Fiery drinks and snowy peaks

The southern winter has caught up with us again and, just like in previous years, the mountains around Santiago have had their first coat of fresh snow at the end of May, while down here in the city we finally received some badly needed rain.

What better way to adjust to the drop in temperatures and shorter days than to invite over a bunch of friends and celebrate the arrival of winter with some of those Christmassy traditions the help us northern-hemisphere folks to get through the darkest part of the year. It may seem totally out of place to some of you... it's June after all... but picture sipping hot mulled wine in December in Santiago instead, with 30°C and the sun burning down on you. Christmas chocolates melting all over your things, etc. It's just a no brainer, June is a much better month for that over here.

To warm up and break the ice, we started with a Feuerzangenbowle, a fun little spectacle that we tried for the first time last year to commemorate the winter solstice. After some nice food (fusion cuisine with Christmassy influences), we then moved on to "simulate" the end of the year at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid with the traditional eating of 12 grapes (youtube projection included). Finish off with another round of Feuerzangenbowle... you can imagine that at this stage the month and hemisphere had become quite secondary q-:

The Feuerzangenbowle 

A week later some of the same friends joined us on a nice wintry walk in the Coastal Range, north-west of Santiago. Normally we don't make it there very often, and our last outing to the area was back in 2014 when we climbed La Campana. But winter is a good time to go as the Andes are more difficult to access, and the accessible bits are usually occupied by the skiing crowds. 

We had picked a peak of about 2000m, Cerro Las Vizcachas, with a climb of 1300m or so. The lower parts of the hike lead us through quite dense woods where we lost the trail a couple of times - it's not exactly a highly popular mountain and does not attract a large number of visitors.

On the way up, La Campana in the background (left)

After a couple of hours or so, maybe around 1700m above sea level, we hit the first patches of snow, which only a little higher started covering much of the ground more than knee deep. Would have been great to have snow shoes at this point, but since it was a warm and sunny day it didn't matter so much. Sinking in frequently just made it harder and slower going.

Taking a short rest on the snow line

Mario showing Christian the way

Mary avoiding the snow by following a rock wall that had already melted out of the snow

Although the last bit to the top took much longer than anticipated and resulted in much swearing at the soft snow, we were finally rewarded with amazing views of the Andes. Aconcagua's almost 7000m standing out as a big blop, about a 100km north-east of our location... what a view!

Another rest, this time with a view of Aconcagua

We made it back to the car just as we were losing daylight, tired but happy for having made the most of a beautiful central-Chile-winter-day! Some more photos in below slideshow (for higher resolution click here).