New steed

We finally have our steed for this trip, the Galloper.You can see the kids are pysched this car came from the friendly folks at MisionImpossible.  So vehicle under foot and we took off to Pucon.

This morning Dave, and I headed up to climb the Volcan Vallarica, a beauty of a volcano. But crazy winds blew an ice chunk into my face.

and then blew me off my feet and sent me sliding down a mellow ice slope. We turned around and will return.

One million done a million to go

Great to watch this number tick over,  didn’t feel as elated as I thought I would. Which is understandable since this is only half way…   Lots more to go.

Exploration

The coolest looking line in this valley is the west face off Pinnacle? so Dave and I headed up towards it with hopes that it would still be holding nice snow. Yesterday it snowed 15 cm of nice snow, which I missed since my body would not allow me to go skiing, and I had hopes that the wind had not ruined the nice snow yet.

We toured up and past Refugio Garganta del diablo

and took a  look inside. A cool older refugio, built in 1937, might have been awesome then but needs some love. Nice place to eat a snack and get out of the wind but not really a place I would stay, unless I pitched my tent inside.

Dave and I then headed up to check out the line off Pinnacle and realized it was wind smashed and did not look fun to ski. We ended up skiing a decent line down the North and toured around and up to the summit of Nevado. Sitting on the summit of Pinnacle it was eerily calm, no wind, and 2 hours later on the summit of Nevado we could barely stand. Crazy contrast.  A long but satisfying tour,  great loop with new terrain all day and out of the 8700ft we had maybe 1000ft of smooth skiing, the rest was wind blasted, choppy, crusty and icy.

Almost at a mill though.