Feliz año nuevo chicos!

Happy New Year everybody!

I rang it in on the flanks of Cerro Tronador (Spanish for "Thunderer", and it looks as badass as its name...sadly the clouds didn't part for me to take photos of it this time) in a hike-in mountain hut full of fun people where the booze flowed and the music played until the wee hours of morning.

Rather than describe in words, here is the story in photos. And some words, but mostly photos. We like photos, right?

Part I: The miserable, miserable (but beautiful) hike

Anneke and I hiked four hours in the driving rain up the side of Cerro Tronador, climbing up through dripping forest with occasional cloud breaks that afforded us some jaw-drapping views. Within the first half hour, we were soaked to the bone, our water-resistant ski gear not up to the deluge. 

It got colder and colder as we hiked, but we were determined. We had a party to go to. Photo: Anneke on the trail as water pours down the volcanic rock.

We did have some pretty sweet views through occasional breaks in the sky (the breaks were never above us, sadly).

Castaño Overa Glacier on Tronador as viewed from the trail.

Anneke slogging though slush as we approached (finally!!) the refugio, rainbow in the background signalling better times ahead.

The refugio! Wait, no, false alarm. A building, but not the refugio.

The refugio! We decided midway up to stay inside, not in tents, because we were so cold and it was raining so hard and staying inside a warm, dry refugio after all that seemed (and was) infinitely nicer.
(Photo taken the next morning as the drunken revelers departed)

Part II: Safe and warm inside Refugio Otto Meiling

Due to our late start, we were the last ones to arrive at the refugio. We were greeted by a hut full of friendly folks who gave us a warm round of applause when we walked in, dripping and shivering. Drinks were quickly poured.

First order of business (after changing into dry clothes): open the wine Anneke hauled up.

Next order of business: cook dinner.

Table neighbor enjoying a book and some mate (in case you doubted we were in Argentina)

One of many cool mosaic lamps decorating the refugio

Part III: We came to party

We killed the five hours between our arrival and midnight by...drinking. Everything. It was new year's eve, after all...

Anneke gleefully pops the cork off of the semi-expensive (expensive is always a relative term when it comes to grape-derived beverages in this part of the world, God Bless the South!) champagne I hauled up the mountain.

¡Diez! Nueve! Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!  ¡¡Feliz año!!

And then the party started for real. First song of the night: Final Countdown. Then: Carrie. Why? Because the refugieros love me (nobody forgot my name that night).

We danced in our flip flops until 4am. You'd think we hadn't just hiked up a volcano. It was an awesome night. (some of the dancing shots by Anneke)

Part IV: January 1, 2014!

Revelers sleeping off the hangovers the next morning. Incredibly, I did not have one. I may have drank like a fish, but I also drank a lot of water and danced all of it off. My sleeping bag is the red one at the bottom, next to the snugglers. Anneke managed to get a photo of me sleep-drooling in my sleeping bag, but I'm saving myself the embarassment here.

Breakfast in the refugio, watching the snow fall and working up the courage to leave.

Anneke was the first brave soul to leave the refugio in the morning.

But it was fine,and fun. The snow was dry and perfect. Me, backpack on, making a total fail of a snowangel. Photo by Anneke.

The snow was, in fact, so perfect that we had to stop and make a little snowman (Australian Anneke's first!!). Harder than we thought it would be, the snow was too dry to use my normal roll-the-ball expert snowman-building technique. Photo by Anneke.

We hiked down as a big group, I used all my Spanish words. Photo by Anneke.

In good spirits despite the rain and hangovers.

Happy new year!!

Epilogue: Some reflections

This new year marked quite a milestone in the life of this chica: the first new year in quite some time where instead of thinking, "good riddance old year, pleasegod let this new one be better," I rang in 2014 in the coolest possible way, all while thinking, "hotdamn, 2013 rocked!! here's to another one like it!"

2010 was the year I struggled mightily with a hopeless experiment, came down with a bad case of pneumonia, and ended a six-year relationship after years of friendship and fighting.

2011 started off hopefully with an exciting new romance and a new direction in my work, but crashed and burned hard with three consecutive cancer scares, surgeries, and the beginning of my battle with major depression.

2012 was an exhausting roller coaster in which I got engaged, got more bad cancer news, got left by my fiancé and, my heart badly and bitterly broken, I sank into the deepest emotional hole I've ever visited, ending up in a hospital after depression had led me to so give up on life that I stopped eating and drinking; it slowly got better from there as my PhD thesis project started to come together and I deepened relationships with family and old and new friends, but it continued to be an emotional battle.

2013 got off to a rough start with another broken heart, but quickly got AWESOME as I fought off the remnants of the mental and physical health problems I had suffered under the previous year, spent a lot of time working on my favorite desert island in the Pacific, wrapped up my PhD research and wrote my thesis, and then, in an incredible burst of everything going right, got a call from my doctor saying "all clear!" from the latest round of biopsies the night before I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in front of a room stuffed with dear friends and my family. August 16th, 2013, the day I became Dr. Frantz, was the best day of my life. And it kept getting better from there as I drove up the Pacific Coast from L.A. to my parents' house in Oregon, put the finishing touches on my dissertation, then flew to Santiago on a $5 air miles ticket to begin this life-changing and grand adventure.

So, to any of my friends out there who suffered through a rough 2013, I lift my glass to you and hope that 2014 is the year that Everything Gets Better. I know that can ring empty when you are sitting in an emotional well in the emotional dark. To you, amigos, I hope you reach out, I'm only an email away and you have my empathy and love. As Allie over at Hyperbole and a Half so beautifully put it, them's some dead fish, and it sucks. Hang in there.

Proof that life gets better!

And to those of you who had a baller 2013, WOOO!! Keep on rocking, rockstars!

To everyone: wishing you joy, random acts of kindness that make you smile, rain in the desert (but get the hell out before the flash flood, k?), and sunny powder days.

With love,

Carie

Navarino Part IV: Refugio Charles and Lago Windhond

Part IV in the story of my 7-day solo trek on Isla Navarino, continued from Part III: Paso de los Dientes and Descent into the Swamp. To start at the beginning or to see the full list of Navarino episodes, click here.

I woke with the sun at 5:40 am (later in the darkness of the woods than out in the open), but despite the window of good weather I let laziness get the best of me, justifying it with feeling a cold coming on and needing the rest to stay healthy, and went back to sleep. I didn’t wake up for another three hours.  I shoveled in a handful of trail mix for breakfast and assessed the water damage. My sleeping bag was dangerously damp and I would need to dry it if I was going to sleep the coming night. My hiking socks all had holes burnt in them from being put too close to the fire the night before. Everything was cold and wet. It was a cold morning. But I wasn’t going to get any warmer staying put, so I braced myself and put on my cold, wet clothes, my cold, wet socks with holes in them, and my cold and still very soggy boots, and packed the rest of my cold, wet things into my cold, wet pack.

View from inside the damp sleeping bag.

I soon had something to cheer me up when I finally picked up a GPS signal and was within 500 meters of where I thought I was, within throwing distance of the official “trail” (which thanks to beavers didn’t actually exist anymore), and very close to the refugio, which I reached after an hour and a half of slogging through more bog (but no more swims, thank God).

More bog to wade through, but I didn't almost drown this time.

I arrived at the refugio—a rough log cabin with a corrugated metal roof—feeling uneasy, having seen boot prints from a group of men again and having in my head the unsettling parting advice of the Carabineros that “if you meet other people while you are out there, say you are not alone, okay?” I really didn’t want to run into a group of strange men out deep in the middle of nowhere. Most people are great and these men were probably nice people, but I just wanted to be alone. So I snuck up on the refugio, listened as I approached, listened at the door, and didn't go in until I was satisfied that nobody was inside. I was much relieved when I found a notebook inside that served as the guestbook and read that three men had just left the refugio the day before—no doubt those were the bootprints I had seen. They had either gone out by the other valley trail to the refugio or we had passed by each other without realizing it. Regardless, I had the place to myself.

The refugio guestbook.

Flipping through the notebook, I was only the fourth “group” to have arrived at the refugio since May, and the only person alone in, it looked like, almost a year. Most of the people there were there to fish, it seemed, and fishing gear was scattered around the refugio. There was a wood stove inside and dry firewood and I set to work building a fire in the stove and hanging my dripping wet things around it. As my stuff dried, I amused myself by collecting wood from the woods around the refugio to replace the dry wood I was using, stoking the fire, sweeping out the refugio, attempting to take as much of my camera apart as I could with the rough Swiss Army Knife tools I had to dry it out. I made lunch, and looked over my maps to plot my next move: How far was it to the bay? I was disappointed that it wasn’t in view from the refugio, having thought it would be.

I wandered off to get water. The nearby river was red with humic material that, having just slogged through the nasty-ass bog it came from, I was reluctant to drink without treating. So I brought out my UV pen to sterilize the water, and of course promptly dropped it right into the river where the protective rubber cap covering the electronic bits popped off and—fried. Shit. So I filled my cooking pot with water and put it on the wood stove to treat it by boiling.

View from the refugio and the red river that killed my water sterilizer.

I lost half a day drying things at the refugio and had underestimated the distance to the bay which was beyond the range of my topographic trail maps. If I wanted to go there versus just turning around at the refugio, it was going to be at least a full day, maybe as long as two and a half days out and back, to get there. Would I have time afterwards to still do the rest of the Dientes circuit as I had planned? There was a chance if I was lucky with weather and a good path and I was fast, but “lucky” with weather seemed very unlikely and having better luck with speed in a place with an off-map place with no trails seemed unlikely. Was I willing to potentially give up on hiking the rest of the Dientes circuit to make it to the bay?

For me, the decision was easy. More time in toothy snowy mountains (which I love, but had already spent a few months doing elsewhere) or go dip my toes in the Antarctic Ocean (I know I’m using that term extremely liberally, but I’m just going to go ahead and call it the Antarctic Ocean because the water is neither Pacific nor Atlantic and is really far damned south)? I didn’t come to the end of the world to not go to the end of the world. Plus the Dientes were wrapped in what looked like a pretty fierce rain cloud and I was not anxious to go right back out and into that again.

So I decided to extend my planned side trip to Lago Windhond into a hike all the way out to Bahia Windhond. I figured it would require an overnight out and back, maybe two if my bad luck with weather and terrain continued. I decided to stash a bunch of stuff (food mostly, and my now-fried chargers) in the refugio to lighten my load. I re-packed and waited for things (especially my sleeping bag, tent, boots, and socks) to dry.

The wood stove in the refugio

And I waited and waited and waited. Meanwhile the weather had gone from cloudy to sun to drizzle to hail to downpour and I was starting to wonder if I’d ever be able to leave and move on, but when the red river water had spent what I deemed long enough at an almost-boil to be safe to drink and my boots had gone from soaked to just damp, the sky cleared briefly. And I was off.

There was no trail—not even a theoretical one now, as I was now venturing off the southern end of my island topographic trail maps. The only paths were periodic little muddy lines that the beavers had left as they shimmied their way out collecting wood around the lake. I mostly followed the shore of Lake Windhond for three and a half hours in a drizzle as the boulders gave way alternately to fine sand, skipping stones, and sharp eroded layered rock to round pebbles, softball-sized pebbles… I wondered what caused the differences since the landscape itself was relatively consistent. Wind direction? The geology of the rocks being washed off the hills to the shore of the lake?

My footprints on the shores of Lago Windhond

The views the entire time were spectacular and despite the misery of the day before and the spitting rain I was very happy and had to stop every once and a while to look around and laugh and grin at how lucky I was to be where I was. When I finally reached the south end of the lake and turned to look back at the Dientes my heart stopped. The light—the sun filtering in beams through the clouds on to the lake and the mountains—was incredible. It was the most beautiful vista I had ever seen.

No photo could truly do the view justice, but this gives you an idea.

After taking some photos with my fingers crossed that I had properly dried the camera out and it wasn’t going to be a foggy mess (which is how it looked in my camera viewfinder) and standing and soaking in the impressiveness of it all for a bit, I hiked the hill that separates Lake Windhond from a smaller bog lake to the south. On the other side of the hill I found a place in a meadow to pitch my tent and was treated to a light show as the sun set over views of Bahia Windhond in the distance and the mountains of the Cape Horn archipelago beyond. It was amazing.

The weather was dry for a change, so I was able to sit outside and watch the sunset while celebrating with a feast: my standard spaghetti but this time with a package of tuna (the luxury!), a packet of pesto seasoning, another cup of runny pumpkin soup in my leftover pasta water, and the special treat: one of the super-dense cookies that Anneke had packed me for this trip before I left Bariloche and that I had hidden in my gear so that I wouldn’t be tempted to eat them before the hike.

Dinner and a show looking west from the south end of Lago Windhond

It was an evening I hope I will never forget. I had the feeling that I had been permitted an early glimpse of heaven, but allowed to stay on Earth to show the photos. I was alone, completely alone, in every direction as far as I could see from the south side of the Dientes to the north to the bay to the south and the last chain of islands beyond that, to the mountains to the west to the hills to the east, almost certainly the only human in all that landscape. I had all that beauty to myself for that night. I felt like the luckiest person on Earth.

I fell asleep at around 11 pm as dusk finally started to settle in to the sound of waterfowl squawking in an amusing sound like a poorly-oiled rotor. At least it was amusing for the first twenty minutes, after which the earplugs went in.

Another Lake Windhond view

And the next day I hiked out to the bay: Navarino Part V: Bahia Windhond, or the day I stood naked at the end of the world

Splitboarding the Refugios of Bariloche Part III: Italia (Laguna Negra)

Part III of the Splitboarding Patagonia series, continued from Part I: Refugio Frey and Part II: Refugio San Martin (Jacob)

Refugio Italia (Laguna Negra)

Fernando's (not crazy Fernando from the last story, Helpful Fernando from the Bariloche Club Andino) final recommendation for me was Refugio Italia at Laguna Negra. I told him I was sick of people and wanted solitude, and he said Laguna Negra was beautiful and likely to be quiet, with the refugio opening for the first time for the season the coming weekend.

My friend Anneke at the Green House hostel had been hearing my stories and getting jealous. She didn't have a splitboard but if the past two weekends were any indication I assumed we'd be carrying our boards most of the time anyhow. She also didn't have a tent or sleeping mat, but there was always the refugio. I encouraged her to join. She finally sweet talked her way into a traded work shift so that she could go, picked up crampons and cooking gas while I got groceries (including a box of wine), and off we went.

Into the woods. With our snowboards. Because that makes perfect sense.

The trail started from Colonia Suiza, a little Swiss village way out in the woods of Bariloche (WTF? but then, that's Bariloche). We just barely caught the one afternoon bus at 1:30 pm after my Spanish class with Ivone let out. Advantage of having a Swiss village way out at the woods next to a trailhead: chocolate. We loaded up, and also picked up a lighter for lighting the gas stove, which I had forgotten (or rather, which someone at the hostel had never returned after I loaned it to him, ahem, Santi). It was hard not to eat all of it right then.

Chocolate acquired, we set off, getting the requisite weird looks from everyone who saw us, boards strapped to our fully-loaded backpacks. One person even slowed down to a stop, rolled down his window, and said what I assume was the Spanish equivalent of, "What. The. Fuck." At which point we proceeded to have a nearly word-for-word identical conversation to the one I had had with a different motorist almost exactly one week prior.

"Are you lost?"
"No, we're going to a trail. It's close."
"The ski area is closed."
"Yeah, we know, we're not going there. We're going to Laguna Negra."
"Then why are you carrying snowboards?"
"We're going snowboarding."
"There is no snow." (this was starting to sound familiar)
"Yeah, there is, in the mountains."
"No, there is no snow. Look, no snow."
"There's lots of snow."
"I will drive you to the ski area, but there is no snow."
"No, we know. There is snow where we are going, not the ski area."
"You don't want me to drive you?"
"No, really, the trail is right here, we're fine."

Then he stared at us with a look that expressed simultaneously a high degree of mistrust and suspiscion, "you must be terrible people", and "you are definitely going to die" while slowly rolling up his window before he drove off.

The two of us at the trailhead, ready to roll. Photo by Anneke.

Two minutes later, we were on the trail. I felt every inch of the climb, carrying my sleeping bag, bivvy sack, sleeping pad, cooking gas and stove, a cooking pot, the box of wine, 2.5 L of water, pasta, oranges, veggies, cookies, sandwiches, snow clothes, my camera, my GoPro, my Kindle, my splitboard skins, my splitboard, my boots, and a first aid kit, weighing in at a total of ~60 lbs. So we decided to stash the food and cooking stuff, since we'd be returning the next night in order to catch the early Sunday AM bus so that Anneke could get to work on time.

Anneke, on the first of many creek crossings.

Aaaand another creek crossing. Notice Anneke's soft cast. Because going snowboarding the week you get your cast off (when it was snowboarding that broke your arm in the first place) is totally fine.

I was happy that it was a significantly shorter hike than the weekend prior, but carrying as much as we were it still felt long. At one point we ran into a guy (I almost literally ran into him, the sun blinding my eyes and keeping him from view until I was less than 3 feet from him) who asked if the refugio was far. "Yes," I said honestly. He wasn't even halfway. He then said that he was exhausted and turned around and went back. I felt bad, but the next part of the hike made me glad I had said that. It was sketchy; as Helpful Fernando had predicted, the final stretch switchbacked up a steep ridge and it was snowed over. Which meant postholing through ice-crusted snow for the final seemingly straight uphill kilometer and a half. Which meant a lot of falling into holes with our heavy packs on. It was not very fun, but the views very beautiful. And snow, snow is good, right?

View from the climb

Anneke hiking through the snow...in shorts. Aussies are badasses.

Between our map, Fernando's trail description, and some old tracks, we figured out where we were going and picked our way slowly and carefully up the ridge. Anneke, hauling her board and a rented sleeping bag that alone must have weighed 20 lbs was a champ. This was her first time out since breaking her arm 2 months earlier, and she had just gotten her cast off.

I popped over the ridge and saw the beautiful refugio perched on the edge of very frozen Laguna Negra. We got in and greeted the refugioero, who was startled to see us, having just arrived himself and unlocked the refugio for it's first day of occupation that season. He spent the first 10 minutes unnecessarily apologizing for the mess and set about cleaning up the place.

Refugio Italia

I meanwhile set about finding a good spot to camp and was struck by the beauty of the mountains, now bathed in Alpenglow. I had just pulled out my camera when a giant fox--a Zorro Gris / Patagonian Grey Fox, which isn't really in the fox family being much more closely related to wolves--appeared. He was the size of a labrador, sleek, stunningly handsome, and not the least bit shy.

At first I thought, "maybe he isn't a fox, maybe he's the refugiero's dog," and remembered seeing the dog tracks in the snow on the way up. But no, despite the lack of shyness, this was definitely a wild animal, a wild animal who had followed the human tracks up the mountain because he was hungry and hunting, and the thought that this animal had climbed up that ridge because he smelled food and that food was of a human nature was in my head as he approached and very closely and slowly circled me. In contrast to how I usually respond to dogs--squat down and hold out my hand for sniffing--I stood tall and eyed him back, snapping occasional photos (with a brief flash of  thinking "at least if it eats me, my family will know what got me").

Foxy fox

"Hey handsome," I said to the fox. "I'm a big healthy animal. So let's make a deal: I won't eat you if you don't eat me."

Fox continued to circle and watch me as I set up my bivvy sack. It checked out my snowboard and backpack, but there was no food (we left the food down the trail hanging from a tree), and I must have impressed upon him that I was not food, because he eventually left and I didn't see him again.

"Why are your jaws so big, fox?" "All the better to eat you with, my dear."

In the meantime Anneke had arrived and was drying out and warming up inside, and I joined her, unpacked the wine, an we toasted. The wine was terrible, even the refugiero refused to drink it with us, but whatever. The chocolate from the Colonia Suiza on the other hand was excellent, and our friend the refugiero didn't refuse that. We discussed the morning, I showed her the line I wanted, and pointed out other options while she decided on hers.

Anneke & me toasting our arrival at Refugio Italia with truly awful boxed wine (my first not-good wine since arriving in South America) in our metal cups. Fortunately this was made up for with very excellent chocolate.

We had asked for a simple meal versus the normal 3-course meal and were served a steaming heap of pasta with a mushroom alfredo sauce. I twas going to be another Benadryl night, but it was delicious. And, Benadryls downed, I crawled into my sleeping bag, attempted some night photos, and slept like a log. I woke up to the sunrise, took some more photos, and went back to sleep, sleeping until 9am, exhausted form the week. Funny, But I always slept better in my bivvy sack than I ever did in the hostel, as much as I loved the Green House.

View over Laguna Negra from the bivvy sack

Sunrise at Refugio Italia

I finally got up, anxious to squeeze as much as possible out of the day, and went into the refugio to repack my bag for snowboarding. Anneke and I had breakfast (bananas, oranges, and crappy sandwiches) and we set off, a late 10:30 start. It took us a while to get around the lake, and by the time Anneke and I split ways and I had put my skins on, it was already noon.

Anneke plowing up the mountain.

So I popped in my headphones for the turbo-charge of energy that music can provide and rocketed my way around the rest of the lake and up the ridge on the end of the lake opposite the refugio, this time making it the entire way on skins, a welcome change from weeks of doing pretty much everything with crampons and the board on my back. I celebrated at the top with a sandwich and another dance party, keeping an eye on Anneke’s progress up the opposing slope and hoping I’d be able to catch her on my GoPro on her way down. Turns out she had stopped, not to put on her board and go down, but to watch me as well, and eventually she started back up the hill, and I started hiking the ridge. I stopped at the point where I’d no longer be able to see and film her, but she was going all the way up—go Anneke!—so I continued, keeping on solid ground and away from the heavily corniced snow edge on my way up to the summit.

Me, hiking along the Cerro Negro ridgeline to the summit. Photo by Anneke.

I didn't realize I had made the summit until I noticed that the view from the ridge was no longer facing the direction it should face from the summit, having passed the summit and continued along the ridgeline toward Cerro Lopez. I turned around, found the summit, filmed my final dance party (see video below...the clips from the Cerro Lopez summit were filmed while dancing to music in my head since my MP3 player had run out of juice), and slowly, carefully, picked my way down the very steep, very cliffs-on-both-sides series of rocks to the point where I wouldn't have to drop a large cliff or giant cornice to hit the slope.

I sat down on a rock, strapped on my board, and made the drop, my heart leaping into my neck in that wonderful surge of “oooh hellll yeah woooooooo!” of doing something absolutely awesome like dropping off the steep face of a pointy mountain. It was an excellent run, a run well worth the long hike, a run that made up for the previous week’s meh-ness, a run worthy of what would be my last run of the season.

When I hit the flats, ran out of speed, and came to a stop and turned around to look at my tracks, I thought,

“Damn, girl, high five, that’s some badass snowboarding you just did.”

And the clouds parted briefly and God turned his holy sky spotlight onto the summit and the beam of light traced my tracks all the way down to the valley as if to say,

“Damn girl, high five, that’s some badass snowboarding you just did.”

And He saw the tracks and saw they were good. And she saw the tracks and saw they were good. And content, strapped her snowboard back onto her back, put her crampons on, and returned to the refugio.

My tracks on Cerro Negro. That triangle to the right is what I snowboarded down, starting at the little whit epatc to the right of the summit (the summit itself had some pretty gnarly cornices followed by cliffs, so I avoided).

Anneke had had herself a pretty badass line as well, and even though “it was only, like 3 minutes! All that hiking for 3 minutes!” I could see she had swallowed the pill and was now an addict like me.

That nice field of snow on the ridge opposite the one I was on is what Anneke cramponed up and then shredded on her first time out since breaking her arm. Proving, once, again, Aussies are badasses.

We “snowboarded” down the snowy switchbacky slope we had climbed up (I put the quotes in because with a 50 lb backpack on, you can’t exactly maneuver well enough to really snowboard. More like stand on a board and sort of scoot in a general direction and keep your fingers crossed that you don’t die, because you can’t turn or break without falling), taking a good half hour off of the time it took us to climb up, and tromped our way down the hill with the goal of making the 8:30 pm bus back to town.

We would have made it (barely), could have made it, but the closer we got to the trailhead and bus stop, the less we wanted to spend the night in the hostel. When I finally said, “Actually, I kind of want to spend another night out here…” I didn't get a chance to finish with “…I’ll walk with you to the bus stop if you want,” before Anneke said, “Metoo”. 

So we got to the spot where we had stashed our food and cooking gear, unstashed it, hiked a bit further to a nice spot where we could camp for the night, and set up camp. There was rain forecast and the clouds had rolled in, and since Anneke didn't have a tent we were worried about rain, but found a spot with thick enough trees and I had some garbage bags to cover her and we figured if worst came to worst, we’d have a bad night’s sleep but catch the 6:30 am bus back to town and warm up at the hostel.

We cooked our pasta and tuna fish dinner (way to much food, but we ate it), attempted to make our wine palatable by heating it (which just made it worse), and collapsed into our respective sleeping bags for a full night of rain-free sleep. Which didn't mean that we were bright-eyed and busy-tailed when my alarm went off at 5:45 am, but at least we made that 6:30 am bus.

River view on the hike out.

And with that, I packed away my splitboad and snowboard for the season and shifted gears to what I thought (wrongly, in some cases) would be less snowy adventures in Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, starting with a 36 hour bus ride from Bariloche to Ushuaia.

I returned to Bariloche with my family in December and made one final pilgrimage to some of the refugios I had missed, including Refugio Lopez on Cerro Lopez and a re-visit to Italia where, instead of snowboarding like in this story, my sister and I surfed sliding piles of scree on our way down to Laguna Negra (story to come). I also rang in the new year in Refugio Otto Meiling on Cerro Tronador with Anneke before finally saying goodbye to Bariloche for this trip.

The Splitboarding the Refugios of Bariloche Summary

I had the time of my life hauling my splitboard for days for my several 3-minute snow runs. I freaking love snow, love mountains, love sleeping in my iced-over bivvy sack under some of the clearest night skies I've ever seen. I spent every weekend in Bariloche incredibly, deeply, blissfully happy. Like, laughing and smiling for no particular reason happy, just because the mountains were so goddamned beautiful and I was in them and holyshitlifeisawesome. When was the last time I was this happy this often? I honestly don’t know, but definitely not since I was a teenager.

Me, in my Happy Place

This means something. Something I always knew but tried to hope was not true because it makes things difficult. That I belong, belong need require, in the mountains. In the mountains. Not within driving distance of them. Not within sight of them. In them. Real ones. Big ones. Mountains with snow and steep faces to jump off on my snowboard. Mountains I can retreat to for peace and quiet and stars and solitude.

So that makes the future easier, because now my job isn't to find a job, it’s to find a way to live in the mountains, be it as a scientist or as a refugiera or as a crazy hermit with a herd of goats. It’s not to find a lover, it’s to take mountains as my lovers, because they make me happy. Desperately, gloriously, soul-dancingly happy.

Also actual dancingly happy.

A special thank you to Fernando (a.k.a. Helpful Fernando) at the Club Andino for the tips and advice! Also to all of the Refugieros whose hospitality, friendliness, and excellent skills in the kitchen made the experience an especially delightful one.