Portillo 8/5-12/06

salida

New member
I was going to do the whole right up, but basically the jist is the skiing was awesome, 10-20ft base, with 4ft while we were t here. Ran into some awesome folks, and skied and partied hard!

Here are the select (semiselect) good pics. Some more action and video on the way.

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waiting at the airport
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sunrise over the andes
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no turtles, apples, or cheese into chile please
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big rock on the drive up
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a mile long tunnel with no ventilation, hold your breath
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switch backs, a two lane road, crazy drivers turn into a 3 laner
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traffic jam
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small room in the Inca
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free wine tasting, night 1/7
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phil on the lift
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flat light first day, looking over the partially frozen lake
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stephan and myself
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me below some cliffs
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wine tasting 2/7
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base on a sunny day
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plateau lift
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looking towards roca jack
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out of bounds beyond condor
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poma
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me on the lift
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waiting at roca jack
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my friends decided i looked like hitch hiker, the portillo dog
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watch the sequence
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jason got knocked over by avy bombing
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nice rock
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waist deep
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our tracks down the main chute plateau side
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rock again, hold the distance mark
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stephan and phil ripping
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keith on the bottom, stephan phil jason and justin at the top
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keith infront of Roca jack where we got first tracks in waist deep. The hardest part was riding the 5 man poma up the slope, jeeeez
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looking at a mandatory from the bottom of the first chute on the roca traverse, it was more like 15ft at the beginning of the week, 5ft at the end
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looking down from the mandatory
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waist deep
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air
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keith on the lift
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wine tasting 7/7, hum missed pictures on 3, 4, 5, and 6.....
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playing "make love to the dealer" in the tea room with pisco
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group shot
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big snow banks
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girl on the bar
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la Posada

-Porter
 
Impressive powder. How long before it was tracked out?

One more question. I note the lake was not frozen. Supposedly there's a lot of traverse-to ski terrain that is dependent upon being able to ski back over the frozen lake. Some people say Portillo is somewhat small for a whole week if that terrain is not accessible. But with the conditions you had, probably nobody cared.
 
Tony Crocker":nf1a6m13 said:
Impressive powder. How long before it was tracked out?

One more question. I note the lake was not frozen. Supposedly there's a lot of traverse-to ski terrain that is dependent upon being able to ski back over the frozen lake. Some people say Portillo is somewhat small for a whole week if that terrain is not accessible. But with the conditions you had, probably nobody cared.

Tony, in all honesty the snow was never tracked out... You could either continue traversing or you could ski gnarlier lines. In my opinion the skiers there were not very good. There were a few elites like Kim Reichhelm and others, who were good, in addittion to the ski schoolers. But other than that we were the only ones skiing anything worth noting.

As for the lake, yes the run down to the lake would have been fantastic and would have opened up another bit of expert terrain. But in all honesty we were very happy traversing out before we got into the lake run, and or skiing the Roca Jack side where we found tons of untracked. The place just has so little pressure (400 total people a week) and not that many hardcore skiers that it was not a huge deal. If you want the lake to be frozen I would go in Sept. but still there is no gaurantee!
 
Tony Crocker":2b95906z said:
Impressive powder. How long before it was tracked out?

One more question. I note the lake was not frozen. Supposedly there's a lot of traverse-to ski terrain that is dependent upon being able to ski back over the frozen lake. Some people say Portillo is somewhat small for a whole week if that terrain is not accessible. But with the conditions you had, probably nobody cared.

I visited Portillo in the same time frame as Porter and the conditions look almost identical. The lake was also unfrozen when I went and although we did explore a few of the lake chutes, hiking back up and traversing out was a pain. Having a frozen lake would have made those runs much easier.

But between the high traverse and all the possibilities off of that traverse, some of the hikes up from the high traverse, and the heliskiing, I had more than enough to keep me busy for a week and I wished I had 2 weeks. We never saw anyone else out on the high traverse while we were skiing there.
 
It was done as a promo for my college ski club. If it'd just been for the sake of making a movie it probably would have been less ostentatious.
 
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