Sunday, September 26, 2010

Snowboarding Crater of Volcan Puyehue with The North Face team


Decided to start with some beauty before writting. The whole trip is described below ....

Home at the rim of the Crater. Weather braking up after 5 days of storm...

On September 10th, 2010, early in the morning I left Bariloche towards Chile with co-pilot, Ingrid Backstrom... (good co-pilot by the way) ...Music and mate made this 4 hs till the airport of Osorno very nice. There, I left Ingrid and picked up Ben Gavelda, writer of "Transworld Snowboard Magazine", next day arrived rest of The North Face crew, they were photographer Scott Serfas and Joe, athletes Luca Di Bari, DCP (Dave C. Porcheron) and Shin Campos.
On the 12th, arrived good soul and pro-snowboarder, Xavier de la Rue.
Huge expedition to supermarket and next step drive to the farm to pack all our stuff....
On the 13th we packed the horses with Don Flavio and company, alwys helpful and friendly.
Weather was not excellent but good enough to travel in the mountains without getting wet, little bit of clouds and moisture.... but very nice... Temperatures were close to 0 degrees celsius.
We rode for 2-3 hs and horses did not make it all the way to the cabin, so we had to do some load trips to the cabin from the highest point were the horses left us.... This hard, part was sponsored by
Mrs Edy, who made the best empanadas in the entire area!!
We waited few days for the weather to improve, but never cleared too much, and forecast said that only will come half a day of clear skies. To Ski into the Crater you need perfect visibility, and the problem is that the first place where the clouds stuck is in the high summits, so... we decided to navigate in the white out and bring tents to the rim of the Volcano where we settled our camp for one night waiting for our window..
Next, morning at 7.30 am with beautiful lights and sunshine Xavier dropped into the Crater doing his first line,
then followed Luca and then DCP.
The guys did in between 4-5 lines each so was pretty nice and we took advantage of 10 hs of good weather,
at 6 pm we were on our way down.... Next morning was pooring rain!!
Thanks God the crater " was open again".... Sorry about my poor english and short story but
I think you will be able to read it anyway! Enjoy pics below!!
Thanks to my good friend Nico, who is always there giving the best of his self !!


donkeys on duty...

Nico in Ninja mode during the down days

DCP, scouting some lines into the Crater

Xavier de La Rue, excited for powder one more time!

DCP in action, I did not take many pics of dropping down! Next time more!!!
Text and pics:
Jorge Kozulj
UIAGM MT GUIDE
www.andescross.com

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