Ski Argentina

I WOKE UP FULLY CLOTHED, face down on the hotel room blanket. It took a while before I understood where I was. Slowly but surely, glimpses of the previous night came back to me, and I began to smile. Vincent snored quietly a few meters away and Seb had fallen asleep with his toupee on. The person lying in the bed above me, whose long fair hair was hanging over the edge of the bed, was no girl but our Finnish photographer, Tero. I wondered where Camille had bedded down for the night. Outside, the birds were twittering and the cars were tooting in the streets of Mendoza. Having rounded off Seb Michaud’s invitational competition in Argentina with two days of partying and craziness, it was high time to travel on.

BUT FIRST: I can’t say for sure because of the jet lag, but I would guess that 24 hours had passed since leaving Chamonix when we all sit down at a big table in Malargué to consume steaks and fine red wine. With pink glasses on his nose and a toupee on his head, Seb Michaud takes us comically through the programme highlights for the days ahead. The list is long as he lays out what will be the greatest ski experience I’ve ever been a part of. It takes the whole morning for us to fill up the minibus and reach the end of the gravel road to Campo Caron Grande, where the way continues south toward Patagonia. It takes an additional three hours on horseback, in galloping hysterics, before we hit the snow line. In bad weather we switch from the pack animals to skis and skins on the way to the hostel at the end of the world. After a quick check-in, we treat ourselves to a comfortable bath at Caron Grande.

THE WINTER has been dry – a poor one, says Tatos, the Argentine skier. And it’s true that there’s not much snow on the mountains around us. In places, the wind has blown the peaks bare. Nonetheless, several wonderful surprises will come our way on our first day on skis. We ski a technical trail with wide variations in snow cover. It’s easy to read the terrain and pick the right way down. This is skiing for the fun of it, and I like that. I’m not accustomed to snowmobiles, so I sit with clenched butt as we roar full speed up the mountainsides. I am sandwiched between the driver and the handlebars, which makes me feel uncomfortably powerless. It’s even worse on the traverses.

ON DAY TWO THE WIND PICKS UP. Camille and I follow Vincent and Seb, all of us tucked into our own sound universe and well hidden by our helmets and hoods. No one tries to speak. I follow Xavier Delerue and Phil Mayer to the top of Campanario’s broad pass, at 3,800 metres. It’s a long way! Vince and Camille have turned off toward the right in the hunt for good downhill runs. We return to the camp around mid-afternoon. The wind is blowing now, and little stones keep flying up to hit us in the face. My nerves are on edge, and Sylvain’s cap gets torn. I come back to camp exhausted, wrung out by this mountainous version of the Antarctic sea. With Vincent and the others, we enact a group bathing ceremony. Soon we are joined by Serge I and Serge II (Cornillat and Vitelli), who have come to relax after a long day of snowmobile driving and tinkering. They talk about life in Argentina and Chile, about skiing and mundane hassles like mechanical breakdowns and nights spent on the pampa. I smell campfire smoke and diesel exhaust, adventure and freedom. At night we gather with Vincent around the kitchen fireplace and share a meal with the other snowmobilers, Leo, Pampa and Caniche. As they break into Spanish, Serge’s wife Erica and her sister Veronica put together a feast of meat, soup and vegetables.

TWO DAYS of storm have blessed us with a good layer of snow. At dawn on the third day I hear Seb Michaud stamp his feet to knock off the fresh snow clinging to his boots. I see him enter the living room with a smile on his face. He ploughs through the ski shoes that ring the wood stove and rubs his hands together. He has been outside resurrecting our sponsorship banners, which had been forced to the ground overnight. For his project to succeed, several acts of nature and of man must coincide, but there’s not much we can do about the weather or snow conditions. If we’re lucky we will sense ”la buena onda”, or good vibes. During the next two days, in any case, we are on skis from morning to night and from mountain to mountain. We all replay bits of our runs for our companions and for Seb Michaud, who makes sure the days unfold as they should. A feeling of fellowship and goodwill pervades this beautiful and wild place east of the sun near the border with Chile. We clap our hands, laugh and cheer; we whistle and congratulate one another. ”That mountainside over there – you are the first to ever try it,” Cornillat tells us. Besides having fun, I think everyone feels they have experienced rare moments on skis in an otherworldly place. Everyone thanked Seb at one time or another during the trip. The next day, we left Caron Grande for the city.

EPILOGUE, at the end of a long, straight run: Behind the green lenses of my sunglasses I’m sweating a little. There’s a catch in my throat and a knot in my stomach at the thought of seeing this enormous, desolate landscape for the last time before boarding the airplane back to Europe. We have driven for three days on the N40, a mythical road that seems endless in both time and space. But our trip is soon over and I turn up the radio, telling myself that the Rolling Stones are like the landscape around me, a magnified version of familiar feelings. The snow-capped peaks of the Andes point the way to this unknown world, where humanity has not yet ruined God’s work. Argentina the Great!

I OPEN a Quilmes beer to wash down the dust in my mouth and then pass it over to Camille. At the top of a cliff a lorry emerges in a storm cloud of smoke and dust. The bearded, suntanned driver lifts a hand nonchalantly and I wave back as custom dictates. Out here, meeting another vehicle is a small happening that breaks the monotony of the drive. A little later, after snaking downhill through a hairpin turn, I brake and park the car. The tires churn up the gravel and a thick dust cloud envelopes us. But when I switch off the engine, the silence is all-consuming. I get out to take a leak and Camille walks across the road to photograph an old vehicle he noticed down the bank, abandoned to the earth, rusting away in the heat of the sun.

AN OLD AND WOBBLY sign reading ”Kiosk 500” convinces me to turn off the main road and onto a gravel one. It takes us into an enclosure of logs and twisted branches that’s watched over by an aggressive dog and some wandering hens. To the left we notice two wonderfully rusted pickup trucks, dented and decrepit in perfect symbiosis with their surroundings. We get out of the car to buy beer, for we ran out many kilometres back. I walk boldly into the sharp gaze of a stocky man in a faded cap. As I greet him in Spanish and tell him what we are looking for, he nods in understanding. I follow him to a cabin made of bricks and wooden planks, covered by a tin roof. Inside it’s dim. It smells of meat from the half carcasses of sheep hanging from the roof to dry, amidst a chaos of food cans, beer bottles and cheap cleaning products.

ONWARD WE DRIVE. We notice a few gauchos on the move who give us a hasty look before disappearing from my mirror. Along the road lie the remains of horses that have collapsed, their breast bones protruding through rotten skin and leather, resting at last among the wildflowers. The empty eye sockets stare at us as we gun past with ugly yellow smiles.