Todo Nieve/About
About this site
Snow in Argentina: where it falls, when, and what the mountains are actually like.
The Argentine ski season runs roughly June to October, against the northern one, and it happens along a stretch of the Andes about 2,600 kilometres long. That distance is the reason this site exists. A reader looking at the nine lift-served mountains from outside tends to be handed them as one category — "Argentina" — when the mountain above Malargüe and the mountain above Ushuaia have almost nothing in common except a calendar.
So the site is organised the way the subject actually divides: the snowpack and where it comes from; the mountains themselves; the range read as one column of latitude; and the people who are on the hill in August. Sixteen pieces, and a register of all of them on one page.
The writing describes terrain as terrain and leaves the mountain to the reader. Elevations and verticals come from the resorts' own published figures. Where a snowpack number appears, it comes from a documented series and is attributed on the piece it appears in.
The warm, dry wind that drops off the eastern lee of the Andes. Spanish, and local to Cuyo — there is no English word for it that anybody in Mendoza would recognise.
Southern beech, Nothofagus pumilio. The tree that makes the lower runs at Catedral and Chapelco what they are.
The monkey-puzzle tree, Araucaria araucana, protected inside Lanín National Park and standing in the snow at Caviahue.