, Rich, Mark, and Sue at the top of the hike.

This is Derek and I goofing off before we drop in.

The ride down from the ridge was amazing and hilarious all at the same time. The terrain was steep and the snow was light, fluffy and untouched – it was definitely the best run of the whole day. What made it unbelievably funny was the following; a few seconds after Derek started his way down the ridge he had built up some speed and, out of nowhere, a huge rabbit popped out of the snow and pretty much jumped right onto his skis. As you can imagine, this was quite startling and Derek almost went down at mock speed. No of us had ever seen anything like it before and we just about died laughing J

The rest of the day was awesome. We had fresh pow all day and enjoyed every minute. We headed back to the hostel in the afternoon, gathered our bags and got on a shuttle to Santiago. The sunset that evening was the most unreal sunset I think I have ever seen.

Also, the mountains were still covered with fresh snow and the view while driving was beautiful.

Remember the crazy switch-backs I told you about on Day 1.

I was in Farellones for six days and it was a great experience. I had three unreal pow days on the mountain and I met some people that I will be friends with forever. Now, it’s on to the next adventure – Ski Arpa here we come!