Fall’s First Descents

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OCTOBER POWDER AND FIRST DESCENTS COMBINE WITH LUSH RAINFOREST IN NORTHERN PATAGONIA FOR A HELI-SKI WEEK THAT BREAKS ALL THE RULES.

October is not, conventionally, ski season. And Chilean Patagonia is not, conventionally, a heli-ski destination. Yet, here I find myself, standing by the Rio Palena Lodge in a remote valley in Chile, skis in tow, in October, surrounded by lush temperate rainforest. 

Outside on the lawn, songbirds sing. Chickens peck the turf around the skids of two A-star helicopters with ski baskets. And just beyond this incongruous scene, the wide, green Rio Palena flows, its ripples glittering in the afternoon sun. The feeling is surreal until Vicente, the lodge’s mixologist, hands me a pisco sour and  I snap back to reality. I gaze up at the steep valley walls surrounding the lodge—past the green canopy, past the waterfalls, where fingers of white snow are visible. Tomorrow morning, we will ski in Patagonia. It’s real.

Mythic Patagonia,
Skier’s Paradise

The name alone inspires trepidation. Patagonia calls to mind Torres del Paine National Park: images of climbers scaling ice-encrusted monoliths, ski tourers crossing ice sheets in inhospitable conditions, extreme feats of athleticism in one of the world’s wildest, hardest-to-access spots. 

It’s true, Patagonia is remote, rugged and sparsely inhabited—the region covers more than a million square kilometres of varied terrain across the southernmost tip of Chile and Argentina. Still, here in northern Patagonia, deep, narrow valleys support a smattering of small farms and tiny villages that are surrounded by thick temperate rainforest on steep mountainsides. Above the greenery is a glacially carved skier’s paradise. Granite spires, shelves, couloirs and wide-open bowls sprawl over thousands of hectares. Most of the peaks have never been properly mapped, much less skied. For that, you’ll need a helicopter.

Enter Eleven Experience and its casually luxurious Rio Palena Lodge, its helicopters, its roster of international heli-ski guides, and its pilots from the Fuerza Aérea de Chile, the country’s air force. Eleven is a Colorado-based company specializing in far-flung, highly curated adventure lodges around the world. When it purchased this isolated fishing lodge in 2013 and reopened after a full renovation in late 2019, it was with an ambitious vision. The setting may be on the banks of the Rio Palena, a 240km flow renowned for trout fishing, but there was another reason for Eleven’s purchase: it’s perfectly positioned for skiers as a gateway to the untrammeled peaks above.

Tucked down at the ends of the earth, Rio Palena Lodge isn’t a quick trip, and the journey is an adventure in itself, with multiple commercial flights plus some road time. Yet for skiers who believe the best things don’t always come with easy access, it’s a good addition to the list of things not just to do, but to do again. 

As a base camp, the wooden lodge has the unique feel of being the home of a well-to-do family—the kind that keeps helicopters on the lawn. A quick snoop reveals decks facing the river, a cozy living room, a stocked bar, plus seven guest rooms. There are also two wood-fired hot tubs and a sauna, but my favourite spot in the lodge turns out to be the ski room, where I gravitate to each evening to prep my gear for the following day. 

Name That Line

The next morning we pile into the A-stars and the green valley is replaced by a wintery, treeless world of white. The terrain unfurls like ribbons of bucket-list ski lines, and it’s clear there is plenty of the thing that’s becoming hard to find in the ski world: complete and utter solitude. Our only company are condors aloft on the thermals. 

Up here in the alpine, snow lines can end at huge cliffs, or onto exposed ice leading into narrow, forested drainages. These aren’t places you want to end up, explains Jamie Weeks, one of our guides. “When we scope skiable runs, we have to pay a lot of attention to the pickup zone. Some of these lines look really tempting, but you’d have a long, long walk out at the end if there’s no place to land the heli.” 

No matter. There are countless aspirational lines with landing zones at the bottom. We whiz alongside ice-encrusted spires, over ridges, and hover to inspect snow conditions and landing spots. We pass over runs to suit any kind of skier: smooth and open intermediate lines, many of them next to hairy-looking couloirs and featured faces. The fact that Eleven fills each helicopter with three guest skiers and two guides means even within a group, skiers can sometimes opt to ski different runs. My group sticks together, there are no complaints. Cold, boot-top powder is on offer on one aspect; warm yet perfectly skiable corn is on offer on the other—we ski it all. We whoop and cheer as we lay tracks where no one has skied before. 

One of our guides is Claudio Iglesias, a native of Punta Arenas. He is always smiling, particularly as we notch line after line under blue, cloudless skies. While he guides all over the world for Eleven and other operations, clearly there’s nothing he enjoys more than sharing his home terrain. “The Andes are so dramatic,” he says. “But it’s not only the terrain. Here in Patagonia, it’s untouched! It’s not merely untracked snow, it’s so vast, so pristine, you know nobody has been here at all.” 

Eleven’s ambitious foray into off-the-radar terrain isn’t going unnoticed. Various athletes have visited in the few years since it opened. Most notably, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) sent freeskiers Tim Durtschi and B.C.-based Nick McNutt and Janelle Yip to film 2023’s Legend Has It. “It’s really rugged country, and it’s definitely a unique place to be heli-skiing,” Durtschi told TGR. “The terrain here is very different from what we have in North America. And the rock creates these unique layers and ramps and different features that we’ve been able to discover.” 

As we fly around, lead guide Mike Barney points out various zones where he took the movie crew—first descents, but not the kind that are likely to be skied again anytime soon. Still, it’s an opportunity to be had. Based on the ongoing exploratory nature of the operation, one of Eleven’s offerings is for guests to ski a first descent and choose a name, which the guides enter into a logbook to be used for future guests.

Off The Piste

In the evenings after skiing, or if a bad weather day interferes with flying, it’s easy to keep your adrenaline high. The lodge supplies drysuits and paddleboards for floating down the river from the front lawn—a helicopter picks you up hours later at the take-out. Fly-fishing is offered by well-versed local guides. Hiking trails through old-growth forest full of exotic flora and thundering cascadas (waterfalls) are plentiful. It seems the only time we sit down is for meals. 

One sunny day we head via helicopter to a put-in on the roaring Rio Futaleufú, known locally as The Futa. Its famed class-V whitewater is a magnet for the world’s best kayakers, and home to a few commercial rafting companies. I’ll ski steep, gnarly lines happily, but rafting the Futa fills me with dread. Still, it is so legendary, the opportunity must be seized. While everyone else appears to revel in this near-death experience, I am relieved to be delivered back to Eleven’s outpost camp alive. Lunch and plenty of Chilean wine help calm my nerves. 

The A-game action in these parts seems hard to fit into one week, until one considers that a season or a year here would still barely scratch the surface. It’s not just the sports and adventure, but the true feeling of exploration in the mountains, of actually having travelled to a pristine place—a guest outpost in a new culture where nothing is mundane. At Rio Palena Lodge, nothing is commercialized and North America’s ski crowds are an alien concept. Instead, we ski bucket-list lines no one can see. 

During a week of skiing, I never do pick my own first descent to name. These snow-covered granite giants in the Chilean Patagonia seem so ancient, so pristine, the best justice I can think of is to let them remain nameless, just as they are.