Bariloche and the volcanoes

Yeah, Bariloche… had a really good time there. Weather panned out great- snow storm followed by a few days of sunshine and even the wind took some time off- the gods were smiling to us those days. On the first day of skiing in the Cerro Catedral resort, we bumped into some cool people, Lasse and Jan, and so the four of us hang out quite a bit together; our little private social scene. We did some backcountry skiing in Cerro Chall-Huaco and improvised a quick side trip to ski the volcanoes in Chile. And to top up the experience, Lasse lavished us with some best hot showers we have had in this trip, as much as we wanted, whenever we wanted, free of charge… act of sheer kindness. Tell me, how not to love Norwegians?!
Mick and I also did a trip to Refugio Frey, a cool little mountain hut near Bariloche. Snow wasn’t great but, again, we met there some nice people and had a great day out all together. We had a bit of an epic getting out of there in the hauling wind that woke us up on the last morning, but when we finally made it up that damn ridge, the windlessness on the other side was our reward.
We had a lot of fun in Bariloche, except for dealing with the local post office. We were waiting for some docs from Australia to arrive general delivery. The thing was that nobody could find them in the system under the tracking number and each time when we asked to have it checked under our last name, we would hear “No” delivered with straight face. They would say that if there is a tracking number, it always gets scanned and shows in the system; if it doesn’t show, it means that the docs are not in Argentina yet. We put up with this shit for a week, but, I mean, how hard it is to walk 5 meters to the backroom and look up if there is any mail for Michael Coffey. Then one day we came in and insisted that there is no tracking number, and so the guy finally moved his ass those 5 meters to the backroom and guess what? He found it! Hell knows how long it had been lying there because nobody bothered to stamp it, never mind scanning. I was more pissed off then relieved but at least we were free to move on.
Now, we stayed in Bariloche from 24 August till 15 September, including a five day side trip to Chile to climb volcanoes Lanin and Villarrica. Lasse went with us and Jan joined us just for Villarrica. So we had full car and tripped on shit all the time but it was great. On Lanin we slept in a little hut half way up the volcano and climbing was long and steep. We didn’t reach the summit but skiing in that spring-like snow was awesome and we left some big lines there, especially the telemark crew, Mick and Lasse. Villarrica is an active volcano- smoke, fumes, lava, the whole nine yards. We really wanted to see the lava. The day we climbed it was almost perfectly cloudless, until the peak started building up that cloud which looked like a cotton ball hat and gave about us much vision as when diving in milkshake. When we got to the top of the crater, the wind made me breathe through my feet because the mouth was busy suffocating; and we couldn’t see each other, never mind the lava. So we turned around, put on our skis and left. Still, skiing out of this cloud into perfectly still afternoon… that was something. This was what Alice must have felt like when she fell into a rabbit hole and popped out in Wonderland.