CHILE’S SUPER C COULOIR: Two different accounts of a South American giant
Numero Uno
I first skied the Super C couloir two years ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since. It was in the midst of an epic storm cycle that had been repeatedly pummeling Portillo. It had been clear for a couple of days following the last dump, just long enough for the snow to settle, but our window was about to close. The next storm was on its way.
Snow and wind and avalanches had closed the Roca Jack lift, a slingshot surface lift that gains about 800 feet. So the five of us—Ingrid Backstrom, Kip Garre, Eric Hjorleifson, Sam Von Trapp, and myself—met on the groomer and began setting the booting up in flat light.
I remember being a little freaked out when we got to the Toilet Bowl, a mouth of exposure where the booter traverses from the chute above the Roca Jack, to another steeper couloir that reaches the pass. I asked Sam about, starring down into a funnel or rocks that looked like the sand pit monster from the Return of the Jedi. “Yeah, but you’ll be able to stop before the cliff,” he said as he casually stepped onto the traverse Kip had just cut. “Actually, I don’t know that. No one’s ever fallen here.”
And I remember wallowing through waist deep powder up the final couloir and thinking how, if this should slide, nothing would keep us from being flushed down the rocky drain below us. Hence the name, Toilet Bowl. But what I remember most is the descent: knee deep powder, starting at probably 45 degrees, protected by huge rock walls for the first 3,000 feet. When the coolie opened up, the snow got a little firmer, and light a lot flatter, for the final 2,000 feet to the lift.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Sam said more than once. “It’s not that often you get the Super C in perfect powder.” We had scored, and we couldn’t have been happier. Ingrid and Kip hopped a plane for Burning Man that evening. Eric and I stayed for another week. When I got home, I put a shot from the top of the Super C as my screen saver, thinking it may be something I never see again.
Click here to see the SUPER C COULOIR PHOTO GALLERY.