Powder Play

For serious skiers, there's no thrill quite like a but-to-but trek in Argentinean Patagonia.

- Scott Yorko

WE WERE STANDING on a wind-blasted ridge at 5,800 feet.

The dark silhouette of a condor circled overhead, and we watched as it carved through a patch of blue sky. Clouds were coming in, but I still had a prime view of part of the Four Huts Traverse, the 29-mile, multiday ski route in the Argentinean region of Río Negro. I was attempting to complete the circuit with my friend Tyler Wilkinson-Ray.

It was mid-August, in the middle of South America's ski season. Two days earlier, Tyler and I had flown in to the city of Bariloche, in Argentinean Patagonia. In the 1950s and 60s, a group of European immigrants built two of the four rustic huts that make up the traverse, which is within Nahuel Huapi National Park. These refugios—Frey, Laguna Negra, López, and San Martín-Jakob—are modeled on the ones found throughout the Alps.

The shelters were once primarily used for summer hiking trips, when porters stocked them with food, drinks, and supplies. Winter services were lacking—until now. Skiers can arrange a stay for one or more nights and link up the huts to create a circuit in this needle-spired section of the Andes that's famous for off-piste skiing. Besides the standard touring equipment (avalanche beacon, shovel, probe), visitors need to carry little more than a sleeping bag and a toothbrush, since dormitory-style bunks and hearty meals are provided.

On the first day of our trek, Tyler and I met our guide, Juan “Juano” José Puliafito, with whom we connected through Club Andino Bariloche—the organization of guides and hutkeepers who maintain the properties—at Catedral Alta Patagonia, one of South America’s largest ski resorts. From the top of a lift, the three of us descended 4,800 feet into a ravine that, over the course of two hours, funneled us to Refugio Frey.