Deep powder, star coaches and a resort like no other — the magic of ‘summer’ in Portillo
As Europe and the US sweltered, the Chilean ski area was getting its biggest snowfalls in 50 years — and it’s not too late to go
No Mediterranean for me this summer — instead, high in the Andes in the middle of August, I skied along an old railway track towards an abandoned tunnel. Snowdrifts had almost filled the entrance, leaving only a dark sliver of open space beneath the cracked brickwork arch. I had to bend my head to get in, then slide down a ramp of snow to reach the dry tunnel floor.
Waiting inside with a headtorch was Mike Douglas, a Canadian often called the “godfather of freeskiing” — one of five celebrated coaches here in Portillo, Chile, to lead an annual week-long trip known as the Superstars Camp. After 20 years of visits to the area, he knew every skiable line on its mountains, including one only accessible via this tunnel.
Mike ushered us forward, a six-strong group of skiers, our brightly coloured jackets incongruous in the dark, rough-walled tunnel. Icicles dangled from cracks in the ceiling, sparkling in the torchlight. We tramped on, taking care not to trip on the old rails and sleepers, stepping over a long-discarded pair of overalls, until we eventually came to a ventilation shaft, half-collapsed and almost impossible to spot if you didn’t know it was there.
We clambered up into it, trying not to rub against rocks still covered in soot from the steam trains that once plied this route, the Transandine Railway. From 1910 until 1984, it carried passengers and freight between Santiago in Chile and Mendoza in Argentina but it struggled commercially and shut down after a series of avalanches blocked the line.
Finally, we saw light ahead and emerged blinking from the shaft into what seemed like the back of a snow-filled cave, and beyond it the secret slope, sparkling in the afternoon sun. It was a short, steep descent, covered in buttery snow and dispatched in two breathless, thrilling minutes. At the bottom we looked back up — the exit from the shaft now invisible, our tracks seeming to start, as if by magic, in the middle of an inaccessible slope bordered by rocks.
I’d been skiing for 40 years and had never done a run like that. But then, for me, this was a week of firsts — not least my first time skiing in South America and first time skiing in August — in a ski resort like no other.
In fact, Portillo isn’t a ski resort in the conventional sense: rather than a town, it is a single hotel, painted bright yellow and perched, like the Ark washed up on Ararat, on a snowy shoulder 2,880 metres above sea level. It stands only 5km as the condor soars from the pass that marks the border with Argentina and 23km from Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia. And, in an age when skiing is increasingly commodified, homogenised and dominated by large corporate groups, Portillo is a happy anachronism, family-run, independent and idiosyncratic.
Above all, though, it was a week of deep powder — like heli-skiing without the need for a noisy, expensive machine. While resort managers worldwide fret about diminishing snowfall, in Portillo this year the problem has been too much. A storm in mid-July brought such a deluge, the road up to the resort and the border was closed — it would be a month before it opened fully again. Some visitors had to be taken out by helicopter and, with no guests, Portillo’s ski instructors gave lessons to the housekeepers and janitors. Staff grew used to shovelling snow to clear windows and doorways that had been subsumed by the drifts.
But before the ski resort and before the road, there was only the railway. In the late 19th century, Norwegian engineers surveying the proposed route donned skis to travel in winter, making them probably the first skiers on the continent. When it started running, the train became South America’s first ski lift — early enthusiasts used to ride it up close to the border, before skiing down alongside the Rio Juncalillo.
Seeing the sport’s growing popularity, in the 1940s the Chilean government decided to build a hotel at Portillo. It opened in 1949 but was soon losing money and in 1961 was put up for auction. Two American former guests, Bob Purcell and Dick Aldrich, submitted what they later discovered was the only bid, and Purcell asked his nephew Henry to give up his job with Hilton in Manhattan to come to Chile to manage it.
Henry was 26 when he arrived in Portillo through that same sooty railway tunnel. He had never skied, spoke little Spanish, and was in for a shock. “The place was in a miserable condition; they hadn’t put any money into it in years. It stank — a sheep was living in the lounge,” he told me, as we sat in his light-filled office overlooking the slopes, a few iron spikes from the old railway on his windowsill.
Yes — Henry, now aged 92, is still here and still running the place, alongside his wife Ellen, son Miguel and various other members of the family. He’d only planned to stay long enough to convince Hilton he was capable of an overseas posting. “I figured a couple of years would show them I could handle living outside the US,” he says. “Trouble was, I liked it.”
He began to renovate the hotel and expand the lift system, hatching an audacious plan to host the 1966 Alpine World Ski Championships — still the only time the event has taken place in the southern hemisphere. Jean-Claude Killy swept to gold in the downhill and combined events, helping put Portillo on the world stage.
Today, black and white photos from that event dot the corridors and, under Henry’s charge, a sense of continuity clings to the place. The main hotel building has 123 rooms and, with a couple of cheaper annexes and small chalets alongside, it accommodates no more than 450 guests at a time (looked after by 450 staff, a ratio that would make more commercially minded resort operators blanch).
Everyone comes for the whole week; meals are all included and taken in the grand dining room with its original wooden columns, leather-lined walls and an army of red-jacketed waiters. “Same jackets they wore back in 1949,” says Henry, who attends every dinner, sitting at what staff dub “the captain’s table”.
Henry might be the patriarch, but isn’t the only familiar face that greets returning guests (and they do return, often over decades and with new generations in tow). There’s Blanca Vergara, the 86-year-old head of laundry, and Mike Rogan, the stalwart director of operations, who first arrived to run the ski school in 1995 (and, judging by the amount of duct tape holding it together, still has the same down jacket). Links between staff and hotel run deep: one team member told me her father was an instructor, her mother a receptionist, and that she was conceived here.
At dinner the first night we met Juan Beiza, the maître d’, who started here in 1968. When Fidel Castro visited in 1972, Beiza noticed that he had risen from the lunch table but left his pistol on the seat. Running outside to return it, his arm outstretched, Beiza was nearly shot for his trouble by the Comandante’s nervous bodyguards.
In the morning we set out — 27 “campers”, most from the US but with others from Japan, the UK, Canada and Greece. Coming out of the boot room, we found the snow so deep, steps had been cut into it to take us up to the surface. Fat flakes were still falling; it was the last day of the big storm and the forecast was for it to slowly clear, with the lifts gradually opening. Portillo has just 14 — but though the piste skiing is limited, the off-piste options, accessed via traverses or boot-packing, are vast. “This place is the biggest little ski area on the planet,” says Chris Davenport, the two-time extreme skiing world champion who has been organising the Superstars Camp since 2005.
We rushed to the Condor lift just as it opened. This is a “va-et-vient”, or “slingshot”, one of only four in the world, all at Portillo. Custom-built in the 1960s, they are a bit like a Poma drag lift, only much faster and, rather than ride up single file, four or five skiers stand side by side — if someone falls, you’ll likely all come off.
At the top, thankful for having survived one more new ski experience without mishap, I found myself following Ingrid Backstrom, another of the coaches and star of numerous ski movies over the past 20 years. She pushed off and we watched her fly through the untracked snow, dropping down the mountainside at speed and yet with languid movements that seemed completely unhurried, the time-bending trick of a true master.
Later, as I stood peering through ephemeral cloud tunnels at the Laguna del Inca far below, I was surprised by a movement on a rock. A strange creature was watching me, only a few metres away — like a giant rabbit but with a squirrel’s bushy tail. A viscacha, I was told, and for me another first.
The Portillo paradox is that, though it attracts hardcore skiers — both freeriders here for the steeps and professional racers down for off-season training — the atmosphere is neither raucous nor competitive; rather it’s more like a high-altitude country club or cruise ship in the snow. When the lifts close at 5pm, you hand your skis and boots to the valet, then head upstairs for a high tea in the dining room. Afterwards, with no televisions to detain them in their rooms, families gather for cards by the fire in the drawing room, or dash through the snow to leap into one of the three outdoor pools.
There’s a sports hall, a climbing wall and kids’ playroom, a cinema, a nightclub and a bar (with a vaguely Bavarian feel created in the 1960s by a set designer who worked on I Love Lucy). Noticeboards show the day’s timetable of activities, from morning stretching sessions to bakery classes and ping-pong tournaments, as well as which band will be playing in the bar that night.
Those on the Superstars Camp also have nightly film shows by the coaches. First up, Cody Townsend and Elyse Saugstad presented their yet-to-be-released movie The Edge of Reason about the death of a friend, an avalanche near miss, and how becoming parents has changed their approach to risk. Watching it was all the more poignant with their four-year-old son Indiana wheeling around at the back of the cinema on his balance bike.
As the skies cleared, we found ourselves with five bluebird days and lavish quantities of snow, and gratefully made the most of our impeccable timing.
When the CaraCara slingshot opened, we could traverse from the top into distant couloirs, like the long, dreamy Estadio, starting on a rocky shoulder, then expanding to a wide apron of the deepest powder.
And though it felt like adventure skiing deep in the back-country, we were actually always within the resort boundary. One minute we’d be negotiating a powder-choked couloir, the next sitting outside Tío Bob’s (Uncle Bob’s), the on-mountain restaurant — as one camper put it, “washing out the adrenalin with a glass of white wine”.
We were, to be honest, totally spoiled — given Portillo’s modest number of beds (fewer than 1 per cent of the total in La Plagne, France, for example), it was like having a private resort. Other companies might have tried to develop more real estate or to maximise lift pass sales, but when Vail Resorts approached to offer partnership and membership of its Epic Pass, Portillo declined, preferring to hold true to the original model.
“It’s a tough business, certainly not a good way to make money,” Henry told me. “But I think people more and more want to get away from corporate ski areas. They enjoy sitting around here in a relaxed atmosphere, in a place where they can do family things and not be subject to so much pressure.”
We skied in groups of five or six, each day with a different coach. One afternoon, Mike Douglas drilled us to look up and further forward: “It’s like driving a car: if you look down at the white line just before the bumper, it’s a blur. But the further out you look, the slower it seems.”
Cody Townsend ran us through spotting and skiing a new steep route, starting with finding a vantage point to look across at the entire face (known as the “barbie line” because film crews would set up in that position and end up having to stay there so long they might as well have lit a barbecue). From there, he explained, we could take photos and note rocks and other features to help with navigation. “The only problem is that it looks steeper straight on. I always have to tell myself: ‘Don’t worry, the barbie line always looks worse!’”
Afterwards we went back up and gingerly slid on to the most committing line of the week. When I caught the tip of my ski on a rock, and toppled backwards off balance, Cody was standing below to stop me falling any further. I won’t say he saved my life, but he probably saved me some bruises.
That night, our last, we trooped a few minutes across the road to La Posada, a no-frills bar that once catered to truck drivers heading for the border but is now part of the hotel. A DJ played Chilean pop and we drank pisco sours alongside hotel staff celebrating the end of the week. When we walked back, we could see the stars that had dazzled all week start to vanish behind incoming clouds — more snow was on its way.
In fact, almost 10 metres have now fallen, the most in 50 years, so much that the resort has extended its season by several weeks, until October 11, while Davenport has added an extra week’s course, starting September 19. All of which is to say, if you like the sound of wild mountains and abundant snow, of a week delightfully sequestered from the modern world, it’s not too late...