Subscribe
After several days of hiking and skiing the perimeter of Las Leñas by day and befriending the mountain management by après-ski, we found ourselves extending our boundaries with the use of a snowcat. This particular region of the Andes is a mixture of rolling terrain between massive peaks – a perfect layout for an ambitious snowcat driver with a passion for exploration. It turns out Jeff, the mountain manager, is a cat-driving guru from Kirkwood, California. He blazed a track that serviced 3,000 foot runs with phenomenal skiing – so good that we convinced him to leave us out remote with our overnight gear.
Who better to take us camping in the Andes than fellow guide Mike Hamilton? Mike arrived in Las Leñas in 1999 and lived in a tent for the next 5 winter seasons. Camping in the snow is all about being prepared, and if you’re not, it’ll be the last time you do it. As we put our new prototypes for skiing to the test, we enjoyed the comforts of expedition quality gear already perfected by a dream team of mountaineers and tested this past spring on Everest.
After many design sessions in the confines of a Bellevue, Washington conference room, we were finally putting the first prototypes to the test in the middle of the Andes Mountains deep in the Southern Hemisphere. As darkness fell over our tents in the Valle Hermoso after another epic day of skiing, I remember looking out over that endless expanse, listening to a deafening silence, and thinking how lucky we are to experience a place like this.
