In the heat of summer, nothing sounds better to me than a cold, wintry day racking up run after run on a ski hill. To maintain this dream, I live in a pretty darn cool place: Mount Hood, Oregon. Here on this 11,000-foot volcano, we are fortunate to have lift-served access to skiing and snowboarding some 300+ days a year. While most ski towns make the seasonal transition to bikes or boats, on Mount Hood my favorite part of the year is the summer “corn” snow, with its soft, responsive carves.
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August on the Palmer Snowfield, Mount Hood, Oregon.
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Year in and year out, while making my summertime laps on the Palmer chairlift, I lusted for one missing ingredient: cold powder snow conditions. As an avid weather nerd, I spent years researching conditions and monitoring forecasts for Southern Hemisphere snow cycles during their winter season. Working at many ski areas while traveling throughout the western United States, I forged wonderful friendships and picked up great advice about skiing locales all over the world. My skiing mentors introduced exotic places such as Portillo into my lexicon with epic stories of big mountain lines and a lively après scene.
It’s a misnomer that there isn’t much money to be made in the ski industry; any resourceful skier will tell you there are ways to make sacrifices and always a creative side hustle to work. When I dreamt about visiting South America, the biggest obstacle was simply the plane ticket to get there. The connections within the ski world often provided a comped lift ticket or a couch to surf—you just needed to be willing to go. Back on Mount Hood, as the Palmer chair closed for fall 2021, I found myself stuck watching clips flooding in from the mystical mountains of the Andes. Bemoaning my inability to pull the trigger on a South America trip in years past, I decided I needed a solution to the burdening cost of travel.
One day at work, a lightbulb moment occurred as I emptied a big bag of recyclables. In the state of Oregon, recycling is big money, and I loved the idea of doing something positive to reach a big goal. If nothing else, I laughed at the idea that it would make one hell of a bar story—to visit a foreign place and tell a random barfly you got there by turning in cans. In the final week of October, I began collecting recyclables in earnest. My goal was 300 cans a week, or $30. I would see how long I could put up with the process and go from there.
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7500 cans takes a lot more space when you can't crush them.
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My recycling routine became easy, which in turn made it realistic to stick with the plan. I told coworkers about my can drive, collected from my roommates, and began efficiently dropping bags at the grocery store each week. Some friends became interested in the plan; others laughed. After a phenomenal day riding Powder Mountain in early March, the second spark happened: an unexpected message from my landlord in Crested Butte asking if I wanted to go on a ski tour in Chile that summer. I had no clue if I could afford the trip or pull it off, but I responded, “Fuck yeah!” without hesitation.
Finally, in the last weeks of May, I counted my stack of money for the final time. It was a satisfying part of the experience that I had looked forward to for so long—to tangibly hold the sum of my recycling funds. After all those weeks and the crazy volume of recycling I handled, I bought the flight and marked the dates on the calendar.
The last day I skied on Hood before leaving for South America was bittersweet. By the time I returned, our summer season would be over. Maybe that’s the only reason I’m writing this story, though—because the winter of 2022 was fantastic for South American resorts. With tremendous early-season dumps at Portillo and the Tres Valles, locals were skiing faces that hadn’t seen coverage in years. I flew from Portland to LA, took a groggy nap, boarded a red-eye, and awoke to an early-morning arrival in Santiago. A quick pass through customs, and a familiar face waited at the curb as men shouted at me from every direction with different offers. Whisked into the van, we needed to beat the uphill road closure to ski the remaining powder stashed from yesterday’s 10-inch refresh.
(In Chile, the road up to the ski area is open the first half of the day, and then downhill traffic begins in the afternoon.)
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Portillo a place where dreams come true.
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The distance from Santiago to La Parva isn’t great, but the roads are insane. Fifty kilometers takes nearly two hours, and since I was the last to arrive and Casey wasn’t missing a good day for my flight, we raced toward the mountain. Our first day was a mission: to ski the wide apron of McConkey’s below the La Chimenea couloir, perched high above La Parva ski area. The potential danger was intimidating as I stared above our skin track while we toured up. Local intel said the snowpack was stable, we were timing the weather window well, and I just needed to keep pace on my shitty touring gear. At the top, I watched my friends drop one after another as they carved their tracks in pure aesthetic bliss. Pointing my skis downhill, the snow was blower soft—not totally bottomless, but in that perfect “ski fast or sink” kind of way. I didn’t waste a single turn, falling into the rhythm my host had set.
Drinking a pisco sour at the base after a terrific day on the mountain, I cheered my comrades and thought back on all those stinky beer cans in my car trunk. 7,500 cans later, I was actually skiing powder in South America.
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| August 2022 in Chile |
