Report from Sunday, August 9, 2026
And just like that, it was gone.
The condor flew a few feet over my head, big prehistoric eyes looking me square in mine as it whistled by, wind current from the giant raptor just about hitting me in the face before it turned a corner and vanished. It was as if the primordial beast was swooping down to bless me, like the hand of God itself, telling me something like to “Go forth, my child, and live out the rest of your days in accordance with my will.” I was speechless in its wake. It’s not every day you see dinosaurs flying overhead.
The day before this was supposed to be a rest day. We slept in and then had to shovel the driveway for Gabi, who was dropping off an APEX Backcountry Guides client at the airport after a week where it was puking snow every day. It snowed about a meter over night with a lot of wind and the trucks were buried under snowdrifts. I drank some yerba, grabbed a shovel, and commenced my rest day.
Gabi got stuck after she made it out of the driveway. We dug her out, and her husband Forrest took the truck and plowed it at 60 kmph through another snowdrift. No digging required there.
Walking home, we saw that the neighbor was stuck. He was wedged 200 meters down a farm road that did not get plowed. No roads got plowed today, nor would they for the foreseeable future. This is a third-world country, after all.
We spent the next hour working as a team to dig out his car, then a track for it to escape to the other farm road that Gabi had taken. A farmer’s dogs came up to see what all the excitement was about.
He made it out. We went home. Then the power went out. Later the kitchen sink broke. More work to attend to. Here you handle things yourself and earn the warmth from the hearth at night. This is not the easy living at the La Sapinière Hotel in Chamonix. This is the Southern Andes zone of Chile.
The next day gave blue skies. The araucaría trees stood strong under the weight of all the new snow. They are beautiful; sharp, geometric patterned-leaves that look more sci-fi than real life. The snow sticks to everything here. I like this.
We dug out another car on the way to the ski area. Tourists. Tire chains would have been good. Then a slow roll in small-town ski traffic to the ski area to put ski boots on in the cold wind and get stoked for the day. I was tired but somehow found energy walking out of Corralco’s parking lot the snow to put on my skis.
An hour or so later we were at the top of the backcountry zone. A whole other world opened up to me, just on the backside of a mountain I hadn’t looked behind yet. My eyes went wide.
Forrest dropped first. He radioed to Cyrus that the snow was better than it looked. My radio was dead so I went second. It felt like I was gliding down butter. My shoulders relaxed and I rocked with each ski turn in the soft snow, gently cruising down a large tube between iced-over rocks at a high velocity.
Big smiles from the team in the powder tube of dreams.
We took it all the way down to the bottom. More ET-phone-home trees met us at the bottom. We passed around the stoke, gawked at the surrounding zone, and hit the climb back up a ridge to head back from which we had came. A puma track criss-crossed in front of us on the climb.
Then the fucking bird. I was just getting to the last switchback on the ridge when a loud flapping sound erupted directly in front of me and Forrest yelled “look!”
After it passed I couldn’t find the words to say anything for a while. I just let the moment be. I was going to pull out my phone and video the spectacle at first but then nah — I wanted to just experience something real and wicked for a brief moment in time. We carried on with the climb.
The only thing that made the day better than the sweet tube we had skied in that mythical zone was going home to eat pizza for dinner. The late afternoon light radiated a gold-hue on the snowy farmland where the house was sitting like a sweet childhood memory where everything is warm and fuzzy. A clear sky later that night revealed stars for the first time since I’ve been here. It’s always been too stormy to see them.
But not on this night.
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