The famous yellow lodge at Portillo, one of South America’s most storied resorts.
PORTILLO
RECOMMENDED BY Greg Harms
“I first went down to Portillo in 1990,” began longtime instructor and powder guide Greg Harms. “The director of the ski school at Heavenly [in Lake Tahoe] asked if I wanted to go to Chile to be an instructor. I wouldn’t have to pay for anything, he said, and I’d only have to teach three hours a day. I was twenty, and hadn’t been out of the country beyond Tijuana, so I said, ‘Of course!’ I fell in love with Portillo immediately—the big yellow hotel, the amphitheater setting in the Andes, and the people. There’s a certain magic about Portillo, a welcoming vibe. The feeling there encourages you to be open and meet new people who share your passion. It oozes skiing.”
Portillo (“Little Pass” in Spanish) rests one hundred miles northeast of Santiago, near the border of Chile and Argentina at Paso Los Libertadores. The site of the resort, on the banks of Laguna del Inca at an elevation of 9,400 feet, was first explored as a ski venue in the early 1930s. Word slowly spread, and alpinists from abroad began venturing south. By 1949, a resort with several lifts and a hotel had opened, though Portillo did not begin to come into its own until the early 1960s, when it was acquired by two Americans, Bob Purcell and Dick Aldrich. The area gained international recognition when the Alpine World Ski Championships were held there in 1966—the first and only World Cup event held in South America. Plans to stage the event at Portillo were nearly quashed when a tremendous storm and subsequent avalanche obliterated all but two of the resort’s chairlifts. Working with the lift manufacturer Poma and various avalanche experts, the area’s lifts were reimagined, and completed in time for the competition. This reconstruction inspired Portillo’s trademark va et vient lifts (more on that later).
“It’s a little hectic when you first arrive at Portillo,” Greg continued, “as it’s a Saturday-to-Saturday program. When I’m guiding, I call it ‘Hugs and High Fives’—I’m giving hugs to the group that’s leaving and high-fiving the folks that are coming in. [There are a total of four hundred guests each week.] The folks at Portillo call guests passajeros [passengers], as once you arrive, it’s like you’re on a ship; we’re all on our own on an ocean of snow. The hotel is a classic structure; it’s bombproof, and with good reason—storms here can be massive. There is something like 450 employees, and many have been there forever. Jaime, the bartender in the Bar Central, has been there for thirty-five years; Juan, the maître d’, has been on staff for twenty-five years. Over my twenty years, I’ve gotten to know more than two hundred of the employees. You go there the first time as a stranger. When you come back, the employees all remember you.”
The warmth of Portillo’s atmosphere helps make for a memorable stay. But the primary reason that people make the long trek south is the quality of the terrain. The mountain averages some three hundred inches of snow a year; while you can’t always count on deep powder, the region enjoys many clear, sunny days—not a bad trade-off. There are a number of long, well-groomed trails for intermediate skiers, though it’s the two-thousand-plus acres of off-piste terrain that have captivated Greg for two decades. “The surface lifts at Portillo open up a huge chunk of expert terrain,” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s why I love it. The steeps, chutes, cliffs, and couloirs—I couldn’t have imagined a better place to freeski. And there just aren’t many people.
“A quintessential part of the Portillo experience is riding the va et vient—‘come and go’—surface lifts, which you find on the resort’s steepest runs: Condor, Roca Jack, Las Viachas, and El Cara Cara. These pulley lifts take you to the classic black diamond/double black diamond terrain. Since they’re in avalanche paths, key parts of the lift, like the motor, can be taken off during big snow years, and reassembled when avalanche danger has passed. You stand side by side, up to five people at a time, and it pulls you up. You have to get off one at a time. On the Roca Jack ‘come and go,’ the lift stops on a thirty-seven-degree slope. If you fall, you’ll wipe out the other people.”
There is no shortage of world-class lines at Portillo. One is the Lake Run off the Condor lift, a broad slope that plummets through a series of gullies and boulder-dotted ridges … though some would say that the real adventure unfolds on the traverse back to the lift or the hotel. “Some years ago, the Purcells blasted a little trail along the edge of a cliff,” Greg explained. “It’s no wider than the length of your skis, and the lake sits down below. You have to sidestep your way along the trail. It can be windy. Some people do the traverse and say, ‘I never want to do that again!’ Others just love the whole experience. One of the other classic runs at Portillo—and in all the Southern Hemisphere—is the resort’s biggest couloir, the Super C.” Leaving the Roca Jack Poma, there’s a climb that can take up to a half day (depending on the snow). On the way, you’re treated to stunning views of a dozen mountain peaks flirting with twenty thousand feet, including Aconcagua, which is the largest mountain outside of the Himalayas. If you make it to the top, you’re rewarded to a swooning descent of 4,300 vertical feet!
GREG HARMS has been guiding and teaching skiing in big-mountain environments since 1990. He is a fully certified PSIA ski and snowboard instructor, Level III avalanche forecaster, EMT, and fluent Spanish speaker. It is evident to anyone who skis with Greg that he absolutely loves his work. His first priority is your safety, and his second is that you enjoy your vacation immensely. He challenged himself to see if he could heli-ski for twenty-four continuous hours and finished the day with more than one hundred thousand vertical feet. He spends more than 280 days a year on the snow all over the globe, much of that in the backcountry. Greg is currently a lead guide with the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, managing more than 1.2 million acres of terrain, and operates Third Edge Heli (www.thirdedgeheli.com), which leads skiers/snowboarders on personalized heli-ski adventures in Alaska, Canada, and Chile. In his off-time, Greg enjoys surfing and warming his feet in the tropical locations of the world.
If You Go
Getting There: Portillo is roughly a hundred miles from Santiago, which is served by many major carriers.
Season: Late June through early October
Lift Tickets: All inclusive rates (seven nights’ lodging, four meals per day, lift tickets, etc.) range from $1,790 to $4,000 per person (based on double occupancy), depending on the season. Visit www.skiportillo.com for details.
Level of Difficulty: While there’s some good groomed terrain for intermediate skiers/boarders, much of the terrain is geared toward advanced skiers.
Accommodations: You have one option for lodging at Portillo: Grand Hotel Portillo (www.skiportillo.com).
