Anticipation:

There is nothing like waking up on an ugly, grey morning, with rain spitting down, a ton of work that needs to be done (but won’t be) and packing up your skis.

Who cares if the weather sucks? Or if the bills won’t be paid or yet another deadline blown off? None of it matters when you have a ticket to Santiago clutched in your sweaty little palm and skis in tow. As the saying goes, it’s always winter somewhere, And right here right now the somewhere in question is Chile, where the K2 crew will invade Valle Nevado in a no-holds barred orgy of skiing, drinking, skiing and, well, because Hattrup is here, even more drinking.

Thus it was this anticipation, a funny feeling in belly and spine and adrenaline pumping through the veins as the first leg of the flight was boarded out of Denver International Airport enroute to Dallas, where we would connect with all of K2’s heavy hitters – Petrick, Mechura, Gutt, Hattrup, Wallace, yeah all those guys – and then catch another flight (which, although it would last nine hours will pass in an instant) directly to Santiago and then a van to Valle Nevado where we would be skiing before noon.

Anticipation? Adrenaline? Stoke? HELL YEAH! Chile here we come.

Transit and Turns:

The van is overloaded. This is not a problem unless we get too close to the edge of Valle Nevado’s access road and the top-heavy deathtrap tumbles into the abyss. Ignoring the very real possibility that this could happen, I board the vehicle, taking only a cursory glance at the bald tires sagging under the load, and get into the very back of the bus (the death seat!) with K2’s Pete Pattison. Somehow Pattison’s flippancy towards death calms me and soon enough we arrive at the end of the line: Valle Nevado.

Valle Nevado sits on a high ridge, surrounded by some of the most spectacular mountains known to man. It is also the home of this year’s K2 ski testing extravaganza. This is where we will spend the next few days charging all types of conditions and terrain, and provide the “last chance” feedback to the guys who make the skis. As the saying goes, “tough work but someone has to do it.”

Round one of the testing comes on a beautiful morning, which then turns to soup as a valley fog rises to engulf the ski area. But the fog breaks and the morning becomes even more spectacular as the clouds swirl around the peaks and the snow starts to soften.

But Mother Nature is a fickle beast and while it looks like the weather will clear for good, soon enough the soup returns and drives everyone off the hill. But, looking outside, maybe that’s a good thing, as the snow has come along with the soup, making for a promising round two of “someone’s gotta test more skis.”

Testing, Testing, Tested:

As anyone can tell you (well, maybe not anyone), ski testing is hard work. You heard me right, ski testing is hard work. “What?” You might say. “All you are doing is skiing around some exotic local (like Chile’s Valle Nevado or in today’s case, La Parva), with the latest and greatest new equipment that the weekend warriors won’t even see for a year or two.”

Well sure, it sounds fun. But I’m here to tell you about the dark side of testing. Take a beautiful day, add some new snow, remove any specs of clouds that could potentially interfere with the chairlift tanning process and then have someone hand you some skis that you know before you even get on them that you will hate. It kinda takes the fun out of the day.

But skis must be tested and part of testing skis is getting on everything and anything that slides on snow, even those little tiny narrow things that scare the bejeezus out of you and randomly catch their edges in the broken, junky crud, threatening to rip your leg off or merely blow your knee out.

Still, just as each and every ski has some sort of redeeming value (the skis in question happened to make perfect little round turns at moderate speeds), my day did too. Because while the first round of testing focused on the narrow sticks, the second focused on the fatties. And when that round of testing was over, I found myself stuck with my favorite pair of the trip so far, and a sunny Chilean afternoon at La Parva to enjoy them on. Of course, there was plenty of untracked powder left, there were no lift lines, and no reason to wait for anyone else, because, after all, I was working hard, testing skis and everything else was a needless distraction. Hard work, but someone has to do it.

If Ya Gotta Go, Go With A Bang:

Some days are better than others. But if you are going to have a full on epic day, you might as well save it for the last day. Of course, there’s a long tradition of saving the best for the last, but when it comes to skiing, nothing is guaranteed. Not the snow, the weather or even the unlikely boulibasse of corn and powder that greeted our group on the final day of our stay in Valle Nevado.

The morning started out promisingly enough, with clear skys and warming temperatures. A bit of adventure skiing off the resort’s most lonely lift, the Tres Puntas poma, yielded a few soft turns but a whole lotta windslab (at least the views were amazing).

But things started to shape up when we began to poke into the terrain on the other side of the ski area, a huge open valley called Olympia. Like its suggestive moniker, Olympia was an autobahn of speed and mid-boot powder, combined with softening crud as the Andean sun started to go to work.

It seemed that things couldn’t get much better than Olympia, after all we were enjoying some of the best turns of the week, but we then joined Eduardo Perez de Castro, K2’s fixer in Chile. With a fistful of tickets to El Colorado, which adjoins Valle Nevado, he took us up one of the steepest t-bars in the world, to the top of the legendary road runs back to the Valle access road.

Of course, you can guess what came next: an orgy of powder madness, with our group completely destroying a virgin face. Ugly? Yes. Wonderful? That too. The best run of the trip? Without a doubt.

As we awaited our shuttle back up the road to Valle Nevado and our inevitable departure, drinking icy beers and admiring the manner in which our crew had laid to waste the pristine slope, it was obvious that the best had been saved for last. After all, if you’ve got to go, you might as well go out with a bang.