Viktor Marohnic

Chile and Argentina’s Lake District is threaded with volcanoes, and when the snow comes in, the line cuts so sharp across the slope you can watch it from the chairlift. On the new episode of After Hours, host Viktor Marohnić talks with Monte Johnston, an IFMGA mountain guide based in Squamish, BC, who has made repeat trips through the region and knows it well enough to have a local guide friend in Bariloche tipping him off to the good stuff. He goes region by region, and the range is what stands out. Antillanca on the Chilean side, where a switchbacking road climbs 1,500 meters to a few old fixed-grip lifts that open straight into the backcountry. Puyehue, where you ride mules an hour and a half above the treeline to ski a glacier inside the volcano. Cerro Bayo on the Argentinian side, a small old resort with enormous slack country that ended up being Monte’s favorite of the trip. Catedral above Bariloche, where a short skin off the lifts puts you onto spines and chutes. There’s gentle terrain for anyone easing into it and 45-to-50-degree couloirs for anyone who came looking, and on a good day you’re lapping 2,000 meters of descent with almost nobody else on the hill. Add it up — big terrain, empty slopes, no altitude to manage, and a full winter running while the northern hemisphere sits in summer — and Patagonia stops looking like a novelty and starts looking like a second season. If you’ve been putting Patagonia off because it sounds like an expedition, this is the episode that shows it isn’t one.

Backcountry skiing in Iceland isn’t new — the first ski race in the country was held in 1905 on the Troll Peninsula, now called the cradle of Icelandic skiing. What’s new is the guiding: Iceland has produced only five certified ski guides through its own mountain-guide program, and four of them work out of one lodge in Tröllaskagi. Viktor sits down with Ólöf, who left a decade running Icelandic Tourism to convert an old schoolhouse into a ski lodge on her family’s land, and Smári, one of the country’s first IFMGA-track ski guides. They cover why April beats January for Icelandic powder, what it’s like skiing sea-to-summit from a converted 1975 fishing boat in the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve — Iceland’s last stretch with no roads at all — and why the geothermal pool waiting at the end of the day is a UNESCO-recognized tradition, not just a nice-to-have. If backcountry skiing conjures crowds and lift lines for you, this resets it — lodge or boat, you end up skiing straight into the Arctic Ocean either way.

Kicking Horse might be the most insane ski resort in North America. Five alpine bowls. Peaks you bootpack to inside the resort boundary. The most chute skiing of any ski area on the continent — and snow so consistent you can still find powder two weeks after the last storm. We sat down with Powder Matt Mosteller, SVP of Resorts at Resorts of the Canadian Rockies, and Toby Barrett, who runs sales, marketing, and operations at Kicking Horse, to get into all of it: the terrain, the snow science, backcountry access, and why Golden, BC might be the most underrated ski town on the continent. Toby’s read on why Golden still flies under the radar, and Matt’s case for chute skiing over everything else the Rockies offer — that’s the part worth staying for.