During my first two seasons working at the reception desk in the Hotel I discovered the huge potential for telemark skiing in Portillo. Portillo’s 480-inch average annual snowfall allows one to count on weekly dumps. Then, with such a large amount of easily accessible off piste terrain and so few skiers, fresh lines are available the day after the dump, then the next day, then the next, and so on. Fresh tracks just demand traversing out a bit further each day from the Roca Jack lift. Traversing on teles is a breeze; you pass alpine skiers that struggle with the locked heel and blow by snowboarders that are forced to walk. Then, you arrive on top of an untracked 2000 vertical foot line and drop in. Then you ride up the lift and do it again.
I ski alpine and telemark and love them both, but there is just something about skiing powder on teles that can’t be matched. Don’t get me wrong, skiing tele in bad conditions is difficult and sometimes just sucks. But in perfect powder, with the heel free, there is no better sensation on snow. It’s like my friend Nick Devore once pointed out, when you do a tele turn in pow, it’s like doing a toe side snowboard turn. It’s a sweet turn, every turn. The glide, the balancing point, is centered over the ball of your uphill foot. And let me tell you that when inertia of your entire body is stacked up over one point on your foot the size of a tennis ball, the sensation is unreal.
Nick Devore, who some call the best telemark skier in the world, has the same feeling about telemark in Portillo. This year he hosted his second annual Portillo Big Mountain Telemark Camp where he invites telemark skiers down to test their stuff and reach new levels of telemark enlightenment in Portillo’s ideal conditions.
This year, telemark skiing became available to the public in South America exclusively, in Portillo, Chile. Portillo purchased a rental fleet of Black Diamond telemark gear in their ski shop and I offer telemark lessons through the ski school. Last week I had a client, Alberto, from Buenos Aires, Argentina who had gone all the way to the United States to buy telemark equipment and was ecstatic to find telemark instruction in Portillo. He told me that Portillo is the only place in South America that offers telemark.
If you have never freed the heel before, I invite you to do so, and to do it in one of the most world-class settings for telemark, Portillo, Chile.
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