I flew into Argentina the other day to get some training in before I head to New Zealand for the World Helli Challenge. I’ve never been to South America before so I was pretty excited to get down there. I had heard it had been snowing and was looking forward to some August pow turns.
It had been a long journey. I left Salt Lake City at 1:30pm on the 14th of August. Tim Dutton met me in SLC and we traveled together to Buenos Aires where we had planned on meeting up with two other guys from unofficialsquaw.com. We found Patrick and waited around for a half hour looking for Greg. We had to take a shuttle to a domestic airport to continue the rest of our trip. It was 9am on the 15th and Greg was no where to be found. We had to run because our flight took off at 10:10am and we had atleast a half hour ride to the next airport. I had very little faith that we were going to make this next flight.
We arrived around 9:40am at the Buenos Aires domestic airport. It was crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it. You couldn’t tell where the line began and people were almost out the door. So we stood around like lost tourists wasting more time and almost accepting the fact that
We arrived at the gate at 10:05am only to find that it had been delayed. Two hours later we boarded the plane and embarked on the sketchiest flights ever. The landings on our way in to San Rafael and some other small town I fail to remember the name of where so sketchy.
We finally arrived in the town of Las Lenas Argentina about 30 hours later. I was so ready to eat then pass out for hours.
AHHH, Las Lenas! This place looks amazing. I couldn’t wait to ski some lines. The bottom of the mountain was nothing to brag about but the upper part is amazing, or so I hear. The Marte is what makes this place a resort to ski. We didn’t expect it to open our first day, it had just stormed the day before so the locals thought maybe it would open in a few days. Ha ha ha….
Tim and Scott waiting for the Marte to open
It was our third day skiing and the word was that the Marte was supposed to open in an hour. We headed up to wait for the opening, checking out lines while we waited. It looked like so much fun.
After a few minutes we got word that it would not open today. We then looked up the lift only to notice that one of the concrete avi barriers had fallen into a lift tower. Not, good. We had been told that it happens often, usually its a quick fix and sometimes a season ender.
I have two more skiing days left at Las Lenas. The majority of my days here have looked like this…
We all hope the Marte will open before we leave, but for those of us going on to New Zealand on tuesday we fear we wont get to ski the Marte. I hope we are wrong.
