I’m standing at 11,000 feet, on an icy, wind-blown ridge in Termas de Chillan, a blue and white volcanic range of the Andes, in southern Chile. I’m breathing hard, looking over the edge, past a too-steep entry to a clear and untracked bowl. But it’s not the altitude that makes it hard to get a full breath. It’s the avalanche beacon I’m wearing around my neck that, simply by its presence, makes me fully aware that what I am about to do may end with suffocation under an avalanche that I triggered. It’s the mountains themselves.

The Andes are so formidable, so honest, and so raw that you are forced to pay attention to them. Or suffer the consequences. Geographically, they’re the youngest mountain chain on earth. And they look it: they are sharp-edged, and cut out deep against the pale sky, as if they’ve just now, broken the crust of the earth and risen to the heavens. The snow here is all above the tree-line, drier and fluffier, and yes, more prone to sliding.

And I am, by nature, not an adventurer. In the ocean, I'm afraid of drowning, of sharks, of being sucked out to sea. And in the snow, though I've been snowboarding for years, I'm afraid of broken bones, cliffs, and avalanches. So mostly, my travels have been influenced, or instigated by my more adventurous friends. I put my trust in them, bury my fear, and allow them to lead me into countries and cultures that invariably change my life for the better. It’s in this spirit that I’ve allowed myself to be talked into a 2-week snowboarding tour in Chile.

I shouldn’t be scared, really. Termas de Chillan is an actual ski resort. Except that the ski patrol is virtually non-existent, hazards go unmarked, and the lifts are sketchy at best. And we’ve hiked off-piste in high winds, with no other people in sight.

There are 5 of us, all of whom I’ve known since High School, or before. And all of who are kind enough, as I edge the nose of my board towards the lip for the first descent, to keep their mouths shut.

The friend of the moment is Aaron Chan. His energy is nearly boundless. He partied early into the morning with us 2 days ago in Santiago, and then woke us, an hour or two later, and loaded us, nauseous or still drunk or both, into a van that careened up 46 mountain switch-backs, sans guardrails, to the first of the mountains on our trip, La Parva, where we’d planned to spend a day or two getting our legs back. There wasn’t much snow, so we decided to make the 6-hour drive to Las Trancas, at the foot of the Termas de Chillan ski area.

Chan is the owner and co-founder of CASA tours, Chilean Andean Snow Adventures, one of the first adventure travel companies to bring regular people like myself to snow adventures in the Andes. He is short and stocky; he trudges rather than walks, as if moving at all times through a high wind. Which is something, in fact, he has spent a large part of the past 9 years doing. Read More...