Chilean Ski Resort Offers Sunset Cat Rides High in the Andes Mountains

Amid one heck of a memorable ski season, Valle Nevado, Chile, is giving visitors a new way to soak in the South American mountain splendor: hitching a ride on a snowcat to the Ancla Summit at dusk and dining on local food surrounded by sunset alpine vistas once you get there.

Perched below peaks like Cerro La Parva and Cerro Pinto, Ancla Summit is one of the highest points at Valle Nevado, nestled in an above-treeline mountainscape that’s dissimilar from most fir-laden North American resorts, but stunning. In other words, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better place to enjoy a Chilean beverage and catch the sunset before heading back to the hotel for a hot tub soak.

The trips, unsurprisingly, don’t come cheap—for booking groups of one or two it costs $210 per person—and don’t include skiing, as the cat departs after the chairlifts close between 5:30 and 6 p.m. On the way back down, visitors ride in the cat, too, returning to the hotel sector between 7 and 7:30 p.m.

But as anyone who’s been on the slopes of a resort before or after operating hours knows, the quietude alone is almost as good as shredding under a multi-colored evening sky. The booking price per person goes down the larger a group is, too, reaching as low as $160 for groups of six to ten people.

Reservations for the sunset cat must be made at least 24 hours in advance, and can be made at the Valle Nevado Ski School. As with everything else at ski resorts, departures are subject to weather, route conditions, and the operational assessment of Valle Nevado’s mountain team.

The excursion mirrors others at resorts stateside, from evening cat trips to multi-course dinners on gondolas (no kidding). 

This past summer, Arizona Snowbowl hosted diners on its Arizona Gondola for a meal that featured “chipotle coconut lump crab” and “bison osso bucco.” Each lap of the gondola brought a new course in a place that probably mostly sees skiers stuffing down Clif bars and granola.

Purgatory, Colorado, meanwhile, has offered a similar trip to Valle Nevado’s evening gondola outing, although with a “five-course meal.”

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