Hey guys,
so, we made it to the Freeskiing World Tour contest in Los Andes. It was a really cool experience. All the riders got pulled up to the peak with the cats of Ski Arpa. It was a pretty unique thing compared to other contests. But anyways, I didn’t get really lucky at this comp. I crashed right at the first cliff because I couldn’t get enough speed out of the starting gate... Eric and Leo had a pretty similar line with the same big cliff at the end of the face. The judges thought that it was too risky to hit this air, and they didn’t even probed the landing, so both of them got a pretty bad line score. Whatever!
Right after the contest the last guy of our crew arrived. It was Jonas Blum, our photographer from Switzerland. We were really keen to do some shootings, so we drove to Portillo and skinned up a peak there. We had sunshine during the whole hike, as soon as we stepped in our bindings the sun was gone. So we took some cliff shots and skied down to our van. Some hot tub and internet sessions later we decided to drive to Bariloche again. It would have gotten very warm around Santiago and it wasn’t supposed to snow.
On the road again! While driving to Bariloche we stopped in Pucon to check out the thermal pools, which are pretty famous in this area. Actually we wanted to hike the vulcano there, but the weather was just too bad. Lots of wind and fog.
This time we took the open border right away and arrived in Bariloche on the same day we planned. Yeah! The other Austrian crew was already waiting in the “penthouse”. We had some really good days at Cerro Catedral. It often snowed during the night so we had fresh tracks every day.
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| Bariloche |
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| Leo sending it! |
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| Skijöring |
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| Stefan Ager |
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| Meat! |
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| Dinner with the crew. Eric, Leo, me, Jonas, Hannes, Josef, Stefan and Simon. |
Some days later we decided to go to a mountain hut called “Refugio Frey”. Therefore we had to traverse into the second valley behind the ski area. The surrounding mountains were just awesome. It was possible to reach every line within 2 hours, so some of us had up to 3 runs a day.
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| Early morning |
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| I failed to climb in from the backside, so there was just one more chance to ski it... |
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| My third and last hike of the day. |
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| Skiing down from the hut |
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| Extreme golfing ^^ |
Eric had to leave yesterday morning to catch his flight back home. Jonas, Leo and I will stay two more days in Bariloche. Then we'll head up north again. If the weather and conditions are good we'll try to hike a vulcano on our way to Santiago. The next two weeks we'll hike some higher mountains around Santiago. We unfortunatly didn't get the permit to hike the Aconcagua, so we have to check out some other nice mountains. I guess it won't be that hard in the Andes :)
I'll keep you guys posted!
Cheers,
Fabi
