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After a hot-and-dusty 12 hour wait in Madrid a chilly blast filled my lungs as I ventured outside the airport at Buenos Aires to journey across the city to the domestic terminal. In the space of a few hours I had switched from the summer heat of the Spanish capital to a city just emerging from winter. I was heading for San Carlos de Bariloche, perhaps the most Europeanised of the Andes ski resorts, and Las Leñas, with such celebrated and steep backcountry that many regard it as the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to Chamonix.

Some 460 kms from Mendoza, the nearest major city, Las Leñas is remote – and not far from the spot where, famously, on a winter’s day in October 1972, the aircraft carrying Uruguayan rugby players accompanied by family and friends crashed between Cerro Sosneado and the Tinguirica Volcano – graphically illustrated in the book and film of the same name: Alive!

The nearest regular hub for Las Leñas is San Rafael, a toytown airport about two and a half hour’s bumpy drive across the scrublands of the vast pampas, the road running parallel for mile after mile with one of Argentina’s many abandoned railway lines. With cliff faces of reddy-brown and the Andes filling the distant horizon, it is bleak but beautiful - reminiscent of some of the wilder parts of New Mexico or a greener version of California’s Mojave Desert.

The Valle de Las Leñas Amarillas – “Yellow Wood Valley” - has a bizarre history: In 1975, the original developers, two brothers who were directors of an Argentinean food and manufacturing company, were kidnapped by Montoneros guerrillas who demanded a US$60 million ransom - to be distributed among their poverty-stricken fellow-countrymen. After nine months, and a partial payment, including truckloads of consumer items left in rural districts, the brothers were released unharmed.

However they were so chastened by their experience that they immediately sold out. As it turns out, the ski area itself could have done with the money. Las Leñas has lived a fairly precarious existence ever since, with various owners and banks attempting to make it pay. Even today the area's finances are unpredictable. Hence the lack of modern lifts. Like so many resorts which are part of the Andean ski industry, Las Leñas has struggled to stay solvent. Argentina’s financial crisis at the turn of the millennium, along with a falling away of tourists, didn’t help.

With French consultants , Las Leñas was built in 1983, just after the Falklands war, and is undeniably reminiscent of the high-rise architecture of French resorts built in the 1960s and 70s. Built almost entirely from a brick-red metal masquerading as wood, the principal hotels and lifts (Marte, Apolo, Jupiter, Neptuno, Venus, Urano and Mercurio) are named after heavenly bodies. Piscis, with a European-style casino and indoor-outdoor pool, is the best hotel in town.

But though Las Leñas may not be pretty, the skiing is undoubtedly impressive - and can be extremely challenging. The Marte (Mars) chairlift feeds what amounts to a separate ski area, with 40 challenging chutes - arguably the best expert terrain in the southern hemisphere. But because high winds and the threat of avalanches frequently close the lift, the resort has introduced cat-skiing and heliskiing to get hard-core skiers and snowboarders to the places they could once only reach by hiking up if Marte were shut. Some “hike-to” terrain takes you miles into the wilderness to such places as the Laguna Escondida. El Collar and Juno Bowl are major attractions. Sin Nombre (No Name) and Eduardo's Couloir are spoken of in hushed tones.

If you lack the patience, time or fitness to hike to the exceptionally good backcountry, a helicopter is the quick answer. Our heliski guide turned out to be a character called Hannes Webhofer, half Canadian and half Austrian. Three of the runs had never been skied before – at least not by heliskiers. We soared high above myriad valleys and un-named peaks. It wasn’t exactly powder – it was too late and too warm to find much of that, but it wasn’t exactly spring skiing either…somewhere between the two. Occasionally a startled rabbit – “as big as sheep” says Webhofer – scuttled out of our way.

My journey to San Carlos de Bariloche – where the main ski area, Catedral is more scenic but less severe than Las Leñas – was based almost entirely on a yearning to track down an old friend. In 1994, when Lucy Dicker and I had skied for a record 365 consecutive days in 240 resorts in 13 countries during the Financial Times Round The World Ski Expedition, the then head of the Escuela Esqui Catedral, Heini Kempel – a former member of Argentina’s demo team – had rescued us when our battered old Russian Lada truck had given up the ghost.

Thanks to Kempel, who had looked after us all week, we had managed to get a tow from four consecutive breakdown trucks or gruas, each working in a different region, across the spectacular Puyehue pass for repairs back in the Chilean city of Temuco – a journey of 500 kms. Once in Temuco, on Day 204 of our “must ski every day” adventure, only a hastily rented truck at the 11th hour had enabled us to barnstorm our way through raging floodwaters to fulfil that day’s minimal skiing obligations, barely illuminated by our headlights, on the flanks of Llaima, the nearest volcano.

Without Kempel’s assistance, our attempts to ski every day for a year – eventually ratified by the Guinness Book of Records – would almost certainly have failed at this juncture. Of all the people who had helped us during our year on skis, Heini had been the most supportive. After our eventful visit, his own circumstances had changed, and in spite of attempts to trace him, I had not been in contact with him for 13 years until my visit in August, when we joyfully celebrated with a few afternoons of skiing together.

Catedral is Argentina's biggest, oldest and most famous ski resort, so there was no shortage of terrain. At one point, we climbed from the top of the new Laguna draglift to a ridge from which we could see condors slowly circling. Their wings were not moving – just their tails. “They’re not looking for prey” said Kempel, knowingly. “They’re just curious about tourists!” Just like us in reverse, I thought. Kempel still had his battered old 1977 Chevrolet truck, its paint flaking, its engine scarcely able to be roused into action – almost as geriatric, in fact as our old Russian truck had been back in 1994. But every evening he would give me a lift home – either to his house for dinner, or to my spectacular Llao-Llao hotel perched on the shore of the magnificent Lake Nahuel Huapi

I learned that he’d lost his father in 1960 when he was four, in a tsunami on the lake triggered by an earthquake on the Chilean side of the Andes. Having lost my partner in a skiing accident after we had completed our round-the-world odyssey in 1995, it felt good to have found my old friend again, and to tell him what had happened. As I left to rejoin the British summer, Heini and I hugged, and there were a few tears.

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