I’ve sort of dreamed about this moment. Getting Layla on the board for the first time. But then when we were actually up at Perito Moreno I seemed to forget I’d thought about it before and we were just hiking up this service road. I took the board just in case we reached the top (from there I could jump up on the T-bar).

We were in this Cohiue forest, soft-packed snow in the middle of the roadbed, a half a foot of powder along the banks. Nobody around. The angle of the roadbed and the conditions were perfect.

In Argentina they call sledding “culo patin,” or ass-sliding. We went for it.

Immediately after the first culo-patin-ride she was saying “otra vez, otra vez.” We walked back up and I told her we could try snowboarding. There’s almost no better feeling than a board floating up in the pow and carving these big quiet turns in the middle of the forest. Check the size of that Cohiue in the background. I heard Layla give her first “Yoohooooo!” as we hit this particular turn with a bit more speed and flow.

This shot below gives a good sense of how the terrain is here in Rio Negro, Patagonia. On the horizon is the pre-cordillera, a comb-ridge / extended range of flatirons with different sections (Los Repollos, Cerro Piltriquitron). On the other side of that is the pampas, the desert. The valley in between is this super fertile farmland, the basin containing El Bolson, Lago Puelo, El Hoyo, and to the North, Bariloche.

The mountain we’re riding is the shoulder of the Andes. The peaks(and the border with Chile) are another 2 hours’ ascent. The terrain here is temperate rainforest. The understory has these Caña Colihue plants, or canebrakes. Out of all the tree-riding I’ve ever done, I think this terrain is my favorite. There are creekbeds everywhere, which, when filled in with snow, create these long serpentine waves and ramps and gulleys through the forest.

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notes:

1. all photos by lau bernhein
2. if i’d thought about it beforehand i would’ve brought layla’s helmet. not that it wasn’t safe (it was super safe), but just to start the ‘protocol’ from the very first day: you go riding, you wear a helmet.