THE LOCAL’S NOT SO LITTLE SECRET: REFUGIO JAKOB

THIS CLASSIC DRONE VIEW FROM LOCAL VIDEOGRAPHER BIANCA FIDANI SHOWS JUST HOW ALONE YOU ARE AT JAKOB, AND THE EXTENT OF THE TERRAIN ON OFFER — FROM MELLOW LINES BEHIND THE LODGE IF IT SOCKS IN TO FULL TILT STEEP SHOTS. NIC LAWRENCE CHECKED IT OUT.

Refugio Jakob is still pretty much the local’s secret among Bariloche’s backcountry ski community. If you like avoiding crowds, this is the winter refugio for you. In August and September the more famous and closer Refugio Frey can start to get pretty crowded (with loud Yanks mostly), but Jakob nearly always remains pretty quiet.

Refugio Jakob (its full name is Refugio San Martin, but it sits at the head of Laguna Jakob and that’s what everybody calls it) is more difficult to access than Frey, so you have to be keen to ski there, and fit. You can ski off the back of Catedral for starters, or walk up a valley track. The track is 18km long so you better have your walking legs ready!

Most of the winter it’s a mixture of walking, skinning and bootpacking. It takes reasonably fit people 7-7.5 hours going up, and around five hours going down, conditions dependent of course.

In mid-August I was lucky enough to hook up with local long-term expat Aussie tradie Robi Cooper, who knew the hut managers, Fran and Lula, were going out to Jakob for their next 10 day stint.

Robi has lived in Bariloche on and off since the 1970s, and most of his kids were born here. One of his toughest but most fun jobs in recent years has been helping rebuild the refugio at Jakob after the historic original building was burnt down in July 2017 by self-declared mapuche activists.

Outraged locals rallied in support of the Club Andino and refugio concessionaire Claudio Fidani, and it was rebuilt new in less than a year, no mean feat given the location and climate.

I had just got back from a week spent exploring some other smaller mountains, so only had a couple hours on a Friday afternoon to get organised. Thank goodness you can buy food at these refugios, it makes life a lot easier..

Next morning we were riding up Nubes chairlift at Cerro Catedral, then bootpack traversing a 200m icy face – look down and you’ll wish you hadn’t – towards the Van Titer valley. Instead of dropping there we continued bootpacking/rock scrambling along the ridge, until we got to a point where we could put our skis on. The local knowledge of Fran and Lula was invaluable. Someone new to the area would have no idea where the best point to stop walking and start skiing is.

We ski traversed a face down into the next valley, skinned up to the head of the valley, then over the next ridge and down to the lagoon where Refugio Jakob sits proudly. All up it took us about four hours from the top of the chair.

Refugio Jakob is an incredibly nice backcountry hut. After the fire, it has been rebuilt with proper four-person bunkrooms, as well as some bigger ones, and even a couple of private double bedrooms. Plus an inside toilet –luxury! The dining room and kitchen is massive, with great views of the surrounding mountains you’ll be skiing the next day.

The following day, we skinned up a pretty mellow valley to lookers left of the refugio and were greeted with blue skies and some lovely spring snow. The avalanche danger was pretty high (I actually got stuck in a slow wet slide the day before on the final ski traverse down to the refugio that dragged me 20 metres before I managed to ski out of it), so we took it easy. Regardless, the skiing was awesome with about 10cm of new snow on top of a smooth windpacked layer – no complaining from me!

After putting in the initial skin track (cheers Fran), we could lap the face in about 50 minutes, so four laps later I was buggered. Robert had to head back to town later that day, so he walked out the valley track and I settled in with Fran and Lula to wait out a three day storm in the refugio, which carried with it the hope of an absolute smorgasbord of powder when it resided. Apart from a few quick one-hour skins to keep cabin fever at bay, we couldn’t do much the next three days as the storm took hold. The wind absolutely howled and the visibility was basically zero. Fran, Lula and I were the only ones in the hut (it sleeps 70), so it was big and quite cold. I also came down with a tummy bug (which I later found out was a virus I had contracted days before from the water in Catedral), so basically I just moped around the refugio playing board games, reading and eating. Or in my case, watching Fran and Lula eat while I sat there clutching my stomach as it cramped.

On the sixth day, regardless of how I felt, I needed to move. There was no snow falling now but the wind hadn’t subsided like originally forecast. To add insult to injury, instead of wet dream-inducing fluffy dry powder, the snow was wet, heavy and severely wind affected.

I got halfway up the valley we had skied on the second day and my body couldn’t hack it due to a severe lack of energy, so I had to turn around and ski back to the refugio. I was gutted – all that waiting for this? Average snow and empty legs was not what I had been anticipating.

The next day I decided I had to get out. The wind was still howling, I’d been at Jakob for a week, half of which had been spent inside with a stomach virus, and I still felt crap. I was gutted because Fran and I had scoped out some big lines to ski when the weather cleared, but the previous day made me realise I just couldn’t hack it until I got better, so I opted for the lonely 18km skin/walk out down the valley by myself.

If you want remote skiing and less people, then Refugio Jakob is your place. It is not quite as ‘epic’ as Frey, nor as easily accessed, but if you spend time there and get good conditions the lines are just as big and gnarly, and there are some easier faces to ski too if conditions are bad.

As with all these places, the options are endless, you could tour for weeks and never ski the same line twice.

The walk itself was long, much longer than the Frey track in terms of distance, but beautiful. It follows a river and has some amazing forest in the upper and lower parts (the middle parts are full of the nightmare bamboo, which is not particularly interesting nor great for skinning/walking).