Chapa Verde is like the best place in the world. It’s this tiny ski resort an hour east of Rancagua. It used to be open exclusively for the families of the workers in the Colón mine but later open up for the public. Still, it seems like no one ever go there, which makes it so awesome!
You need a permit to drive up with your car, so we just took the shuttle from the Chapa Verde headquarters in Rancagua. The lady told us the shuttle would leave between 9am and 9:30am and we started to get a little impatient as the clock past 10am, but there were 3 other people waiting that seemed to know what they were doing, so at least we knew we were at the right place and we had not been left behind.
We eventually got the OK Go! sign. I fell asleep right away and woke up as we hit the dirt road.
Last time I was here they had a ton of snow, me and my two friends were alone on the mountain and we stayed for 4 days skiing untouched snow every single run. But that was 10 years ago. I was looking at their website before I left for Chile this time and it seemed like they had made some updates so I really did not know what to expect.
As we pulled up, I saw that it looked exactly the same as 10 years ago, just with a lot less snow.
If you didn’t bring your own gear, you could rent some in this hut;
The place has 3 lifts. As we got to the second lift, I pointed over to the last lift that is kind of hidden and asked the lift guy “Abierto?” He said something to which I responded “Si?”, he shook his head and said “No, cerrado!”.
Well, fair enough – there’s no snow and we are only 5 people here.
We cruised around for a while, took some photos and jumped over gravel on the slopes before it was time for lunch.
As we had our lunch two other skiers walked in, they turned out to be the Chapa Verde ski instructors and asked us where we were from. I don’t know what to say to that so I just let Asher respond. As he said United States, the girl said -Ok, I’ll ask my boss if he can open up the third lift for you guys.
Yeah, private tour of the mountain and an open lift just for us! Somehow we forgot that the snow conditions were dull and the day turned out to be awesome!
Close to 4pm, it was time to call it a day, we felt a little bad for them keeping the lifts open just for us and we wanted to buy them a couple of beers as thanks for an awesome day before we had to take our 5pm shuttle back.
Back in Rancagua, staying at this classy hotel;
We had a TV on the room, very luxuries!
It’s all happening right outside the hotel. I love watching this kind of stuff, but never have any desire of buying anything.
This always fascinates me;
Chile definitely should try to do something with their stray dog problem. It got me thinking though; they probably don’t have a huge rat problem at the dogs will eat the rats and I rather have dogs roaming the streets than rats. The dogs also seem to be pretty friendly.
Plaza de los Heroes. Here we learned that it was Bernando O’Higgins that was one of the main figures that made Chile independent from Spain in 1818.
Not so much happening outside the hotel at night.
