Victoria Jealouse, Natasza Zureck and I are going to Lonquimay which is about 10 hours drive from Santiago. I love to come down here for the Burton summer photoshoot cause we team up with 2Tiempos, a sled company pulled together by Christian Vahrhan – these guys guys are dope! Los Andes are huge – really deep mountains with volcanoes but the sleds make them easily accessible… they avoid extra hiking too!
The Orange Truck came to pick us up at Santiago’s airport for a long drive.. we decided to stop at the ocean in Pichilemu on the way after we heard that the waves were huge that day! And they were! Man I had never seen such big waves and by the time we got there, they were much smaller they said! The morning of the same day some Chilean surfers had dropped into 12 meters high waves.. one of the surfers even just paddled into it! C R A Z Y !
Last year one of them had won the Billabong XL Award on one of these waves. I’m glad we got to see that! Cause travelling like mad I often don’t get the opportunity to see anything other than mountains…
We got to Lonquimay which is a very remote place, with poor snow conditions… the worst snow conditions I’ve ever seen actually! After a day of scoping and a day of studio shooting we went to the market waiting for the rain to stop. That was cool! I got cool ballaclavas for the cold times, like sledding days or bike missions or anything like that.
Victoria and I were on a mission, we love South American markets and any cultural shopping days! And we got tons of really cool sick dope earings!
Victoria always has crazy stories to tell and this time she came prepared with tons of DVDs and printed sheets etc. She is rad! Finally the weather cleared up for the last day. All excited and curious on what we would find, we first got stuck about in the mud… but the guys thought they had big muscles and could push us through that crazy f**ked up dirt road.
Only an hour later they admitted we wouldn’t make it… so we got on the sleds, crossing the road bank from one side to the other trying to find a way through the bush the river the houses and the dirt. Most of the snow had melted and the way was hard to find.
We finally made it to the top of the mountain from where we could see a huge lava river from a volcano that exploded in 88 I think… C R A Z Y ! We were right next to the crater that exploded so I decided to hike and to check what was in there. It took me quite a while to get to the top, all rocks were falling under my feet and the heat coming out of the ground didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. Scared that I was gonna blow up the next second! The crater was cool! There were caves sucked in the snow to a deeper level of the earth with smoke coming out from time to time.
I felt blessed being up there! First and probably last time I was gonna be on top of a volcano! Then I strapped in my Gtwin and rode the dirty black sticky snow down the volcano… S T O K E D !
That’s it for 2007 Chile. Hopefully we ll get better conditions next year!
