The dream: to get face shots in the summer, to go from mountain biking
one day to standing atop a snow-covered peak, the next, salivating through your
neck gaiter over the fields of white that lay before you.
Yesterday's fantasy is today's reality. As I stand at the top of Las Leñas, Argentina's Marte
chair with 4,000 feet of untracked below me, I wonder, am I dreaming? Just 48 hours ago, I was swatting mosquitoes
while fixing a bike flat on Crested Butte singletrack. Is this possible? Am
I about to slide, glide, turn, jump, and ski my way down 4000 leg-burning
feet of South American powder?
"The real trick to visiting Las Leñas...is skiing the 4,000-foot runs all day and then dancing all night..."
The era in which we live is perhaps the best of all times to be alive.
We have the ability, as working people in society, to afford to travel
with relative speed (it takes 48 hours to go from my door in Crested Butte, Colorado, to the hotel in
Las Leñas, Argentina) to the far reaches of the earth and still find those places
relatively unspoiled by the ravages of overpopulation and overuse that
seemingly will be rampant in the future.
Las Leñas is situated about as far from anywhere as you can imagine. The plane crash from the movie "Alive," in which Uruguayan rugby players struggled to survive after going down in the desolate Andes Mountains in 1972,
landed a stone's throw distance from the ski area. (In the summer you can see the plane from the top of the mountain).
Las Leñas Details
Best Way to Get There: Fly to Buenos Aires, Argentina, fly to Malargue, take a shuttle to Las Leñas. Best Place to stay: www.hotelaries.com Best Music: Salsa music and classic American tunes you haven't heard in years. Best Food: Bife de lomo (steak) Best Wine: Luigi Bosca Winery or Bianchi Best Skis: Bring your Fats
Las Leñas is most certainly one of those gems of the earth that remains as yet
unspoiled. The base area, the road and the few chairlifts are the only signs of
man among thousands of peaks. If you were flying over the range, the chances of spotting the ski resort would be slim at best.
Nestled in the remote Andes Mountains, Las Leñas was the vision of a few men who loved to ski but were not satisfied with the existing resorts in the South of Argentina. A man known as Tito, the "Hamburger Baron of Argentina," was the primary financial and spiritual leader of Las Leñas. He chose the location, the architecture, the layout — everything. The one thing Tito did better than anything else was put a lift to the very top of the mountain. This one lift, called Marte, accesses the "goods," as we Americans call it — 4,000 feet of the
best couloirs and relatively untracked snow I've ever seen.
The Argentineans do not ski like the Americans. They come to Las Leñas to be in the mountains, to take a lesson, cruise the piste and prepare for (and recover from) a late night of eating and dancing. They leave anything that is not groomed. They think: "Why would I want to go out there? That snow has not been prepared
for me."
Personally, I am a big fan of unprepared, untouched snow, so this
attitude of 98% of Argentina's public is fine with me.
Now the real trick to visiting Las Leñas (beside enduring the ever-present wind) is skiing the 4,000-foot runs all day, and then dancing all night with a few hundred of the most beautiful women ever to grace the face of the earth, and still managing to squeeze in enough sleep to ski and dance again the next day. I would love to tell you the technique, but I can't give away all of my secrets. You will have to go to Las Leñas yourself. See it, live it and I assure you, you will
love it.
