In early June 2026, the mountain town of San Martín de los Andes is holding its collective breath. The autumn has been relentlessly dry, trailing on the heels of a 2025 winter season that local residents remember as one of the worst and most barren in recent history. Everyone is looking toward a storm system forecasted to hit the Southern Andes this week which shows promise for high snowfall rates. For Julian Pajarola, the born-and-raised San Martín local, former ski patroller, and co-founder of Chilco Experiencias de Montaña, the wait is just another variable in a life entirely calibrated by the unpredictable rhythms of Patagonian weather.
Pajarola launched Chilco alongside his partners Marco, a mountain guide and ski instructor, and Luna, a ski patroller and fitness coach, to address a fundamental void in their hometown. While nearby Bariloche became a famous crucible of South American ski culture due to a heavy influx of Swiss and German immigrants in the 1940s who founded the historic Club Andino Bariloche and built alpine stone huts, San Martín grew under a different blueprint. Formed around the wood industry and border skirmishes with Chile, it lacked a foundational mountaineering club. Chilco was designed to build that mountain community from the ground up, turning its attention toward education and guiding city transplants and adventure seekers through real, unmanaged terrain.
The places Chilco operates are a masterclass in geographical contrast, leaning far more into raw exploration than the predictable boundaries of commercial ski resorts. In their immediate backyard sits the Lanín Volcano, a colossus that demands immense physical stamina. Unlike smaller peaks, Lanín requires high-skill ski mountaineering, forcing athletes to ascend with crampons and ice axes to harvest a spectacular, continuous 2,600-meter vertical drop down an open 40-degree eastern face.
Further south, the operation transitions into the historic granite playground of Bariloche, leveraging an interconnected backcountry network that dramatically changes the nature of a multi-day tour. “There is a good system of refugios,” Pajarola says. “You can connect different huts, and the terrain there is really nice. The huts are open during the winter, so you can go right with a light pack with only a small sleeping bag, and you can have food over there.” The skiing around the famous Frey zone is remarkably scenic and alpine, defined by steep couloirs protected from Patagonia’s notorious elements. As Pajarola describes it, the landscape is “full of needles” and you can ski inside all the couloirs between all the needles. Because these high granite basins are protected from the wind, Chilco’s teams can reliably hunt down high-quality snow even when weather systems batter the upper ridges.
When spring arrives, Pajarola shifts the operation across the border into Chile’s Araucanía region, joining forces with a local guide. The landscape transforms into a sprawling volcanic playground where guests can experience the surreal sensation of skiing down live geological formations. “You can ski from the top of a volcano, maybe it’s a smoking crater,” Pajarola says. “You skin on a smoking crater, and then ski to the bottom with hot springs.” The runs wind through wide-open, ancient forests of Araucaria trees, which give the region its name. “You can ski in between the trees because they are wide open, so it’s very nice,” he adds. While peaks like Llaima present classic conical profiles, Pajarola’s favorite zone is Sierra Nevada because “it doesn’t look like a volcano, because it has a different geological process—it’s not like all that conic shape.” A hallmark Chilco route drops off the massive ridge directly down to the thermal waters of Cañón del Blanco, capping off a long day of spring corn. “At the end, you have all the cultural side,” says Pajarola. “You can have an asado, and like all the folklore from the places.”
“Here in Patagonia, we are used to wild places, not so crowded,” Pajarola says, reflecting on his team’s expedition-style philosophy. “I think it’s more for adventure seekers than powder seekers. The truth is that we have maritime weather, so you need to get better and better to read the mountain, read the snowpack, and read the weather. You need to take decisions with what is available.”
This hyper-localized decision-making is an absolute logistical necessity in a country entirely devoid of a monolithic, state-funded avalanche forecasting network. While the Argentinian Mountain Guides Association established an initial avalanche center in Bariloche about five years ago, and a grassroots mapping effort is underway in El Chaltén, towns like San Martín de los Andes operate in a total information vacuum, meaning “there is nowhere to get that information,” according to Pajarola. To bridge this structural gap, Pajarola operates as a certified avalanche instructor, partnering with an official American Avalanche Association (AAA) provider to organize and teach a rigorous winter curriculum of Recreational Level 1, Level 2, and specialized Avalanche Rescue courses. Adapting a foreign educational framework to a region without a daily public danger rating requires a complete re-engineering of traditional instruction, making it “quite hard for us as avalanche instructors to teach a level-one course using the North American schedule,” Pajarola explains, because “when we do our notebooks, we cannot start with the bulletin and the avalanche danger scale.” Instead, Chilco’s morning protocol begins with a basic regional weather forecast, which the guides cross-reference with first-hand snowpack observations shared within an informal WhatsApp network of working Patagonian mountain guides, before shifting the classroom focus heavily onto smartphone mapping applications to isolate slope steepness and terrain traps.
Fortunately, Patagonia’s maritime climate offers a baseline structural advantage over more volatile continental zones like Las Leñas. We don’t have many persistent weak layers because it is more maritime weather,” Pajarola notes, adding that “if you wait 24 to 48 hours after the big storms, most [avalanche] problems settle down.” Yet, what the region lacks in hidden, deep-seated instabilities, it more than makes up for in pure geometric hazard and high-consequence exposure, where a winter uptrack often requires navigating unforgivingly hard, icy crusts on steep volcanic flanks where a single slip can result in a catastrophic fall. Ultimately, Chilco forces students to look past the missing public danger metrics and read the physical slope directly in front of them, cultivating a deeply disciplined form of wilderness literacy where safety is carved entirely out of immediate observation. “The answer is always in the terrain,” Pajarola emphasizes. “When you don’t have information about the snowpack, you need to manage the terrain and give the people tools to manage the risk — you need to keep good margins.”
Guiding in this frontier also means wrestling with complex land access. Many of the finest lines are locked behind private ranch boundaries or restricted by national parks that lack a native backcountry culture. Formal mountain rescue insurance is nonexistent. While volunteer units like the Comisión de Auxilio provide highly skilled rescue support, the recent arrival of a private helicopter firm in San Martín is only just beginning to modernize high-altitude evacuations. Yet, for the team at Chilco, this friction is precisely what keeps the spirit of the Andes pure. “Everything here is like a big adventure,” Pajarola reflects on the operational challenges. “It has the bad side and the good side. The bad side is not so accessible, but the good side is sometimes you go and you have like all the mountain only for you, your group, or your friends, so it’s quite a wild experience, and everything here is more like expedition style.” Under this philosophy, every tour is treated not as a commodified lift-accessed lap, but as a deliberate, self-powered journey into the true untamed heart of Patagonia.
As San Martín de los Andes waits for the dark winter clouds to arrive and deliver the long-awaited June storms, what Julian and his team are doing at Chilco feels like something much bigger than just running a standard guiding outfit — it’s about building a unique mountain culture from the ground up. By skipping the resort crowds and cozy conveniences, they’re creating a fresh blueprint for South American ski touring that honors old-school European roots but stays completely loyal to the wild, unpredictable reality of the Andes. In a ski industry that’s increasingly obsessed with quick vertical feet and curated powder clips, Chilco forces you to slow down and actually learn how to read the landscape. Whether you’re working your way down a tight granite couloir in Bariloche or harvesting spring corn off a smoking Chilean volcano, you aren’t just getting a vacation; you’re stepping into a rich, living alpine culture where skiing is stripped down to its purest, most rewarding form. The real magic of Patagonia isn’t found at a crowded resort gate, but in the sheer beauty of carving untracked snow through a forest of ancient Araucaria trees, earning every single turn, and sharing stories over a lakeside asado with local friends at the end of the day. Ultimately, the finest reward Patagonia offers isn’t bought at a ticket window; it’s earned on the skin track, celebrated around a warm stove, and found in the quiet, monumental beauty of one of the wildest mountain ranges there is.
