Room 628, Hotel Portillo, Portillo, Chile; 800-829-5325; www.skiportillo.com. There are 123 rooms; doubles range from $1,750 to $2,050 per person for seven nights, including meals and an eight-day lift ticket. Room 628 is $2,050.

This month, It's possible to drink in a jaw-dropping wintry view—albeit at the southern end of the globe. The 800-acre Portillo Ski Resort, high in the Andes, about a two-hour drive northwest of Santiago, sits above tree line—the surrounding mountains reach altitudes of 19,000 feet—offering stark vistas of the craggy snow-covered peaks reflected in the Lake of the Incas, seen outside your window. There is little flora (or fauna, for that matter) to soften the edges, although the range's impressive oversized condors occasionally swoop down in a display not seen at ski resorts in the Alps and the Rockies. Even if there are no appearances by the mountains' flying residents, over the course of the day guests at the historic Hotel Portillo can watch the peaks change from a soft pink at dawn to burnt orange at dusk, with a full day on the powdery slopes separating the two spectacles.