Words and Photos Kevin Nolan LEFT TO RIGHT Looking across the Beagle Channel, a strait in the Tierra Del Fuego Archipelago, from Ushuaia into Chile. Grant Giller, backside boardslide to fakie. “There are very few places you can ride street in the Southern Hemisphere. At this spot I could see the ocean from where I dropped in. We got a foot of snow and were able to hit some street stuff in the middle of August in a cool, pictur-esque spot—one that definitely doesn’t look like what you find in the States. Also, we were able to go into the backcountry only 30 minutes from these spots in the city.”—Grant Giller omeone once told me that you can get anywhere in the world in five flights, and to get to Ushuaia it took all five. Fifty-one hours to the end of the world start-ing from my house in Seattle. I met up with Grant Giller at the Hous-ton Airport with a plan of taking the easy way out—at least as far as snowboarding in Argentina goes—by setting a course to the well-trodden resort town of San Car-los de Bariloche. Two flights and a layover in Santiago, Chile, later we touched down to questionable conditions. Descriptions of “aggressively firm” and “bad all the way to the top” from friends on the ground were enough for us to book a last second flight to a city further south, a city all the way south: Ushuaia. We cleared cus-toms, grabbed our board bags and headed straight back to the check-in counter to do it all over again. Two more flights and an overnight layover in the Buenos Aires air-port later, we finally touched down at what Argentinians call “El Fin del Mundo.” S 058 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.2: Page 58
