Skippress - Index

Skippress - SkiPress US Vol.7 No.3 - Index

Carving under the Chilean sun.
Salomon jacket, Liquid plaid pants,
Scott USA goggles and gloves.
Hiking at 10,000 feet. From left to right:
Nordica jacket and pants, Spy goggles.
Helly Hansen hat, jacket and pants; Salomon jacket,
Liquid pants; Peak Performance jacket and pants.
Riding in the summertime: Peak Performance
hat, jacket and pants. Oakley sunglasses.
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Lazing on pista verde: Helly Hansen jacket and
pants, Oakley hat and sunglasses.
Valle Nevado is the largest skiable domain is the Southern
Hemisphere — more than 22,000 acres of terrain.
The fi rst day you’ll only ski the part you see from your
room. It’s big, all right: open, excellent grooming, fast
lifts, uncrowded pistas and — snow-permitting — endless
off-pistas. But still, you don’t feel it’s that big. Not
until, the next morning, you venture behind that fi rst
range of mountains...
Then it feels like you’ve just opened up the gates to
heaven. Lifts, more lifts; runs, more runs; snow, more
snow; higher, farther, deeper into the heart of the Andes.
Let the spirit take you closer to the glacier. You feel so
small next to those vast mountains.
And the sun is warm. And the snow is dry. The air is thin,
but your spirits high. “At 13,000 feet, it’s the closest I’ve
been to heaven, literally,” says one fi rst-timer. “Or maybe
it is heaven.”
Valle Nevado gets tons of snow but rarely gets cold. “It’s
sunny 85 percent of the year… and the temperature rarely
goes below freezing,” says Claudia Molina, Valle Nevado’s
marketing director. And by the end of their season — that
would be September — you can ski hardpacked winter
conditions all morning and spend the afternoon tanning
by the heated pool.