Another day, another update from the storm that's deposited countless inches of snow in Chile and Argentina.
And man, is this one a doozy.
PowderQuest, a skiing and snowboarding mountain guide service, shared a post to its Instagram page this morning, August 23rd, documenting the mindblowing snowfall at Las Leñas, an Argentinian resort.
In the post's caption, PowderQuest stated that the storm has mostly passed, with Las Leñas waking up to clearing skies.
PowderQuest also provided some pretty incredible storm snowfall totals:
Las Leñas base area: 4.92 feet
Las Leñas mid-mountain: 11.5 feet
Yep. You read that right. 11.5 feet at the Las Leñas mid-mountain area.
Powder connected with David Owen, the founder of PowderQuest, via Instagram to learn more about the resort's status. While not in Las Leñas himself, Owen has been communicating with a PowderQuest guide stationed in Argentina.
Owen reports that although the access road to Las Leñas is closed, the resort is currently spinning a few lifts, and several runs are already open.
Resort management is currently undergoing avalanche control work to open more terrain. According to Owen, Las Leñas considers avalanche risk in the area to be level 4.
Here's a peek at how the base area looked this morning:
All this snow raises an important question: Is this really, as Ski Portillo, Chile, stated earlier this week on Instagram, the "storm of the decade"?
I posed that question to Owen to get his input.
"It is common for these areas to get huge amounts of snow when the storms do hit. 3-5 feet," he wrote.
This past storm, though, with its 8 to 11 feet snowfall totals, is a little different, says Owen: "I feel like we have seen a handful of big storms like this over the past 5-10 years. But then again with Portillo reporting 8 feet (and still snowing), Las Leñas 11 feet, and resorts down in Patagonia 5 feet; this indeed came in big and is one to remember."
For a bit more information on the snowy proceedings, I reached out to Luke Stone, a South America forecaster with the snowsports-focused meteorology team OpenSnow.
"This storm is unique. In addition to the massive amounts of snow in the mountains, decades-old rainfall records have been broken at lower elevations," Stone wrote in response.
There you have it. This past storm cycle was huge for South America, and conditions at Las Leñas are sure to be memorable over the coming days. Stay tuned!