Colin Mitchell’s forecasting life in Argentina

Hi Jerry,

I thought I’d send some pics along of my first week at Baguales.  It’s really beautiful here, it helps to make up for the lack of summer.  

I stayed at this cool old lakeside hotel, called the Mascardi Lodge, nice old school 4-star, and now I am at the ‘Hosteria’ the lower lodge at Baguales.  Also very nice, old school digs.  Not much snow, but a meter and a half or more in the forecast for next week, changing to heavy rain after that, should be good for a few more grey hairs.  

Saludos, Colin

Winter hit quickly here, the giant storm faded a bit, but we have ~ 40cm on the ground with 70 more in the forecast by Friday.  We got our weather station up in the nick of time.  We managed to get it up to 1875 meters and it reaches camp with two repeaters.  We had to hack our way through the Patagonian rain forest to get to the mountain…. Quite a week!  The Cerro Ciruela pic is my avalanche forecasting area (top left).  If you zoom in, you can see the road at the bottom of the paths… They say down here when the parrots come down, it’s going to snow… They were right this time!  The rest of the pics are the weather station.  Note the hat that my porter is wearing.

Colin