The Road to Portillo

     There's no comparing Portillo to Park City, where I grew up. Here, the staff is mostly Chilean, cigarettes and speedos are socially acceptable, and tree-skiing doesn't exist. Most of you are probably familiar with Park City (Olympics, Sundance, O'Shucks), so I'll just say that it's Portillo's giltzy opposite. Yet despite such clear cultural differences between the two, do you know what strikes me as the most dissimilar? Access. Park City is rightfully advertised as being
"conveniently located," 40 minutes from Salt Lake City and an international airport. Parley's Canyon, which connects the mountains with the valley, is a well-maintained, three lane passageway that rarely closes. Parley's sick and twisted cousin is el Camino de los Libertadores... The road to Portillo from Los Andes, our closest neighbor, is a steep beast that consists of thirty plus switchbacks and hundreds of potholes. On the best of days, it takes three hours to drop into Santiago. But if you've been reading the blog, you know that with even the least bit of snow the road closes - potentially for days. Avalanches and ice and the greatest dangers, and the Chilean government won't hesitate to trap guests, up or down.

A truck, a chair, and the road

     Yet these inherent dangers, the constant perils of snow and ice, are just half the story. Rapid access to the hotel is equally impeded by an almost daily line of trucks, semis from across South America that naturally move at a snail's pace. In reality, Portillo's closest neighbor is the nearby border crossing, which, sitting just half a kilometer up the road, is the most significant interchange between Argentina and Chile. With scant amounts of snow, the road closes and Portillo is totally isolated. Without it, Portillo (or rather the Posada) is an elegant pit stop for the hundreds drivers waiting to cross into Argentina. When there's congestion, and there often is, the view Juncalillo chair, as it passes over the road, is mind blowing. Truck after truck after truck down to the valley floor. I've never seen anything like it, really. Although the juxtaposition of such bleak industry with the beauty of Andes can be unnerving for those seeking tranquility in the mountains, please don't let this entry mislead you. The hotel is a good ways from the road, and after their initial ascent most guests quickly forget about the trucks. That is, until they ride Juncalillo... But even then, the congestion is a kind of Chilean novelty, at least for me. The road to Portillo should be thought of as another fascinating part of the Portillo experience, which, for the reasons stated above, is not your minutes-from-the-tarmac, boots-on-in-the-car kind of vacation. Yet even though getting to Portillo can be a real challenge, those that make the journey rarely do it once.

Exhibit A

Snow = empty