The Chilean Volcano Tour: Part 2!

Patty Murphy was a great friend and mentor of mine during my days at Bucknell (he was president of the ski team my sophomore year) and he moved out to Vail after he graduated.  We were never more than a few hour drive from each other and we got to do a lot of partying and skiing over the years, with rendezvous in the Utah desert, the central rockies, and the backwoods of Montana.  

I hadn’t gotten to see him since my going-away asado in Salt Lake almost two years ago, so when he proposed a trip to visit me in Chile, I said yes immediately!  As a bonus, he was bringing along his girlfriend, Haleigh, a Vail local that skins faster than a spandex-clad-randonerd and had strong enough cribbage skills to give me a real run for my money.  Truly a force to be reckoned with!

We met up at the airport in Puerto Montt and everyone’s bellies were rumbling for some Chilean grub.  We went straight to the best pichanga bar in town and ordered up a round or two of pisco sours and caught up on the last two years of our lives. 

That turned out to be just what we needed and I mentioned that there was a traditional Chilean drink that (I’m embarrassed to say) I hadn’t tried yet.  It’s called a terremoto (earthquake) and it consists of a sweet white wine, a splash of grenadine, and a scoop of pineapple ice cream.  They’re a sweet, powerful concoction, and when you stand up after one and notice the room is shaking, you suddenly understand the reasoning behind their name.  

As you can imagine, those went over great with the team and by the time we went to bed that night, everyone’s fear of earthquakes had disappeared and everyone’s Spanish skills had improved tenfold. 

The next day, we had a leisurely morning, put on all of our ski gear, and took the bus (amid stares from confused Chileans) up to Puerto Varas to meet my friend Jess for a little afternoon skiing on Volcan Osorno, a little mom-and-pop operation above Lago Llanquihue.  

It was the weekend so there were scores of Chileans heading up in two wheel drive sedans to go sledding on the flanks of the mountain and it was quite an entertaining, if frustrating, drive to get up to the ski area.  The upper cone of the volcano was going in and out of the clouds and by the time we hopped on the ski lift it was totally socked in.

We couldn’t see more than a turn or two ahead, but the snow was absolutely great (we described it as being cream-cheesey) and we carefully sliced and diced our way around volcanic rocks that seemed to be sticking out of the snow all over the place.  Eventually the clouds broke apart and we got a view across to Volcan Calbuco and down towards the lake.  

Jess’s truck was triple parked in by the intrepid sledding crowd, so we decided a few pisco sours by the wood stove in the lodge might be a nice way to warm up after skiing in the clouds all afternoon.  We still didn’t have a solid plan for where we’d go for the rest of the trip, but Jess offered to let us use her extra car (a lovely white Toyota Corolla which we soon named Karen) and it looked like the best weather would be a couple hours drive to the north.  Thus, we cheersed "To The North!" and to the north is exactly where we went!

The following day was nice and clear and we spent it working our way slowly through the Chilean countryside, stopping for the occasional empanada on the side of the road.  We eventually found ourselves in a little hostel outside the village of Malacahuello.  We took it pretty easy that night and retired early with plans of trying to skin up Volcano Lonquimay early the next morning while the weather was still clear.    

The weather the next morning was indeed clear, and we started a couple of hours before dawn with stars twinkling above us and a gorgeous view of the surrounding mountain ranges.   

Eventually the sun caught up with us and we got to enjoy the second half of the skin totally bathed in alpenglow.   

The wind continued to build as we got higher on the volcano and by the time we got up to the summit pitch, it raging in our faces.  There were times when it could even blow you back down the skin track.  We knew it would only get worse with elevation and on the exposed ridgeline it’d be downright unsafe, so we decided to bail.  It was a bit of a bummer to not reach the crater, but we were able to console ourselves with four thousand vertical feet of soft wind-buff.

There is only one thing to do when weather kicks you off of a Chilean volcano - we spent the rest of the day soaking in Malacahuello hot springs, drinking wine and watching the clouds build in.  

The next day had rain and more high winds on the docket, so we elected to take a rest day to explore another set of hot springs in the area.  They're out in the boonies and it was an adventuresome drive working our way out to them.  

The Rio Blanco hot springs are a bit more natural than others in that neck of the woods, with stone tubs, a stream running past, and trees overhanging the whole thing.  

Clouds built and parted throughout the day and there was a great view of the Sierra Nevada mountains from our tub.  

We brought sandwich makings and plenty of Escudos and whiled away the day soaking, listening to tunes, playing cribbage, and chatting with the proprietor of the joint who had excellent stories to tell.  He gave us all the delicious mineral water we could drink and told us great stories about the various times he'd gotten kicked out of Argentina.  He was a real character, and was happy to put up with all of our shenanigans.  

The next day was predicted to be warm, sunny, and clear so we got an early start on the road to Volcan Llaima.  After the restorative waters of Termas Rio Blanco, we were really primed up and the stoke level was high.  Unfortunately, google maps isn’t particularly reliable in this part of the world and it routed us on a shortcut to the base of the volcano that was closed off by snow at that time of year.  

This would’ve have been a big deal, but it meant an extra hour of backtracking and then another two hours to work our way around to the other side of the volcano on dirt roads.  The volcano felt so close, but in reality it was still three hours away.  By the time we finally got to the small ski area at the base of the volcano, it was nearly noon and the sun was really cooking.

After getting shut down on Lonquimay early in the week, everyone was really raring to go and we set a mean pace up the side of Llaima.  The approach is a bit long, and we wound our way through lots of low angle lava flows before we got to the proper summit cone.  Distances and elevations are really tough to gage on these volcanoes because of the lack of trees or any other thing to compare for scale.  It looked like we were nearly there, but in reality we still had about three thousand vertical feet to go.

We alternated between skinning and booting as we worked our way up the cone and eventually we spotted some mountaineers higher up that looked smaller than ants to give us some perspective.  We redoubled our efforts and made good time on the upper snowfields. 

The views of the surrounding countryside (with volcanoes speckled throughout) were stupendous and it was tough to concentrate on climbing.  As much as I love skiing volcanoes, I might’ve been just as happy to bask in the sunshine and take in the view for hours on end.  

One thing we could make out from down below were the volcanic vents on the side of the mountain slowly letting out steam and melting snow.  These vents slowly create small crevasses where they’ve melted fresh (or windblown) snow and sometimes their tough to spot.  You can imagine how they’re quite a hazard to the alpinist, especially when they’ve had a couple of days to work their magic without any fresh snow to bridge over them. 

We eventually ran into some Basque ski mountaineers (randonerds in the truest sense) and they reported having fallen into a half dozen of them during their ascent of the final hundred meters of the climb.  At that point, the corn snow from lower on the mountain had given way to a mix of ice chunks and deep sun cups.  The snow conditions, combined with the prospect of dying in a volcanic vent crevasse, made the decision an easy one: we would ski from there and, once again, forsake the summit.  

Note the vent crevasses beyond Patty's beer

The ski descent was one of the coolest of my entire life.  

The upper section was good and steep, with sections of good soft corn between the chunder and ice chunks.  We were careful to dodge vents were we could see them and we all made it through unscathed.  

As we got lower on the mountain, the pitch moderated and we found ourselves swooping through lava tunnels with crazy wind features and natural half pipes.  The snow had cooked long enough that it was good and soft and we hooted and hollered the whole way.

We skied a slightly different route than we had climbed and as we got back towards tree line we did some traversing up and down through the lava flows to get back to the trailhead.  It felt like a hell of an accomplishment and some celebratory beers were definitely in order after such a long day.  We had been considering a late evening drive back to Puerto Montt and then an early morning bus to Bariloche, but the weather there had been hot and was expected to get cold again without any fresh snow in the forecast.  We knew we’d end up skiing on concrete and the weather for Chile seemed much better, so we decided to find a spot to spend the night.  The bartendress pointed us in the direction of some cabanas down in the village of Cherquenco which were supposed to be good and cheap.

As we pulled into the driveway, we were greeted by a pack of small dogs that seemed eager to eat us for dinner and a dark-haired woman popped her head out the door to greet us.  She looked a bit suspicious, but was friendly and the little cabin she had was wonderful, with a kitchen and several bedrooms and bathrooms all to ourselves.  We got to chatting with her and her husband and found that they were half Italian and half Arabic and had moved to Chile several years before. 

The nighttime view from our cabana window!

Now, I’ve never met a gypsy in the flesh before, but these folks, combined with the vibe of the whole place, immediately struck me as gypsyesque and we couldn’t help but make jokes about it the whole night.  Pat tried to collect some of their tears, which are, of course, a powerful ingredient in potions, but he was unsuccessful.  


The next morning was also nice and clear and we up to a little lodge on the other side of Llaima to do some more exploring.  Tree line was a bit higher there and there was only one type of tree on offer: the legendary Monkey Puzzle tree. 

We skinned up a good distance to explore more of the cool wind features that build up around the lava flows and then made a bunch of short laps through the trees.

It was another perfect sunny day and smiles and Escudos abounded.  

The next couple of days looked stormy.  As we had found out at this point, storms in Chile normally mean high winds and high winds mean chairlifts don’t spin.  Thus, we decided to wait out the weather again and hang tight for another window of no precip and low winds.  Our cheap little homey cabana was the perfect place to do that from.   After a quick food run, we sent the first day holed up, playing cribbage with the wood stove roaring, the wine flowing, and the rain coming down in droves. 

The next day we were feeling well rested and a bit more ambitious and we decided to head north to another hot springs that we hadn’t seen yet.  They had a website that looked really promising and made mention of how exceptionally hot their springs were.  It was up in the mountains and as we gained elevation, the rain eventually turned to slush… and then the slush turned to a light layer of snow.  Karen had no problem working her way through it, but there were several busses stopped along the side of the dirt road and eventually we came to one that was blocking it entirely and was clearly having issues making it up a hill.  We stopped to let them get out of the way.  A half hour slowly marched by and they made little progress.  Eventually a group of surly passengers from the bus trudged up to us said that we would have to turn around because the bus could “never make it past us”.  There was clearly plenty of space, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer and we turned Karen around and pointed her back up the road away from the hot springs until we found an extra wide spot with at least two lanes of passing space.  It was clear that the process of getting the stuck bus around all of the other stopped busses would take hours, so we decided to hoof it the remaining 3 kilometers to the hot spring – the only snag was that I’d just brought sandals.  It was a cold, wet, slushy walk, and a shuttle from the hotel at the hot springs buzzed past and totally splashed us with muddy slush as we walked up the hill.  Talk about adding insult to injury.

All of these stupid shenanigans wouldn’t have seemed so bad if we’d arrived and been able to jump into some glorious steaming hot springs, but instead we jumped in to find that they were barely luke warm.  We spent enough time for each of us to drink a beer and then trudged another three kilometers in the snow and sleet back to the car.  Hands down my least favorite hot springs in all of Chile.

Spirits were pretty low at this point, so we decided to head back to the cabana and fire up a big delicious dinner to bring us back to life.  Ribs and baked beans it was, and we all felt much better after a few glasses of wine, a hot meal, and a few games of cribbage.  

We left our gypsy cabana early the next morning and made the drive back up to Lonquimay.  It had rained almost up to the parking lot so the road was clear and the cloud deck had risen enough to make out the summit in the early morning light.  We met a few Spaniards in the parking lot that were also going for the summit and we each wished each other well. 

This time around, we elected to buy lift tickets and try to get a bunch of skiing in before we made for the summit.  It was some of the oddest snow I’ve ever seen – windblown and extra grabby – but we had a blast lapping it and waiting for the t-bar on the upper part of the mountain to open.

The wind was still blowing with some force and the clouds were threatening to close in again, so we made for the summit at the first opportunity.  A couple hundred feet of skinning brought us up to the final ridge where the wind had blown the snow into a bunch of ice bulges.  We switched over to crampons and slowly booted our way up to the crater with the clouds just skimming above our heads and the surrounding volcanoes beginning to disappear into the overcast.  Pat and Haleigh looked down into the crater in awe and we all took a moment to rest and collect ourselves.  We’d finally made it to a summit!

The slope immediately in front of us looked to be wind loaded from the storm, so we decided it would be best to wrap around to the slope I’d skied with Porter a month before.  It was during this process that we realized Pat was missing his beacon.  He’d definitely had it on in the parking lot, which meant that he must’ve left it behind somewhere during the climb while he was changing layers.  With the way the wind was blowing it seemed unlikely that it’d still be there if we went back for it, so we decided to charge ahead and get off the summit before we lost visibility.  

It turned out that the aspect we chose had the best snow we’d seen all day and we ripped big, fast turns all the way down.  We pulled up at the base area with huge smiles on our faces and exchanged copious high fives all around.  It was the longest run of Haleigh and Pat’s illustrious skiing careers and we were all really stoked to finally have ticked off a big objective.  Beers were enjoyed in the lodge and eventually we ran into the Spaniards who had come across Pat’s beacon on the ridge and brought it back down for us – talk about a lucky day!

The next day we drove back to Puerto Montt through the rain and packed everything up for the flight back home.  We went out to a big German dinner and polished off more than our fair share of local microbrews.  

The next morning we walked around some local markets to grab a few snacks and momentos for the trip home.  Early in the trip, Pat had jokingly asked me, "Considering the difference in season between the southern and northern hemispheres, what do they call summer sausages down here?"  I puzzled on it for a while, but was totally stumped... until we came across this sign in the market and everything became clear!  

We still had a half day to kill so we decided to head up to Puerto Varas to visit the home of the best pisco sours in all of Chile, at a little place called The Office.  They were as delicious as always and Pat and Haleigh continued to lose cribbage games to me left and right.  A big seafood lunch really capped things off and I dropped them off at the airport with a good pisco buzz and full bellies.  

The end of their trip marked the end of two whirlwind months of land travel, and while I had a big smile on my face, I was worn out and needed a few weeks to recuperate before the party can continue.  Spring is starting to arrive and the rainy days are becoming fewer and fewer.  Another friend arrives soon and I'm in the process of getting the Rascal ready for several months of cruising deeper into Patagonia!