Fifty Four Degrees of Latitude - 8/28/2009

The streets of Ushuaia fall quickly to the water, stuck as they are on the flanks of the mountains that tower over the town and tumble into the Beagle Channel below. Our small, two-story apartment sits four streets up from the waterfront and faces south, toward the Channel. Toward Chilean Tierra del Fuego. Toward Cabo de los Hornos and Antarctica beyond. It is truly a spectacular place to be, after spending so many hours reading stories about this part of the world.

On Thursday we departed Bariloche for El Calafate, a town of 25,000 (grown in the last 12 years from 300, primarily because of the tourist industry). With a three hour layover in El Calafate, we hired a taxi to take us into town so we could look around. As is our custom, we timed the afternoon ¨siesta¨ hour perfectly, but were able to find helado and an ATM before we returned to the airport for our flight to Ushuaia. Landing in Ushuaia around 8:30 put us into bed close to midnight, but the bus to Cerro Castor was picking us up at 9:30 and we were reasonably rested by the time dawn finally broke and gave us our first (cloudy) views of the area.

Cerro Castor is the newest resort in Argentina, having been open only ten years and boasting quadruple chairs, whereas most of the other resorts seem to have doubles and lots of surface lifts. With a base elevation of only 700 feet and a vertical drop of about 2800, it´s a little bigger than Alpental, but feels more like Whistler. The stubby, wind-scoured lengras trees peter out at around 2000 feet, since we´re so far south, and the terrain quickly becomes rocky and steep. The mountains themselves average between three and five thousand feet at most, but every inch means business.

The skiing at Castor -- in a word: empty. In two words: empty, fluffy. This is the land of free refills, where the wind tears up snow a few kilometers away and brings it over your tracks to carefully wipe them clean. El Viento was so strong that the snow didn´t get too deep anywhere, but the creamy wind-buffed powder was everywhere, and all the other skiers ate lunch the whole day (or so it seemed). We took a break around two and it took about twenty minutes to get a table and longer to get our food, but the ¨cordero parilla¨ that they delivered (a small grill with 17 pounds of succulent lamb) fed us amply for the rest of the day. When our bus returned at the end of the day, we´d finally sated our hunger for August powder. Of course, we needed another fix the next day.