How to Ski Patagonia: Season, Terrain, and Chile vs Argentina | After Hours ep. 5

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.