Lucky on Lanin

I have to say that technology  definitely helps the modern skier. Last night I was humming and hawing on whether to attempt Lanin today. Its such a huge mountain and so much has to be aligned to make it happen. I checked out mountain-forecast.com and they predicted 10 km an hour winds in the morning and 0 km in the afternoon. Zero… Seriously… After the winds on LLaima that gave me frostnip at around 80-100km; I could not ignore a zero km an hour forecast. This site will predict precisely for the summit you want to climb. And it was giving me the go ahead.  So Dave and I headed up there this morning.

Again its tough to get perspective but that is 8200 feet of relief in the photo. Over 8000 ft of alpine terrain. Driving up this morning we were both awed and ready for this beast of a climb. A skin through some monkey trees and then up and into the terrain. Lots and lots of skinning, with a tiny bit of boot packing brought us up 4000 feet. Looking up we both were blown away that we still had over 4500 feet of climbing to do. Up an up we went 5 hours in and we were getting close…

Finally we were boot packing the final rimed pitch, such a beautiful backdrop. This mountain is almost 2000 ft higher than anything in sight, giving us an amazing view. By now we were thousands of feet above the clouds and getting to Dave’s highest summit ever

.

Mountain-forecast.com’s prediction was perfect,  zero wind on the summit. Unbelievable.. The summit straddles Chile and Argentina. We enjoyed a good 20 minutes on the summit while I did some video stuff and then skied 8500ft down to the valley. Rimed snow, softening to some powder, to slightly icy crust, to windslab, some soft powder, sun crust, moist snow. Quite the variety over such a log descent. Awesome day.