In the field: Chile
Lars and Svein from Think Outside visited Chile in August to do some field testing. They travelled to Nevados de Chillán — which is actually an active volcano — to prepare for the upcoming season and collect valuable data for Sknow. Not only did they have a great time doing research, but their experiences outside the field were also good!
It’s the 12th of August, the temperature scale shows 25°C in Bergen and I — Lars the working geologist in Think Outside — am packing three pairs of skis in my ski bag, all equipped with Sknow devices. To prepare for the upcoming winter season and get a head start on data acquisition, Svein (electrical engineer) and I are sent by Think Outside to the other side of the world to do field work.
Besides being known for its red wine, devilish Pisco, Easter Island and the world’s largest swimming pool, Chile is well known for summer skiing. The winter season in Chile is reverse form the Northern Hemisphere, lasting from late June to early October. Therefor, the best time for backcountry skiing — as well as field testing — is August to mid-September. This period serves longer days and it’s less likely to hit the worst winter storms.
We first planned to go to Valle Nevado, the ski resort in the Farellones area, east of Santiago. The resort is most known for housing some of the best National alpine teams from the US and Europe. Every year they come to train and prepare for the upcoming winter season and competitions in the Northern Hemisphere. However, due to a bad snow season in this area, we decided to go further south to Nevados de Chillán. When we flew to Santiago, we came across the Farellones area and were happy we changed location. From the plane we looked down at what is normally a snow paradise, but this year it was almost free of snow, except on the highest 5000 meters peaks.
Nevados de Chillán is known as a powder playground, with a huge area for backcountry skiing. The ski resort is spread across the skirt of an active volcano. Yep, I’m not kidding and every now and then we could see dense smoke rising from the volcano. For me, as an eager skier and a geologist, this was paradise.
For the first few days, we spent most of our time trying to find the best field localities. Each morning we had to go by the local police with a handwritten application for permission to venture outside the resort area for safety purposes. And as long as the weather was good, we got a permission to go. However, on bad weather days we got denied and had to do other stuff. Luckily there were only a few days with bad weather and on those days we stayed in, looked over the collected data and tweaked on the Sknow device parameters.
The days started mostly the same. We woke up early and lighted a fire in the cabin where the temperatures always decreased to around 2°C over night. Luckily, it got up to about 7°C in time for breakfast, which consisted of a simple menu: “palta y huevo” eggs, avocado and sweet bread. After breakfast we drove to the police station and then up to Nevados de Chillan ski resort. We skinned up through the resort for about 1200 meters, dug a snow pit, profiled it and collected data with Sknow. Svein who is originally a snowboarder, walked up on back country skis, with the board on his back.
The spring in Chile came early this year, and the snow conditions we found were similar to spring conditions in high altitudes in Norway. The night to day temperatures could often change from -6°C to 12°C, freezing the top snow layer in the night and then melting it during the day, leading to melted water percolating through the snowpack. We found a lot of ice layers throughout the snow pack and lenses of soaked snow on top of the ice layers. The 30 mm of rain we got on August 16thand 10mm on 25thdidn’t help the situation either. We did however get a good set of interesting Sknow data for later processing. One of the most interesting parts were the layers of volcanic ash that we stumbled upon now and then. Whether they would change the propagation of the electromagnetic waves through the snowpack was unclear, but it could be interesting to identify them with the Sknow device.
We got a great relationship with our Airbnb hosts. The lovely Correa family lived in another cabin and invited us to dinner right away. Veronica, Mrs. Correa, is a professional chef and made traditional food. Our first meal was Humitas, a corn dish made of corn flour cooked in corn leaves and served with veggies and un pebre muy picante. Neither Veronica or her husband Mario could speak a word of English and because of our poor Spanish, we ended up having the dinner conversation through google translate.
The next night, their daughter joined us as well. Natalia is an English teacher and could translate everything we said. This made it much easier to hold a conversation opposed to the previous evening. The meal consisted of homemade Empanadas and grilled meat, in addition to vino tinto y cerveza. Thanks to our hosts we also experienced Chilean musical culture as both Mario and Natalia are great musicians, whom sang and played for us. Svein and I also played, and in the end of the night we all sang along: me on the piano, Svein on the guitar and Natalia on the ukulele. It was an incredible experience and we felt honoured to be welcomed like we did. We will definitely go back!
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to experience the powder playground fully. According to a local ski guide we met, we were two weeks too late. I would still recommend skiing in Chile though, and I’ll definitely come back. Anyways, the adventure was only half of the trip, and we managed to collect huge amounts of data and prepare tests for the upcoming winter season in Norway — both of which we’re very excited for!
