SKI ARPA: Lost and Found at Chile’s hidden cat operation
The cat chugs up to almost 12,000 feet, from which we can see all of Toni’s riches. A ridge stretches out to our right and drops into four different skiable drainages. Everything is above treeline and wide open. The landscape lacks the towering rock walls and craggy couloirs that surround Portillo, but there are a couple little cirques and rock lines. Mainly, though, there’s a lot of powder—not a single track for miles.
To our left is Aconcagua, and behind us, another pristine valley, which is also part of Toni’s land, but isn’t serviced by the cats. On the rare occasion the cat terrain gets tracked out, Toni will lead tours back there.
But that’s not a possibility today. There are only 11 of us in the cat. Toni; his guide Caiman; a Calgary snowboarder named Theresa; Brian Pearson, whose company Santiago Adventures was invaluable for finding us lodging and getting us up the 4WD road that leads here; Eric and I; and five snowboarders from Santiago who make up Toni’s core clientele. They’ve come up every weekend of the season.
Every line below us drops about 3,000 feet to the road. So with little reason to search, we drop straight in. For about 20 turns, we ski the lightest, drying powder of our trip—the kind of hard crystals that hiss as you turn through them. We hit a short bench, traverse to the next ridge, and take more of the same 1500 feet down to the cat road.
We’ve spaced out enough where Toni decides to split us into two groups. He calls the other cat, and waits for the locals while we load up and start driving to the top. 2,500 acres of untouched, cat-serviced powder, and we’ve got a private. At the top, we decide to spread it out a bit… so we go about ten feet to skier’s left of our old tracks, which will lead us to a small cirque of short chutes and cliff drops. And by “us” I mean everyone else in our group but me. I drop in first, all greedy and sneaky like, and somehow miss the cue on where to go. I feast on what I think are glory turns until I get to the bench below. I turn around in time to see Eric throwing up huge plumes of dusty snow. His contrails must be 40 feet long, which is also about how long it takes for him to complete one turn. Only he’s pointing straight at the steep cirque, not the open powder field I skied. He hauls ass straight at what, to me, looks like a double-stager, and sends the whole thing. He lands in not so much an explosion, but a poof, as if someone dropped a marble into a tray of baby powder.
Theresa follows, throwing up beautiful contrails and snakes a line between the rocks. Then Caiman drops, works his way to skiers right of the cirque, and sends a different cliff.
We continue on like this for two or three more runs, break for lunch at the sunny Ski Arpa bunker, then head back up. We take a run, and then meet up with Toni, who has sent the Santiagans home and joins us for a run. The sun is starting to get low. At any ski area the lifts would be closed by now. “Thees vill be the last run?” Toni says. It was phrased as a question, so we take it as one. “This one, then one more.” I pose. Toni understands powder addiction. He’s chased it his entire life, and now, at 73, still feels it’s affliction.
“OK,” he answers. “But I have to go down after thees one. I need to return some phone calls.”
We leave Toni at the bottom and return for a final run. We traverse out the ridge, under 11,550-foot Cerro Diablo and prepare to drop into a chute called Avalanchas. The sun is about to set across the valley. It’s leaving slivers of silver light on the ridges before us. Behind them, we see nothing until the verdant valley floor—Santiago’s wine country.
The contrast is amazing. While snow has fallen up here all winter, covering everything in white, rain has fed the vines and trees in the green valley below. It reminds me a little of the differences between Portillo and Arpa—the luxury hotel verses the stone bunkers; the chairs and the guests and the guys who check your skis and dry your boots at the end of the day versus the simplicity of a cat road to the top of a ridge and a traverse track out and not much else. Like the valley and the mountains, each is beautiful in its own way, probably a little more so for the presence of the other.
Those are the type of corny thoughts that often come to me when the sun starts to turn the western sky orange. I shake them out of my head and look over my ski tips at the fall line, untouched as it has been all day. As the setting sun starts to turn the slope pink, I push off.