Chile Ski Resorts – The Most Successful Year

Chilean resorts are enjoying the most commercially successful year in history with more than 600,000 skiers and snowboarders total expected for the 2007 season – a record amount. Resorts such as Valle Nevado and Portillo are seeing huge increases in day skiers, but this is expected to drop now that school vacations are over. Still, weekends are crowded and road problems can snarl traffic. Heavy snow and a backup of trucks have tacked on extra time to get to Portillo, and the narrowness and poor condition of the road up to Valle Nevado, La Parva and El Colorado has caused frustrating waits of up to three hours to get to the resorts. If you’re visiting any of these resorts for the day on weekends, get a very early start. Snow is predicted this week at most resorts.

The founder of Burton snowboards Jake Burton and the Burton crew held their yearly sales conference at Valle Nevado this weekend, bringing in 200 distributors and dozens of pro riders, who lent an air of excitement around local snowboarders. Wednesday the Three Valleys resorts came to a standstill when a fire at a switch station caused a power outage that lasted the entire day.

The resort El Fraile, near Coyhaique and deep in Patagonia, at last began operations this past week. The resort is mostly popular with Andean clubs and has just two chairs and 6 runs, but the resort is an impressive forest of mostly beech and considering that it is the only resort around for hundreds of miles, locals love it. A new operations management has added a cafeteria and brought a new Snow cat over from Europe to bring the resort up a notch. For more information, see www.elfraile.cl.