Cerro Catedral, Argentina

Kim from UNITED KINGDOM writes:

Living in Bariloche and skiing in Catedral.
I skied most of the 2007 season. I had a great time but the place is certainly not without problems. Here´s the good and bad of the place.
GOOD:
Scenery: Really some of the best scenery in the whole world on a clear day.
Snow: We had a dump of 2-3ft every 10 days or so. If you stay for 2 weeks you´re almost certain to have a few spectacular days at some point.
Off-piste skiing: The areas La Laguana and La Palmera offer some pretty challenging options as does the out of bounds section under Nubes. Be careful though. One guy died in an avalanche while I was there.
Food: Incredible (assuming you´re not vegetarian). Have the 3 course steak meal of your life with views of Chile from the top of Catedral for about a tenner.
Get good at moguls. They´re everywhere.
Bariloche morning bus connections are excellent and Bariloche´s a pretty decent place to live with some nice hostels. Getting back you may need to queue a while to get on the bus but there´s plenty of them. Journey time is about 40 mins.

BAD:
Random Argentinian factors. Stuff happens in Argentina that you´re not used to if you´re European. A few examples I recall include the resort being closed due to a catering strike, resort closed due to local elections, resort closed due to a gondola falling of the cable, day being ruined by incompetent staff in some unexpected way.
Grooming: Despite owning many snow-cats, they are rarely used.
Lifts: Nubes works well and when the queues aren´t long so does sextuple. Many of the other lifts are a complete joke, e.g. Princessa 1,2 and 3, Condor 1,2 and 3 which have been scavenged from US and European resorts and crawl up the mountain at an unacceptable snails pace.
Cat tracks are everywhere and are a pain if you want to do long continuous wide runs. You can work them to your benefit if you can work out the good points to use them as a jump.

2008-04-30