Photos by Carlos Blachard

On a search to find fresh powder, new tricks and have some fun, Elias Elhardt returns from an avalanche dodging month in the country where you can shred all summer long.
Here are some of his pictures and thoughts from the trip:

“Hey Guys, it’s been a remarkable month here in Argentina with moments I will never forget.
The journey from Innsbruck to the Ski resort Bariloche was pretty long, exhausting but also interesting.”

Elias Elhardt during his 49 hour journey (6 hours on train, 20 hours by plane, 22 hours by bus and 1 hour in the car.)

“I stayed in Bariloche with the local film crew BQP and the photographer Carlos Blachard. The weather in the first two and a half weeks was so bad that we could shoot hardly anything; It was snowing, then super warm, then raining, then super windy…all the time. So we ended up going to a junkyard to find some stuff to jib, that was pretty fun anyway.”

“Once the weather was good, the snowpack got really dangerous due to all the changing conditions. Here is a picture of how the Ski patrol tried to secure a face in the Ski resort from avalanches. They’ve simply been riding straight in the danger zone trying to incur an avalanche. That was a pretty unconventional security method.“

“Then the Rip Curl team arrived and we did some catalog shooting, it was really good to hang out with all the team, we were joking and laughing pretty much all day. We tried to move safely and found some good things to shoot. A week after the snowfall the snowpack seemed quite stable and we went in a face to shoot a wind lip, all of a sudden a huge cornice on top broke down an almost buried us. Luckily we managed to run away from those ice junks shooting down the mountain. Puh, that was close!”

“This experience left a very deep impression on me. Although I’ve always been pretty diligent with avalanches, this happened and showed me once more how dangerous and unpredictable powder riding can be. I never wanna stop riding riding powder, but I definitely want to get more knowledge about it and be more careful. Life is all we got!”

Here’s hoping…